By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Mandated abortion funding in health care reform is once again in the news with the passage of an amendment in the Senate yesterday that will allow the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to include abortion as “preventive care” in their guidelines, thereby mandating abortion coverage in all group and individual health care plans.
The amendment, authored by pro-abortion Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), passed by a vote of 61-39. Specifically, the amendment states that anything classified as preventive care or screenings for women by the HRSA would become a mandated covered service. Should the HRSA recommend abortion as a preventive care, insurance plans would have to cover it.
This was not Sen. Mikulski’s first attempt to sneak abortion coverage into health care reform. She authored another deceptively worded amendment this past summer which would have included Planned Parenthood clinics under the bill’s definition of “community health services” so that health insurance companies would be forced to contract with them.
“Sadly, the Senate voted today to further mandate inclusion of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest network of abortion, in a national health care scheme,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “This is a breach of faith with the American people, roughly 70 percent of whom oppose federally-funded or -subsidized abortion. . . .
“Because today’s bill as written has no exclusion for abortion in its language, there is no doubt that Sen. Mikulski’s amendment opens the floodgates to massive public underwriting of abortion, a position Planned Parenthood has always favored. Without the adoption of ‘Stupak-Pitts’ amendment language in the Senate version of the bill, it’s now very clear that taxpayers will be forced to pay for abortions,” added Perkins.
Mary Harned, attorney for the pro-life group Americans United for Life, wrote that while her group “strongly supports preventative care for women,” “the Mikulski Amendment should be amended to include language prohibiting abortion from being included in the HRSA guidelines.”
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