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Abortion now dividing Senate Democrats on healthcare reform
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by smkovalinsky | November 13, 2009 at 06:32 pm
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The health care reform bill will finally be brought to the Senate floor by Democrats next week. Once more, the issue of abortion with regard to healthcare reform is causing divisions as was the case prior to this in the House of Representatives.
Michigan's Bart Stupak was the one who demanded that the bill include language strictly forbidding federal monies for the funding of abortion. This, as the CBS correspondent below rightly emphasizes, would mean that poor women with any federal funding would be prohibited from any insurance plan which includes the procedure.
Some liberals feel that the Stupak amendment has hijacked the healthcare reform debate.
The fight over abortion rights has become a thorn in the side of both parties now. It all started when anti-abortion Democrats, led by Michigan's Bart Stupak, began demanding that health care reform include strict new language banning abortion coverage.
"What I'm saying and a number of my Democratic colleagues are saying is no public funding for abortion, period," Stupak said.
Government rules have prohibited abortion coverage in federally funded plans since 1976. Federal workers, Medicaid recipients and women in the military do not have abortion coverage except in extreme cases like rape.
But the health care reform bill creates an unprecedented scenario. Millions of low-income Americans get some federal assistance to help them buy insurance. Stupak's amendment bars any woman who gets even a dollar of federal funding from buying a plan that contains abortion coverage.
And the San Francisco Chronicle makes this argument about the futility of barring abortion from insurance programs, especially for those in need:
Experience has shown that denying coverage of abortion does not stop or even curtail it, but rather shifts the costs elsewhere, and threatens to delay a woman in seeking and obtaining this medical procedure, thus potentially endangering her.
The San Francisco Medical Society's board of directors has voted to urge our elected officials, particularly Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, to find a compromise that will not ban such funding and keep women with unwanted pregnancies safe.
Women's lives should not be held hostage to politics.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/13/ED1L1AJ8P1.DTL#ixzz0WnUBQaU0
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at 10:35 on November 14th, 2009
"Experience has shown that denying coverage of abortion does not stop or even curtail it, but rather shifts the costs elsewhere..."
What a load of chicken droppings. Women that don't want to pay for an abortion, simply go to Planned Parenthood for the money - which gets millions every year from Uncle Samuel, in the name of "family planning".
If liberals want to kill any minute hope of passing a health care plan, there is no better guarantee than forcing it to pay for abortions.