Charmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life addresses abortion and health care in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. She examines whether or not President Barack Obama’s “balanced” approach to abortion in his health care reform maintains the status quo (the Hyde Amendment) as Democrats claim or whether it “opens the spigots” to abortion funding. Yoest describes how Obamacare will expand abortion by paying for more of them:
• It would change existing law by allowing federally subsidized health-care plans to pay for abortions and could require private health-insurance plans to cover abortion.
• It would impose a first-ever abortion tax—a separate premium payment that will be used to pay for elective abortions—on enrollees in insurance plans that covers abortions through newly created government health-care exchanges.
• And it would fail to protect the rights of health-care providers to refuse to participate in abortions.
The president’s plan goes further than the Senate bill on abortion by calling for spending $11 billion over five years on “community health centers,” which include Planned Parenthood clinics that provide abortions.
When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Obamacare will subsidize abortion. Thus Yoest says the president’s health care plan is “the single greatest expansion of abortion since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.” It is hard to disagree with her.
