By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
With congressional voting on the Democrats' healthcare bill delayed until September, expect social conservatives to use the lull to keep raising the specter of taxpayer-funded abortions as a reason to oppose Obamacare. "Washington D.C. bureaucrats and abortion industry lobbyists are trying to force YOU to pay for abortions," reads the Web site Stop the Abortion Mandate, a new clearinghouse for antiabortion groups, "through your tax dollars as part of their proposed trillion-dollar healthcare takeover."
But an amendment adopted by the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week extends the federal ban on government-funded abortions, except in the very rare cases in which it's already permitted. The amendment also prohibits the government from requiring abortion coverage as part of the basic benefits plan from health insurers participating in the health insurance exchange. Even in the public insurance option, government funds are not to be used for abortions, in accordance with the decades-old congressional ban on federally funded abortions, known as the Hyde amendment.
So are antiabortion activists' objections to the Democratic healthcare bill all red herrings? No. Activists worry that a bevy of new healthcare plans available through the proposed healthcare exchange will cover abortion—even if not required to do so by the government—which could lead to more abortions. And they note that the Capps amendment bans money for abortion only so long as Congress decides to keep passing the Hyde amendment, which must be reauthorized every year.
The bigger concern is that an infusion of billions of federal dollars into the healthcare system would amount to a huge abortion subsidy, even if the government can't directly finance abortions. If the government is helping underwrite health insurance plans that offer abortion, the argument goes, that's an abortion subsidy, even without official government-funded abortion.
But I think there's an important distinction between taxpayer-funded abortion and the idea of federally subsidized abortion, an idea that a lot of liberals say is bunk. Uncle Sam, many liberals say, is either funding abortions or not. What do you think?
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Henry Massingale of FL 1:51PM March 21, 2010
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