For immediate release: For more information:
Federal Legislation Department, 202-626-8820
Communications Department, 202-626-8825
National
Right to Life:
"Any House member
who votes for the Senate health bill is casting a career-defining
pro-abortion vote"
WASHINGTON (March 5, 2010) -- The following
statement may be attributed to Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National
Right to Life Committee (NRLC) the federation of affiliated
right-to-life organizations in all 50 states.
HOW IMPORTANT
IS THE HOUSE VOTE ON THE HEALTH
On abortion policy, the health
care bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought to the House floor last November
was extremely bad (before the House fixed it by adopting the Stupak-Pitts
Amendment) -- but the Senate health bill (H.R. 3590) is worse.
The Senate health bill is a
2,407-page labyrinth strewn with the legislative equivalents of improvised
explosive devices -- disguised provisions
that will result in federal pro-abortion mandates and federal subsidies for
abortion. The so-called abortion limits that are in the Senate bill are
all very narrow, riddled with loopholes, or booby-trapped to expire. Some
of them were drafted more with the intent of misleading superficial
analysts (which unfortunately includes some media "factcheckers")
than actually effectuating a pro-life policy.
When all of the pro-abortion
provisions are considered in total, the Senate bill is the most pro-abortion
single piece of legislation that has ever come to the House floor for a
vote, since Roe v. Wade. Any House member who votes for the Senate health bill is
casting a career-defining pro-abortion vote. A House member who
votes for the Senate bill would forfeit a plausible claim to pro-life
credentials. No House member who votes for the Senate bill will be
regarded, in the future, as having a record against federal funding of
abortion.
All of those statements are true regardless of how many assurances or
denials are disseminated by President Obama or by Speaker Pelosi, both of whom
have sought throughout their political careers to undermine limits on
government funding of abortion. House members who vote for the Senate
bill will be accountable to their constituents for what the Senate bill
contains.
When he ran for president,
Senator Barack Obama promised
that abortion coverage would be "at the heart" of his health care
proposal. (See the PolitiFact examination of Obama's
promise here.)
Throughout this Congress, President Obama has tried to deliver on this promise,
even while hiding behind deceptive verbal formulations and outright
misrepresentations regarding the content of legislation.
During the latter half of 2009,
the White House backed phony "compromise" language that Speaker
Pelosi put in the bill she brought to the House floor -- language written
by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Ca.) (the
so-called "Capps Amendment"). This language explicitly
authorized coverage of elective abortions under two major new government
programs. It was this pro-abortion language that the House jettisoned on
November 7 through adoption (240-194) of the
Stupak-Pitts Amendment, which was supported by one-fourth of all House
Democrats (64 Democrats), joined by all except one House Republican. The
Stupak-Pitts Amendment contained a bill-wide, permanent abortion fix (it
begins, "No funds authorized or appropriated by this Act . . ."),
which was the approach needed to prevent any provision of the vast bill from
being used as a basis for pro-abortion federal mandates or subsidies.
Although President Obama often
has claimed he wants his health care legislation to reflect bipartisan
consensus, he lamented the bipartisan adoption of the Stupak Amendment,
and he contributed to keeping the Stupak language out of the Senate
bill. As a result, the 2,407-page Senate-passed bill contains at least
six separate abortion-related policy problems, any single one of which would
dictate a negative vote for any lawmaker who wishes to maintain a record
against federal abortion mandates and abortion subsidies. These problems
are summarized below, and discussed in detail in a
January 14 letter sent by NRLC to members of the House and other
materials posted
on the NRLC website.
BLOOD OATHS
Speaker Nancy Pelosi in recent days
has reverted to repetitious denials that there is a problem -- for
example, saying at a March 4 press conference, "I will not have it turned
into a debate on (abortion) . . . There is no change in the access to
abortion. No more or no less: It is abortion neutral in terms of
access or diminution of access." This is the same
deny-and-evade approach that Pelosi employed throughout 2009.
It will not suffice now any more than it did then.
Indeed, some of the
more recent utterances by Speaker Pelosi and other top House Democrats
suggest that they have stumbled down some sort of rabbit hole into a
fantasy world in which lawmakers can vote to enact the Senate bill without
being accountable for its contents. For example, Congresswoman
Louise Slaughter (D-NY) on March 3 suggested that the House should
pass the Senate bill after receiving a "blood oath" from Democratic
senators that they would later pass a specific list of changes to the
bill. Lawmakers who are considering voting for the Senate bill based
on a "blood oath" or any other promise should first call to
mind the once-popular comic strip "Peanuts," in which Lucy
frequently teed up a football and enticed Charlie Brown to take a run at it,
solemnly promising not to snatch the ball away at the last instant.
Charlie Brown inevitably ended up flat on his back wondering how he
could have been once again so foolish.
House members who vote for
the Senate bill will be accountable to their constituents for what
the Senate bill contains, including its pro-abortion mandates and
subsidies, without regard to blood oaths, secret handshakes, solemn
assurances that Congress will revisit the issue in future
legislation, or any other artifice or gimmick.
(Pelosi has also repeatedly implied that the longstanding "Hyde
Amendment" would somehow prevent the heath care bill from subsidizing
abortion. Such utterances are highly misleading. The Hyde Amendment
only applies to funds that flow through the annual Health and Human
Services appropriations bill, and would not affect funds directly appropriated
by the health care bill itself. As the Associated Press
accurately reported in a
story dated March 5, 2010: "The Democratic bills created a
new stream of federal money to help working households afford health insurance
premiums. And those funds were not subject to the Hyde
restrictions." For further discussion of this point, see the
memorandum posted here.
Moreover, the Hyde Amendment is a patch that must be renewed annually --
not an acceptable approach when Congress proposes any large new federal program
that implicates abortion policy.)
THE LIST
What follows is a thumbnail
sketch of the major abortion policy problems in the Senate-passed health
care bill (H.R. 3590).
-- The Senate bill departs
from longstanding federal policy by authorizing tax subsidies to help tens of
millions of Americans buy private health plans that could cover abortion on
demand. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Ne.) attached to this provision a badly
flawed requirement under which anyone enrolling in such plan would be required
to make separate payments into an abortion fund. In a recent
statement, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (which strongly opposes
the bill) said, "The bill requires each American purchasing such a plan to
make a separate payment to the insurer every month, solely to pay for other
people's abortions. This is an enormous imposition on the consciences of
the millions of Americans who oppose abortion." In its
first analysis of the Nelson language, NRLC recognized it as a convoluted
bookkeeping scheme inconsistent with the principles of the Hyde
Amendment. In January, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Ca.), a pro-abortion
leader in the Senate, assured McClatchy
News Service that the abortion surcharge requirement is only an
"accounting procedure," and DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius also
assured pro-abortion listeners that the Nelson language was of no
consequence. Yet today, in an effort to entice pro-life Democrats in the
House to vote for the bill, the White House and Democratic leaders are working
on "convincing as many as a dozen antiabortion Democrats in the House that
abortion language in the Senate bill is more stringent than initially
portrayed," according to a report in the March 5 Washington Post. The bottom line is that a vote for the Senate bill
is a vote to subsidize the purchase of health plans that cover abortion on
demand -- a sharp break from the principles of the
Hyde Amendment and the Stupak Amendment.
-- The Senate bill would
establish a new program under which a federal agency, the Office of Personnel
Management (OPM), would administer private "multi-state" plans.
It has been reported that the bill guarantees that one plan will be available
everywhere that does not cover abortion. In fact, it guarantees no such
thing, because even this narrow requirement is rigged to depend on annual
renewal through a separate appropriations bill. Moreover, other plans in
the federally administered program would be allowed to cover all abortions
-- a break from the policy that has long governed the Federal Employees Health
Benefits program, which is also administered by OPM. A vote for the
Senate bill is a vote to put the federal government in the business of
administering health plans that cover abortion on demand.
-- The Senate bill would empower
federal political appointees to expand access to abortion by federal
administrative decrees. The bill contains a bewildering array of
provisions that grant authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services
and other federal entities to issue binding regulations on various
matters. One analyst recently wrote that the Senate bill “contains more
than 2,500 references to powers and responsibilities of the secretary of health
and human services,” to say nothing of other federal authorities. Some of
these provisions could be employed in the future as authority for pro-abortion
mandates, requiring health plans to cover abortion and/or provide expanded
access to abortion, unless there is clear language to prevent it. One
clear example is the
Mikulski Amendment, under which any service listed as a
"preventive" service by the Department of Health and Human Services
must be provided (without copayments) in all types of private health
plans. (Sec. 1001, pp. 20-21.) Sen.
Mikulski refused to modify her amendment to exclude abortion from the
scope of this mandate authority. (The Nelson-Hatch-Casey Amendment,
similar to the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, would have prevented abortion mandates
or subsidies under any provision of the bill -- but that amendment was tabled,
54-45, on December 8, 2009.) A vote for the Senate bill is a
vote to empower federal political appointees to mandate unlimited abortion
coverage in most private health plans.
-- The Senate bill would
reauthorize all federal Indian health programs, without including language
to prohibit funding of elective abortion, even though such an amendment
(the Vitter Amendment, similar to the Stupak Amendment) was approved
by the Senate when it last considered Indian health legislation on February
26, 2008. There is a clause in the
Senate health bill [Sec. 10221, pp. 2175-2176] that has been misrepresented as
an abortion restriction, but it actually contains no policy standard on
abortion funding -- it merely "punts" the question to the annual
appropriations process, an
unacceptable approach. A vote for the Senate bill is a
vote to open the door to future federal funding of abortion on demand through
all Indian health programs.
-- The Senate bill lacks language
to protect health care providers from being penalized for refusing to
participate in providing abortions (known as the "Weldon language"),
even though such language was approved by the House Energy and Commerce
Committee and was included in Speaker Pelosi's original bill even before adoption
of the Stupak Amendment. (See Section 259 of the House-passed H.R.
3962.) Yet, because such language is offensive to the pro-abortion lobby,
it was excluded from the Senate bill. A vote for the
Senate bill is a vote to abandon the strong position that the House took in
favor of protecting the conscience rights of pro-life health care providers.
-- The Senate bill, due to a
last-minute amendment, provides $7 billion for the nation's 1,250 Community
Health Centers (CHCs), without any restriction whatever on the use of these
federal funds to pay directly for abortion on demand. (These funds are
both authorized and appropriated by the bill, and thus would be untouched by
the "Hyde Amendment" that currently covers Medicaid funds that flow
through the annual Health and Human Services appropriations bill.) Two
pro-abortion groups, the Reproductive Health Access Project and the Abortion
Access Project, are already actively campaigning for Community Health Centers
to perform elective abortions. In short, the Senate bill would allow
direct federal funding of abortion on demand through Community Health
Centers. A memorandum documenting this issue in further detail is posted
here: http://www.nrlc.org/AHC/NRLCmemoCommHealth.pdf
In a recent statement, the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops noted that this provision alone could lead to
"hundreds of thousands of abortions per year that taxpayers would be
forced to pay for." In a story published in the March 4 Washington
Times, Congressman Diana DeGette (D-Co.) called
this concern "patently false," but White House spokeswoman Linda
Douglass took a different tact, admitting at least the possibility
of what she referred to as a "drafting issue that requires a
technical change . . ."
-- The Senate bill contains additional pools of directly appropriated
funds that are not covered by any limitations regarding abortion, including $5
billion for a temporary high-risk health insurance pool program (Sec. 1101 on
pages 45-52) and $6 billion in grants for health co-ops (Sec. 1322, pp.
169-180). Only bill-wide, permanent language, such as the Stupak-Pitts
Amendment, can ensure that none of the vast amounts of federal money authorized
and appropriated through the Senate bill are tapped by pro-abortion political
appointees and bureaucrats to pay for abortion.
NRLC Legislative Director Douglas
Johnson and Senior Legislative Counsel Susan Muskett are available to
provide comment and analysis on the Obama proposals. Please contact the
NRLC Communications Department at (202) 626-8825 or (202) 626-8820 to arrange
an interview.
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