Senator Barbara Mikulski (D, MD) has an amendment (No. 2791) to the Senate health care reform bill of Harry Reid that would mandate coverage of “preventive” health care for women. That sounds benign enough but as the National Right to Life Committee notes in a letter to U.S. senators, when the Maryland senator sponsored a similar amendment earlier this year, it was endorsed by the usual suspects (NARAL Pro-Choice America, Catholics for Choice, Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Medical Students for Choice). The NRLC also points out that the National Abortion Federation publication Providing Abortion Care (2009) states that abortion is a component of women’s “comprehensive primary preventative health care” needs. Preventive health care might include abortion, and it certainly will if pro-abortion groups have anything to say about it. In July, when Mikulski was asked about this by her colleagues, Senator Orrin Hatch (R, Utah) and Bob Casey Jr. (D, Penn), she refused to add clarifying language to rule out the possibility that her amendment could be read to include abortion. As the National Right to Life Committee says, “anyone who genuinely believes that abortion properly will remain outside the scope of future ‘preventive care’ mandates should have no objection to explicitly writing such a rule of construction into the legislation.”
