Next step: Forced abortion coverage
NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood have said pro-life organizations are wrong to oppose the Obama administration's new mandate for contraception and sterilization coverage in private health plans. After all, they say, increasing access to contraception (and especially "emergency contraception") will reduce abortions, and don't we all want that?
This argument conveniently ignores studies showing that such access doesn't reduce abortion rates. Of 23 recent studies on the effects of increased access to emergency contraceptives, none showed a reduction in unintended pregnancies or abortions. It also ignores the fact that at least one of the drugs covered by the mandate can induce abortion weeks into pregnancy.
On Jan. 26, a House committee in the Washington State Legislature demonstrated an even more glaring abortion connection. It approved what may become the nation's first-ever law forcing private health plans to cover abortion through all stages of pregnancy.
Hailed by "reproductive rights" advocates as "groundbreaking," the measure and its Senate companion are being promoted by the local affiliates of Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice Washington — the same groups that claimed a few days ago that they want to "reduce" abortions.
Killing is healing
If mandating coverage of contraception is designed to increase use of contraception, isn't mandating coverage of abortion meant to increase use of abortion?
The Washington state bill says any health plan providing "coverage for maternity care or services" must provide equivalent care for abortions. This represents a pro-abortion ideology at its purest and most extreme form. It declares a moral equivalency between childbirth and abortion. Killing is healing, a dead baby is the same as a live baby.
And this bizarre view is to be imposed on everyone who offers, sponsors or buys insurance.
About half of Americans identify themselves as "pro-life." More than half see abortion as "morally wrong," and most Americans oppose public funding of abortion and would choose not to have it covered in their health plan.
Most doctors and hospitals, regardless of secular or religious affiliation, do not perform abortions — in one recent survey, only 14 percent of OB/GYNs said they ever perform abortions and 87 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion provider.
Ineligible for federal funds?
Among the general public as well as the medical profession, abortion is a fringe practice, a moral problem and an embarrassment. So if you are committed to making it a mandatory aspect of basic health care for all, the coercive power of the state is your only option. Hence the Washington bill.
The drive to pass this state bill, however, ignores a looming direct conflict between it and a separate federal law signed last December by President Obama as part of the Labor/HHS appropriations act. This "Hyde/Weldon Amendment" provides that no federal funds under the act may be given to a state government that discriminates against those who decline to perform, refer for, or provide coverage for abortions.
So if Washington state passes this proposed law, it could make itself ineligible for all federal funds for labor, education and health and human services in that year.
Since President Obama and his administration have repeatedly insisted that they strongly support the Hyde/Weldon Amendment, we are about to witness a landmark event.
Will the Obama administration make good on its oft-repeated pledge to enforce federal conscience laws on abortion? Will it warn Washington state to hold off on the abortion mandate bill, or risk losing much of its federal funding? If not, we will know that the administration's pledges have been hollow, and may better understand that the real goal of the HHS mandate was about much more than contraception all along.
Richard M. Doerflinger is Deputy Director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities,
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Contact him at rdoerflinger@usccb.org.
February 9, 2012