When, after a grueling race, a contestant fails to make it over the finish line, he has several options. One is to expect thanks for trying. Another is to declare that, contrary to what you just saw with your own eyes, he not only crossed the finish line but won!
The latter has been the response of Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mi.) to organizations such as National Right to Life who have respectfully but unambiguously criticized Mr. Stupak for accepting a meaningless executive order from the most pro-abortion President since Roe v. Wade was handed down. I'm not going to quote Mr. Stupak's more intemperate remarks, because I strongly suspect that at some point he may regret them.
Because of the Obama executive order, it is Rep. Stupak's position that the Senate measure the House voted in favor of (and which President Obama signed into law) fits the pro-life bill. That simply is false.
"The order does not truly correct any of the seven objectionable pro-abortion provisions described in NRLC's March 19 letter to the House of Representatives," as NRLC pointed out a week ago Sunday.
Over the weekend columnist Kathleen Parker, not one of us, wrote a piece under the headline, "Federally funded abortions are in our future."
There are places where we disagree with her analysis. For example, there are grounds to believe Community Health Centers may already perform abortions. But Parker's five-word summary why CHCs in the future will for sure perform abortions is completely persuasive: "There's nothing [in the new law] to stop them."
"By statute, CHCs are required to provide all 'required primary health care services,' defined to include 'health services related to . . . obstetrics or gynecology that are furnished by physicians,'" she writes.
"Federal courts long have held that when a statute requires provision of health services under such broad categories, then the statute must be construed to include abortion unless it explicitly excludes it. Voil."
There's more. In defending his actions, Rep. Stupak wrote an op-ed that appeared Saturday in the Washington Post. The bottom line of his defense is, "I and other pro-life Democrats struck an agreement with President Obama to issue an executive order that would ensure all Hyde Amendment protections would apply to the health-care reform bill."
Parker does a good job explaining how Obama's executive order may be much ado about something, but is nothing ado about stopping the funding of abortion. "For one thing, the Hyde Amendment is a rider that must be lobbied and attached each year to the annual Labor/Health and Human Services appropriations bill," she wrote. "Under its terms, the amendment applies only to those funds."
Moreover, "Rather than following the usual course of funding community health centers (CHCs) through the Labor/HHS budget, the health-care-reform measure does an end run around Hyde by directly appropriating billions of dollars into a new CHC fund. Because the Obama administration's 'fix-it' bill did not include the abortion-ban language proposed by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), those billions appropriated to CHCs simply are not covered by Hyde."
Obama has unfailingly tried to keep his commitment to his pro-abortion allies, just as Bush unfailingly kept his commitments to pro-lifers. Skip the opinions of those with an involvement in the issue.
Why would anyone without a dog in the hunt possibly believe that Obama and his pro-abortion Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius would expend 15 second to assure that federal money not pay for abortions?
Contact: Dave Andrusko
Source: NRLC
Publish Date: March 29, 2010
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