Pro-Life // Current

Who currently subsidizes abortion? Many pro-lifers don't know

As is now widely known, added to the health care reform bill just passed by the House of Representatives was a provision barring access to abortion called the Stupak-Pitts Amendment. Passed with the support of sixty-four Democrats, Stupak-Pitts doesn't merely prohibit coverage of abortion in a public option. It also forbids women who receive a federal subsidy from purchasing any health insurance plan that covers the procedure, even if the abortion is paid out of a separate pool of private premium dollars (for all the background and details, see my colleague Emily Douglas' post).

If this highly regressive amendment makes its way into the legislation that Barack Obama eventually signs, millions of less affluent women who obtain access to affordable health insurance will thus join the ranks of low-income women on Medicaid, most of whom live in states that don't cover abortion procedures. The two-tiered system that dictates who in America has "choice" (more privileged women do, less affluent women do not) will be further entrenched.

But if the social consequences of Stupak-Pitts are clear, the logic is not. Supporters of the provision evidently want to assure taxpayers that they will not be forced to subsidize abortion in any way. But if they are serious about this, why haven't they drawn up an amendment abolishing tax breaks for employer-sponsored health insurance? As Jonathan Cohn has pointed out, this is by far the largest subsidy in health care policy today. (It is also a regressive subsidy, but that's another story.) If the employer-sponsored insurance that a worker gets happens to cover abortion – which, in roughly half the cases, it does – than that taxpayer already subsidizes abortion.

The purists who don't want any of their dollars to subsidize abortion have another problem. As Amy Sullivan of Time has observed, plenty of pro-life people likely have no idea whether their private health insurance plans include abortion services (in which case their premiums indirectly fund the procedure). The same goes for pro-life organizations. Sullivan did a bit of digging and found out that Focus on the Family provides its employees insurance through Principal, a company that - you guessed it - covers abortion procedures.

"If health reform proposals have a fungibility problem, then Focus does as well," Sullivan notes. "And if they don't think they do have a fungibility problem, then it would be interesting to hear why they think the set-up proposed in health reform legislation is so untenable."

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/494818/who_subsidizes_abortionAs is now widely known, added to the health care reform bill just passed by the House... more

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Pro-lifers attack possibility of public option coverage for abortions

Think debate over the president's healthcare plan is contentious? You ain't seen nothing yet. Cue center stage the divider of all dividers, the heart of the country's culture war -- it's ... drum roll ... abortion. There is no mention of the issue in the critical healthcare bills currently being considered in Congress, but abortion foes argue that the legislation would allow, maybe even require, federal funding to cover abortions and make the procedure both more accessible and more common. Despite this recent chatter, Obama didn't explicitly speak to the issue of abortion during Wednesday's press conference on the healthcare overhaul. (Although he did obliquely emphasize "choice.")

"This is a president who says he wants to reduce abortions," says Douglas Johnson, director of the National Right to Life Committee. "But the actual policies that this administration is promoting will result in massive public subsidies for abortion and result in a massive increase in the number of abortions" -- because poor women who previously lacked insurance might suddenly have a real choice about carrying their pregnancy to term.

Conservatives would also have us believe that federal money would be directly funneled to abortion. The truth, however, is just as Politico's Ben Smith put it: "The 'government option' or 'public plan' is only administered by the government; the actual services will be paid with the same mix of private money and vast new subsidies that will pay for private plans, some of which now cover abortion."

Still, some Democrats have suggested a "common ground" approach: Let insurers decide what coverage they offer, just as they do now. Abortion coverage would neither be required nor prohibited. A more popular Democratic solution is to have an independent medical panel determine which procedures should require coverage. This approach is dissatisfying to abortion-rights supporters and opponents alike: One group assumes abortion will be covered, the other assumes it won't -- and neither is happy about said assumptions.

Certain conservatives are going as far as to call for a clear ban on funding in the pending legislation. If they succeed, a whole lot of women will lose medical benefits under Obama's plan: Roughly 86 percent of employment-based insurance plans covered abortion in 2002, according to the Guttmacher Institute. As Laurie Rubiner, vice-president for public policy and advocacy at Planned Parenthood, told Politico: That goes against "the first principle of health care reform, which is: Don’t make people worse off under health care reform than they are today."Think debate over the president's healthcare plan is contentious? You ain't seen... more