Health Care Proposals and the Stupak Amendment

Here is an email I just sent to my two Senators in Washington:

As a Catholic, I understand and appreciate that there is a pressing need to make health care more affordable and accessible for those in need. So, I appreciate the Senate's efforts in this direction. However, I understand from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that the current legislation is "an enormous disappointment, creating new and completely unacceptable federal policy that endangers human life and rights of conscience."

Please adopt the House-approved Stupak Amendment that upholds longstanding policies against abortion funding, and please protect conscience rights in health care reform. I also do not believe that it is a good idea for immigrants to lose or to be denied health care coverage.

Abortion Is Not Health Care

I emailed my Senators today:

Those of us who believe in the sanctity of human life are appalled that the people who are supporting the new health care program feel it necessary to include something that makes it easier for a woman to afford her abortion. The proposed health care program, I think maybe contains some good ideas; however, so far, we just see it as a program to make it easier for a woman to afford her abortion.

Human life is the most precious, most important thing .... the most important thing we have is the lives of all our human beings. It's wrong to take a human life, even if that life happens to be living inside of another human being. Obviously, the baby just before he/she is born has got to be a human being just as much as after birth.

So, I am pleading with you to add to the health care law a statement stating that it does not include coverage for abortions.

Press release: CIRTL opposes stealth abortion amendment

Central Illinois Right to Life opposes a stealth amendment to a health care reform bill that could be interpreted as mandating insurance coverage of abortion services.

The amendment was approved 12-11 on Thursday, July 9, by the U.S. Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee. The panel was working on the Affordable Health Choices Act health care bill, one of several proposed in Congress.

Sponsored by Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., the amendment’s wording would require insurers, both public and private, to cover “essential community providers ... that serve predominantly low-income, medically under-served individuals.”

Planned Parenthood, which performs abortions at many of its clinics, is typically considered one such “community provider.”

Mikulski denied that the language was a mandate to cover abortions, but said, "It would provide for any service deemed medically necessary or medically appropriate."

The language is nothing but an attempt to use “health care reform” as a vehicle to make abortion even easier to obtain than it already is by forcing private insurers and taxpayers to fund it.

In the current climate of legal interpretation, “any service deemed medically necessary or medically appropriate” could easily be understood as referring to abortion, which has been defined by court rulings to be a private medical matter between a woman and her doctor.
Mikulski said that the language could be “sharpened in the future” to satisfy the concerns of senators who objected.

If that’s the case, why not sharpen it now — by deleting it so it couldn’t be misinterpreted at all?
Central Illinois Right to Life is a nonprofit organization that exists to educate, convince, and mobilize citizens to take responsible action in defense and support of innocent human life.
For more information, call us at 309-645-8000.

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