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NRLC Responds to PolitiFact.com

May 9th, 2012 No comments

Comments by Douglas Johnson, legislative director, National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) in response to a PolitiFact.com article concerning an NRLC press release from May 8, 2012:

I note that Molly Moorhead of PolitiFact.com (a leading vendor of ever-more pretentious, ever-more tendentious “fact checking”) has imposed on the National Right to Life press release a construction that goes well beyond the plain language of the release — and then she declared her own construction, attributed to NRLC, to be “mostly false.” Nice work if you can get it.

Moorhead wrote, “The National Right to Life Committee headline suggested that fetuses were being screened for security at the White House gate.” She also wrote, “But is the Right to Life Committee correct . . . In other words, does a pregnant woman count as two at the White House?” [italics added for emphasis] Yet these phrases, attributed to NRLC, appear nowhere in the NRLC statement, nor are they implied, nor do they reflect anything I said (or thought) during the short interview that Moorhead conducted with me. Our release says what it says, not what Moorhead imagines we “suggested.” You can read the entire NRLC release here.

How can it be “mostly false” for us to say that the White House is collecting the data on the “baby that has not yet been born” (the actual White House term) “for security purposes” (our term), when the White House newsletter itself says, “We have received a number of calls regarding how to enter security information for a baby that has not yet been born,” then goes on to instruct, “The baby’s security information should be entered as follows . . .,” and then requests various specifics, including the unborn baby’s sex when known. [italics added for emphasis] Since the White House twice said that the information on the baby is “security information,” how can it be false to say it is information “for . . . security purposes”?

We didn’t say that the White House Visitors office counted a pregnant visitor as two people, but rather, made the point that the White House recognizes the “baby” as a family member prior to birth, “for purposes of providing security within the White House,” but not for purposes of establishing abortion policy for the District of Columbia, an exclusively federal jurisdiction. Moorhead apparently went to all of that re-write work as part of a studied effort to miss our point. I wonder why?

While we said nothing whatever to suggest that “fetuses were being screened for security at the White House gate” (one of Malloy’s imaginative extrapolations, attributed to us), we were accurate in asserting that the bill mentioned in our release (H.R. 3803) would, as we understand it, “provide for the security of the unborn child immediately outside of the White House gates, as well as inside.” The White House is entirely within the District of Columbia, see?

Finally, Moorhead conflates NRLC’s statement with entirely independent commentaries on the White House newsletter by the Washington Times and Creative Minority Report. As a rhetorical tactic this is too shoddy to require any further commentary. As journalism . . . well, it is not journalism.

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HHS Issues New Rule on ObamaCare Scheme to Fund Abortion Insurance

March 16th, 2012 No comments

By NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson
and NRLC Senior Legislative Counsel Susan T. Muskett, J.D.

WASHINGTON (March 14, 2012) — The Obama Administration has taken another step in what amounts to a four-year plan to make abortion-covering health insurance, subsidized by the federal government, commonly available in the United States.

The latest action came on March 12, when the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a lengthy regulation that spells out how some of the components of the massive 2010 Obama health care law (“ObamaCare”) will be implemented.

The new rule — consuming 644 pages, including HHS’s commentary — is concerned mainly with the “exchanges,” which are the government-operated health insurance markets that must be established in every state by January 1, 2014.  While states may retain responsibility for administering the exchanges, they must do so according to the detailed blueprints provided in the federal law and in federal regulations, including the new rule.

One part of the ObamaCare law establishes a big new program to provide federal subsidies for tens of millions of American families whose household income is 400 percent or less of the federal poverty level ($92,000 for a family of four).  (Only health plans that join the exchanges will be eligible to sign up federally subsidized clients, which provides a strong incentive for health plans to enlist in the exchanges.)  These federal subsidies can be used to purchase health plans that cover all abortions.  This is one of the abortion-expanding aspects of ObamaCare that caused NRLC to strongly oppose the legislation when it was under consideration in Congress in 2009 and 2010.

OBAMA ASSURANCES HOLLOW

During the 2009-2010 congressional debate, President Obama repeatedly told the American people that he was not seeking federal funding of abortion in his healthcare legislation.  For example, in a speech to a joint session of Congress on September 9, 2009, the president claimed that “under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion.”  NRLC repeatedly pointed out that such claims were flatly inconsistent with the actual legislative proposals that Obama was pushing — indeed, the president played a key role in removing House-approved language (the Stupak-Pitts Amendment) that would have prevented subsidies for elective abortions under any component of the book-thick health-care legislation.

In March, 2010, Obama persuaded a small group of Democrat House members to support the bill — and to provide the margin needed for enactment — by signing an executive order that he touted as a firewall against federal funding of abortion.  In reality, the executive order was political theatre, nearly devoid of substance.  In a March 21, 2010 statement, NRLC warned that the executive order was “issued for political effect” and “does not correct any of the serious pro-abortion provisions in the bill,” adding that “a lawmaker who votes for this bill is voting to require federal agencies to subsidize and administer health plans that will pay for elective abortion, and voting to undermine longstanding pro-life policies in other ways as well.”

Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the nation’s largest abortion provider, also dismissed the executive order as “a symbolic gesture” (USA Today, March 25, 2010), as she welcomed enactment of the ObamaCare law.

During 2011, the Obama White House issued formal veto threats on two bills (the Protect Life Act and the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act), both approved by the House of Representatives, that would restore effective barriers to federal subsidies for abortion.

NEW RULE SPELLS OUT SOME DETAILS

The new rule spells out some, but by no means all, of the details on how abortion coverage will be paid for in the developing exchange system.

Under the rule, a health plan that covers all abortions may participate in an exchange unless a state enacts a law that explicitly prohibits such coverage (known as an “opt out” law).  If a health plan covers abortion, the rule forbids the plan from calling attention to that fact in any of its advertising or explanatory materials.  The disclosure of abortion coverage can be provided “only as part of the summary of benefits and coverage explanation, at the time of enrollment.”   This provision seems designed for no other purpose than to ensure that many people who would not deliberately sign up for abortion-covering plans will do so inadvertently, because of the federally enforced gag rule.

Once a person is enrolled in an abortion-covering plan, he or she will be required to pay a defined monthly charge for the abortion coverage, dubbed the “abortion surcharge” by critics.  This abortion surcharge is not optional — every enrollee in the plan must pay it, including families that have moral objections to abortion and/or that contain no females of reproductive age.

Some media stories have reported that the “abortion surcharge” will be $1 per month, but in fact, the law and rule say something quite different — they say that the surcharge must not be “less than one dollar per enrollee, per month.”  The surcharge could be a good deal more than $1, depending on how many abortions are paid for and how much they cost.

Neither the law nor the rule contain any limitations on reasons for which abortions are sought or how late in pregnancy they occur.

HHS has so far avoided spelling out in any detail how the abortion surcharge payments will be made.  From the pro-life perspective, the exact method of collecting the payments is not very important.  The most important fact is that the federal government will be helping tens of millions of Americans purchase exchange-participating health plans, many of which will cover abortion on demand.  When the government pays for health insurance, it pays for what the insurance pays for.  The abortion surcharge is merely a bookkeeping device that is intended to obscure the reality that the federal government will be purchasing abortion-on-demand insurance — which is a sharp departure from decades of previous federal policy under the Hyde Amendment, the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, and other federal programs.

STATE OPT-OUT LAWS

The ObamaCare law specifies, and the rule repeats, that a state may enact an “opt out” law that prohibits coverage of abortion in the health plans that participate in the exchange in that state.  So far, 15 states have enacted variations on such laws, and other state legislatures are considering such legislation.

However, while enactment of state “opt out” laws is important, they do not reach the heart of the problem.  A state legislature may forbid coverage of abortion in the exchange-participating health plans in that state –but under ObamaCare, the taxpayers who live in that state may not “opt out” of subsidizing the abortion coverage for other Americans, perhaps numbering tens of millions, who live in other states that do not enact opt-out laws.

Moreover, the ObamaCare law provides additional mechanisms by which the Obama Administration will be able to expand abortion-covering insurance in the future, step by step.

For example, the ObamaCare law provides that a different federal agency, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), will offer so-called “multi-state” health plans.  Eventually, each “multi-state plan” will be offered throughout the country.  The law provides that one such federal plan will have limitations on abortion coverage, at least initially, but it leaves the door open to one or more additional federal plans covering abortion on demand.

In the new rule, HHS does not reveal how the OPM-administered “multi-state” plans will handle abortion coverage.  The HHS commentary merely says that such issues “will be described in future rulemaking published by OPM.”  Presumably, the Obama Administration prefers to reveal the answers to such questions after the November presidential election.

FUTURE MANDATES POSSIBLE

The HHS rule released on March 12 is entirely separate and distinct from the controversy that has erupted around another component of ObamaCare, which is a provision allowing HHS to mandate that virtually all health plans cover, without copayments, any medical service that the Secretary of HHS places on a list of “preventive services.”  Earlier this year, the Administration ignited a national controversy by placing all FDA-approved contraceptive methods and sterilization on the mandatory preventive services list.  NRLC has warned that if President Obama is re-elected, his administration could expand the “preventive services” list to include all abortions.  The effect of such a mandate would be that health plans in general — whether federally subsidized or not — would be required to cover abortion on demand without copayments.  However, enactment of a properly drafted “opt out” law should shield the exchange-participating plans in a given state from any such mandate.

While some of the details of the Obama Administration’s abortion-expanding campaign remain to be revealed, the new rule is only the latest evidence that pro-life objections to ObamaCare were well founded, and that only repeal and replacement of the ObamaCare law will prevent a vast, federally dictated expansion of abortion access in the United States.

RESOURCES

Additional documentation on the abortion-expanding components of ObamaCare can be found on the NRLC website at http://www.nrlc.org/AHC/index.html, including testimony presented by NRLC to a U.S. House subcommittee in February, 2011 (http://www.nrlc.org/AHC/ProtectLifeActDouglasJohnsonTestimony.pdf).

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National Right to Life Applauds Gov. McDonnell and Virginia Legislature for Enactment of Ultrasound Law

March 7th, 2012 No comments

 

SB 484 ensures Virginia women will be given full range of information before abortion

 WASHINGTON – Today, the National Right to Life Committee, the federation of 50 state right-to-life affiliates and more than 3,000 local chapters, applauded Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and the Virginia state legislature for enactment of SB 484, the ultrasound bill which ensures that women in the Commonwealth are given the full range of information available before undergoing an abortion procedure.  Governor McDonnell signed the bill into law today.

 “We commend Governor McDonnell and the dedicated men and women in the Virginia legislature for seeing this protective legislation enacted into law,” said Carol Tobias, National Right to Life president. “We also applaud the Virginia Society for Human Life for making this law a top priority and their tireless efforts to protect and empower the women of Virginia.”

The new ultrasound law provides mothers an opportunity to view real-time images of their unborn children, and then provides an appropriate waiting period before rushing her through an abortion. The final version of the bill includes language, urged by Governor McDonnell, which clarifies that only an abdominal ultrasound is necessary to meet the requirements of the law.

During the legislative debate, opponents vilified the ultrasound procedure as “invasive,” even though the National Abortion Federation reports that ultrasounds are already in common use by abortionists to determine the gestational age of the unborn child.  However, the ultrasound screen is often hidden from the mother’s view.

 

“This basic medical information should be provided to women, but because a life-affirming choice takes business away from the abortionist, they will often hide all the facts of abortion and the child’s development from mothers,” observed Mary Spaulding Balch, J.D., National Right to Life director of state legislation. “The outrageous misinformation propagated during the debate on this ultrasound bill exposed the abortion industry’s concern for its financial bottom line at the cost of women’s well-being. The truth is, the abortion industry is afraid to let women simply see the image of their own child.”

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