WORLD’s Washington Bureau chief Edward Lee Pitts is closely following healthcare reform activity on Capitol Hill, and this afternoon he reports the latest on Harry Reid’s Senate version of the bill, including how it treats abortion:

The Senate bill also does not include strict limitations on taxpayer-funded abortions. It rejects language in the House healthcare bill that pro-life Democrats secured after successfully pressuring House leaders.

Rather than containing tight exclusions against federally funded abortions, the Senate version adopts an approach that could lead to the inclusion of abortion coverage in the bill’s public option. It mandates the inclusion of at least one plan with elective abortion coverage in each state’s health insurance exchange.

While wrapped in legal language, the intent of the eight pages in the bill devoted to abortion can be discerned by the way pro-abortion advocates have praised it while pro-life groups have attacked it.

“Reid has sought to please the militant minority that demands funding of abortion through federal programs, even though substantial majorities of Americans believe that abortion should be excluded from government-funded and government-sponsored health programs,” said Douglas Johnson with the National Right to Life Committee.

At Thursday’s rally, Reid said the bill’s abortion provisions are “in keeping with what the traditions have been in our country for more than 30 years.”

But his bill also empowers the Health and Human Services secretary to perform periodic updates of a qualified plan’s essential benefits. Such a review could lead to a major change: the eventual inclusion of abortion as an essential benefit.

Read Lee’s report in its entirety here.

Last week, in anticipation of President Obama’s trip to China, Chinese activists testified before Congress about how Chinese officials still allow forced abortions, sterilization, and infanticide in their efforts to enforce the country’s one-child policy. WORLD news editor Jamie Dean shares the story of one of those who testified, a woman called Wujuan:

During her testimony, Wujuan recounted what she called her “journey in hell”: learning she was pregnant without a required birth permit from the Chinese government; hiding from authorities in a dilapidated house with no electricity in a remote area as her baby grew in her womb; being discovered by authorities and forced into a grisly hospital with other pregnant women facing a similar fate. Finally, she told the excruciating end: begging for her child’s life as doctors pulled the baby apart with scissors. . . .

Wujuan told the congressional committee that only God’s forgiveness and her new-found Christian faith sustain her, and that she believes she’ll see her baby again: “If God allows, I will ask forgiveness from my baby when I see him in heaven.”

Read Jamie’s report in its entirety here.

Earlier this morning, we posted about former Bryan, Texas, Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson and her change of heart on abortion. The Washington Times has added another layer to the story, reporting today that Johnson’s church started giving her the cold shoulder once they found out she was no longer pro-abortion:

Now she is facing a different kind of music at her parish, St. Francis Episcopal in nearby College Station, the home of Texas A&M University.

Whereas clergy and parishioners welcomed her as a Planned Parenthood employee, now they are buttonholing her after Sunday services.

“Now that I have taken this stand, some of the people there are not accepting of that,” she told The Washington Times. “People have told me they disagree with my choice. One of the things I’ve been told is that as Episcopalians, we embrace our differences and disagreements. While I agree with that, I am not sure I can go to a place where I don’t feel I am welcome.”

The rector at St. Francis refused to comment on the charge of nonacceptance.

Ironically, Johnson had a hard time finding a church home while she worked at Planned Parenthood, telling the Times:

“I was raised Southern Baptist but didn’t find the Southern Baptist community was very accepting of my work at Planned Parenthood. It felt there was a spiritual conflict in what I was doing, but you just begin to rationalize it. I didn’t want to leave these women without options, so you begin to think you are doing the right thing, although it doesn’t feel right.”

After being told by a Southern Baptist church and a nondenominational church that they could not join, she and her husband, Doug, landed at St. Francis, a U.S. Episcopal Church, which, of all mainline denominations, has one of the most liberal stances on abortion (see Marcia Segelstein’s “‘Abortion is a blessing.’”

The Times adds this little tidbit near the end of its piece:

A photo on the front page of the church’s Web site, stfrancisonline.org, shows [Johnson] seated at the right end of the front row, holding a girl dressed in pink. Her husband, dressed in an orange shirt, is to her right.

“Chief among our values,” says a statement below the photo, “are service, tolerance and understanding of the people and events that God has put into our lives.”

Johnson said that her and her family “really, really love” St. Francis and don’t want to leave.

Politico reported yesterday that the Republican National Committee’s insurance policy with Cigna covers elective abortions. Once the news broke, the RNC quickly took action to change its policy.

According to several Cigna employees, the insurer offers its customers the opportunity to opt out of abortion coverage – and the RNC did not choose to opt out.

Republicans have spoken forcefully against Democrats’ healthcare reform that included abortion coverage . The Stupak amendment limited that coverage.

Last week, we posted news of a Planned Parenthood director in Bryan, Texas, having a change of heart and joining the pro-life cause. WORLD contributor Julie Smyth talked to Abby Johnson, who described in detail the day that changed her life:

In late September, the abortionist at Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas, needed assistance, so he asked the center’s director Abby Johnson to hold the ultrasound probe during a dilation and evacuation abortion. Johnson watched as the 13-week-old unborn child attempted to avoid the probe. “I saw a full profile of the baby from head to foot,” she told me.

Once the abortion procedure began, Johnson saw the child “crumple” under the pressure of the vacuum and then in an instant the child was gone. The reality of seeing the baby moving struck her as she stood in shock and dropped the ultrasound probe, she recalled: “My heart was racing. I kept thinking about my daughter.”

Ready Julie article in its entirety here.

The Honduran Congress has joined several other Latin American countries in banning the morning-after pill. According to Catholic News Agency, the law passed earlier this year has now taken effect. Carlos Polo, Latin American director of the Population Research Institute, told CNA,

In Latin America, where abortion is illegal, the only option left for the promoters of this pill was to misinform the people by denying the so-called ‘third effect.’  Now we see that pressure and misinformation can last a while but in the end, deceit fails on its own. We will certainly see the morning-after pill eradicated from Latin America, thus freeing ourselves from an inoperative and costly method that has grave adverse effects for women.

Abortion is illegal in Honduras, and advocates for the bill noted that the pill can cause abortions by preventing the embryo’s implantation.

For the past eight years, Abby Johnson has worked for Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas, the last two years as its director. But then she saw an ultrasound of an abortion procedure. “I just thought I can’t do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that’s it,” Johnson told KBTX-TV (link includes a video interview with Johnson).

She also began to disagree with the organization’s new business model of pushing for more abortions: “The money wasn’t in family planning, the money wasn’t in prevention, the money was in abortion and so I had a problem with that.”

Johnson, who resigned on Oct. 6, has joined forces with Coalition for Life and has been praying with the group on the sidewalk in front of her former employer’s place of business. Planned Parenthood has reacted to Johnson’s leaving by slapping a temporary restraining order on her and Coalition for Life. A hearing on the order is set for Nov. 10.

HT: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

WORLD Washington Bureau reporter Edward Lee Pitts has been closely following healthcare reform this week on Capitol Hill. He reports:

Healthcare reform advocates took two major steps forward this week, but conservatives fear those steps could represent two giant leaps backward for those with pro-life, limited government, and anti-tax interests.

Concerning the inclusion of abortion funding in healthcare legislation, Lee writes:

. . . the biggest burden the House bill places on the nation may be its treatment of abortion.

“Language in the bill still does not do enough to prevent federal funding from going to abortion services,” worries Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich.

Stupak and as many as 40 other House Democrats fear that the creation of new federal insurance subsidies for low-income earners would go toward purchasing healthcare plans that include abortion coverage.

Current law prohibits federal funding for abortion through Medicaid, the federal employee health plan, and military plans. But the new health bill creates new federal funding avenues that are not covered under current law—and theses new streams have the potential to reach a greater number of Americans than the already restricted plans.

To stop this, Stupak is pushing for an amendment that adds the abortion prohibition to the new federal subsidies. He says that pro-life Democrats combined with Republicans could derail the House bill. Stupak is continuing to negotiate, but Pelosi may try to get the House bill through under a procedure that does not allow amendments.

“Anyone voting to forbid amendments to this bill is in effect voting to set up a federal government program that will directly fund abortion on demand,” warns Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee. “Prominent Democrats who have claimed that the federal government could pay for abortion with ‘private’ funds have been engaged in a big snow job.”

The fight over the pro-life amendment could come as early as next week.

Read Lee’s report in its entirety here.

President Barack Obama won the majority of Catholic votes last November, but Democratic healthcare reform may not win the backing of some of the most influential Catholics in the country. Earlier this month, representatives for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a letter to Congress, expressing disappointment over congressional healthcare proposals, and warning that if a final healthcare package allows taxpayer funding for abortion “we will have no choice but to oppose the bill.”

Cardinal Francis George—the Catholic archbishop of President Obama’s hometown of Chicago—told The Wall Street Journal yesterday that every healthcare bill coming out of congressional committees so far has allowed taxpayer funding for abortion. Such provisions violate what the cardinal called his top priority for healthcare reform: “Nobody should be deliberately killed.”

The Guttmacher Institute has a new report saying that abortions declined from 1995 to 2003.

The number of abortions performed worldwide fell from 45.5 million in 1995 to 41.6 million in 2003, the report said. The global abortion rate declined from 35 abortions for every 1,000 women (aged 15-44) in 1995, to 29 per 1,000 women in 2003.

Other highlights:

• The use of contraception is up. The percentage of married women using contraception increased from 54% in 1995 to 63% in 2003.
• The global rate of unintended pregnancies fell from 69 per 1,000 women in 1995 to 55 in 2003.

Advocating for abortion legalization is part of the report’s agenda. It also reports that the rate of “unsafe abortions”—the term they use for “illegal abortions”–has barely decreased. It says about 70,000 women die each year from the effects of “unsafe abortion” and that eight million women annually experience experience complications that need medical treatment.

Pro-lifers reject this figure of 70,000 women, saying the report is based on conjecture. LifeNews.com quotes Anthony Ozimic, with British pro-life group SPUC, calling the report “propaganda from the pro-abortion lobby” and saying the figures “are based on highly spurious guesstimates, which even the report itself is forced to admit.”