By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
The White House is planning to meet this week with a major pro-life leader about the problem of abortion coverage in health care reform, but at the same time, it is refusing to speak with a pro-life Congressman who claims to have enough votes to derail the House bill if abortion coverage is not specifically excluded.
White House officials plan to meet with Dr. Charmaine Yoest, president of the pro-life legal group, Americans United for Life, on Thursday of this week, to discuss the problems of abortion funding in the health care bills pending in Congress.
Dr. Yoest told LifeNews.com that she doesn’t expect significant results from the meeting but hopes to “take the message to the White House that real health care respects life.”
The meeting will include Domestic Policy Council Director Melody Barnes, a former board member of both Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List. Also in attendance will be White House Director for Public Liaison, Tina Tchen, a former vice president of the pro-abortion National Organization for Women.
However, Dr. Yoest, who has a Ph.D. in politics and began her career in the Reagan Administration, now heads one of the largest and most respected pro-life and public policy organizations in the country. And she intends to have her say at the White House.
“Abortion is not health care, but without an explicit, proactive exclusion of abortion, the courts will impose an abortion mandate just as they did with Medicaid,” she told LifeNews.
“The abortion lobby is using health care reform to try to end-run around the Hyde Amendment which has been a thorn in their side. Their ultimate objective is to define abortion as basic health care which Americans do not support,” she says.
However, at the same time that they are hosting a pro-life leader in the White House, a pro-life Democrat, Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, has been trying for months to meet with the Obama Administration about removing abortion from health care reform, but has been rebuffed every time.
Speaking to the Weekly Standard the day after the President’s address to a joint session of Congress, Rep. Stupak said Barack Obama isn’t telling the full truth when he says that no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions” in the congressional health care plan.
“There certainly is public funding for abortion” in the House bill, Rep. Stupak said. The bill would allow both the public health insurance plan and federally subsidized private plans to cover elective abortions.
Rep. Stupak said he has asked repeatedly for a meeting, or even a few minutes on the phone, with Obama to clear up any misunderstanding, but the White House hasn’t granted his requests.
The problem for the White House is that Rep. Stupak, who has been working for months to gain support for removal of all abortion coverage from the bills, says he believes he has enough votes to prevent HR 3200 from making it to the House Floor.
If Nancy Pelosi and Rules Committee chairman Louise Slaughter do not allow an up-or-down vote on his amendment to explicitly ban coverage for elective abortions in the bill, Stupak says he’s going to lead a coalition of Democrats to vote with the Republicans “to try to take down the rule.”
He claims to have 40 Democrats willing to vote against the rule which, combined with Republicans and a defection or two from the “blue dog” Democratic caucus, would be enough votes to prevent the bill from moving out of the committee to the House floor.
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