Why pro-aborts praise and pro-lifers attack Senate bill
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.




Learn it! Speak it! Live it!
Bring Christmas to a child in need!







