A pro-life amendment is finally being added to Senator Harry Reid’s health care bill. Senator Ben Nelson (D-Neb) introduced the amendment to the Senate health care bill on Monday. The amendment, which essentially mirrors the language of the Stupak Amendment, would ban abortion coverage within the government sponsored public option and prevent women receiving federal health insurance subsidies from purchasing insurance plans that cover abortion.
This new amendment enforces the already existing federal policy on abortion written in the Hyde Amendment, which has banned federal funding of abortions for decades now. The current draft of the Senate bill, on the other hand, allows women to purchase insurance plans that cover abortion with federally subsidized funds while stipulating that no federal funds are used to directly cover the procedure. This is a simple accounting trick that amounts to nothing more than federally subsidized abortion.
“As written, the Senate healthcare bill allows taxpayer dollars, directly and indirectly, to pay for insurance plans that cover abortion,” Sen. Nelson said in a statement on Monday. “Most Nebraskans, and Americans, do not favor using public funds to cover abortion and as a result this bill shouldn’t open the door to do so.”
Pro-abortion factions, however, argue that the amendment would violate women’s rights by making it too difficult for women receiving federal funding for health care to pay for an abortion. Sen. Boxer (D-Cal.), for example, claimed Monday that those attempting to limit federal funding for abortion were attempting to use health care legislation to limit women’s rights.
This logic is fundamentally unsound, however. Refusing to publicly fund a procedure does not legally limit a woman’s right to obtain it. At what point did the law permitting abortion shift into a legal mandate to ensure that all women have funding for it. In truth, the Nelson amendment does nothing more than enforce the federal policy on abortion as it currently exists.
The Senate is currently debating the amendment and is expected to vote later today. Unfortunately, many in support of the amendment are in doubt that it has enough votes to pass. “A lot of us on the Republican side will support that,” said the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee. “The question is whether or not you can get 60, which I think is very much in doubt.”
Write or call your Senators TODAY to ensure that the amendment gets the 60 votes it needs. As the Senate health care bill currently exists, your federal tax dollars will be used to subsidize the abortion of thousands of unborn children. Let your Senators know that you will not tolerate your tax dollars being used to support a practice to which you are morally opposed.