Life Advocacy Briefing

Major Vote on Tap in House

THE U.S. HOUSE IS EXPECTED TO ACT THIS WEEK – shortly after reconvening from its Easter recess – on HR-3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” introduced at the beginning of this Congress by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL), the co-chairmen of the House Pro-Life Caucus.

Americans United for Life president Charmaine Yoest PhD, in an AUL Bench Briefs memo, last week described the measure as “one of the most important pieces of pro-life legislation on the subject of taxpayer involvement in a generation. This bill stops the game-playing in the budget,” Dr. Yoest noted.

The measure would put the long-standing ban on taxpayer funding of abortion into permanent law, as the Hyde Amendment was a provision which had to be incorporated into annual appropriation bills every year and sometimes, though always popular with the American people, has been a bone of contention.

It would also extend Hyde-style prohibitions throughout the federal government. Though many voters and even Members of Congress have long assumed “Hyde” applied government-wide, in reality, the Hyde Amendment restricted Medicaid funding; other provisions had to be adopted separately and annually to bar taxpayer funding of abortions in, for example, the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan.

The proposal would also codify the Hyde/Weldon conscience clause and would bar abortion coverage through tax-exempt health savings accounts.

The bill is being co-sponsored by 227 House Members, giving it enough expected votes already to pass. But additional Members are considered likely votes, either by virtue of their party affiliation or by their votes in the 111th Congress to bar abortion funding in ObamaCare. Readers in the districts of these Members should make special efforts to contact them, either via the Capitol switchboard at 1-202/224-3121 or via the House website at www.house.gov, or, preferably both.

Republicans who are not co-sponsoring HR-3 and need to be encouraged to vote “yes”: Representatives Young (AK); Bono-Mack, Dreier & Rohrabacher (all CA); Tipton (CO); Webster (FL); Biggert & Dold (IL); Camp (MI); Paulsen (MN); Heller (NV); Bass (NH); Frelinghuysen & Runyan (NJ); Gibson, Hanna & Hayworth (NY); Renacci (OH); Dent & Meehan (PA); Hastings, Herrera-Beutler & Reichert (WA); and Capito (WV).

Democrats who voted for the Stupak/Pitts Amendment to ObamaCare yet have not co-sponsored HR-3 so need to be urged to vote “yes:” Baca, Cardoza & Costa (CA); Barrow & Bishop (GA); Chandler (KY); Michaud (ME); Lynch & Neal (MA); Kildee (MI); Kaptur & Ryan (OH); Altmire & Doyle (PA); Langevin (RI); Cooper (TN); Cuellar & Reyes (TX); and Matheson (UT).

Stateside

ABORTION POLICY IS A HOT TOPIC not only on Capitol Hill but also in various state capitals.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) has signed a bill barring abortion on babies old enough to feel pain, setting the bar at 20 gestational weeks, pursuant to established medical research showing pain responses in babies at least that young. She subscribed also to a new law excluding elective abortions from group insurance coverage even in the private sector.  “‘Together,’” said Gov. Fallin, quoted by Steve Olafson for Reuters, “‘these two pieces of legislation will expand protections for unborn children and ensure that Oklahomans are not forced to unknowingly or unwillingly help to pay for procedures that run contrary to their values.’”

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) has now stepped into the “defund Planned Parenthood” fight, proposing an exclusion of the abortion behemoth from his state budget plan, “redirect[ing] about $300,000 in federal family planning funds,” writes Brad Cooper in the Kansas City Star, “from Planned Parenthood to state and local health clinics. … ‘Gov. Brownback, along with the overwhelming majority of Kansans,’” said Gov. Brownback’s spokesman, quoted in the Star, “‘opposes taxpayer subsidy of abortions.’” Planned Parenthood is the nation’s chief purveyor of abortion.

Lawmakers in Kansas have sent Gov. Brownback another bill to sign. (He has already begun signing pro-life legislation, as we have reported previously.) The Kansas Senate voted 24-15 last week to pass a proposal requiring two annual inspections of every abortuary, to prohibit remote-control “webcam” chemical abortions and to authorize the state’s Dept. of Health & Environment to fine and close abortion “clinics” that do not comply. The proposal also requires abortionists to maintain hospital privileges within 30 miles of their killing shops. When the Kansas House passed the bill earlier this spring, the vote was 97 to 27.

Indiana’s lawmakers have handed their governor, Republican Mitch Daniels, a dilemma, passing legislation barring Planned Parenthood from participating in the state’s Medicaid program.  Gov. Daniels has traditionally embraced a pro-life commitment but has drawn media attention as a potential GOP Presidential candidate by repeatedly advocating a “truce” on “social issues” in the face of the fiscal challenges facing America. The pending bill, according to the Washington Post’s Rachel Weiner, could cost Indiana dearly, since, she writes, “federal law blocks states from choosing which organizations can provide family planning services to Medicaid patients.” After passage by the Indiana Senate on April 20, the Planned Parenthood disqualifier sailed through the Indiana House on April 27 by a vote of 66 to 32. The measure also bars abortion of babies aged beyond 20 gestational weeks.  Gov. Daniels is expected to indicate his Presidential intentions any day, now that the legislature adjourned on Friday. At the same time, he has just one week to act on the pro-life bill, which will become law without his signature if he fails or refuses to act, according to LifeSiteNews.com writer Kathleen Gilbert. Governors seldom use their “pocket approval” authority to dodge an issue.

Quoteworthy

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Family Research Council senior fellow Ken Blackwell, writing in a column for Townhall.com: “In exposing Planned Parenthood for what it is, we have set the stage for a victory that might not come tomorrow but eventually will come. Due to the dogged work of pro-life citizens committed to defunding Planned Parenthood’s pro-abortion agenda, the days of Planned Parenthood feasting on taxpayer dollars are numbered.” (We at Life Advocacy agree!)

Persona Non Grata

THE MARYLAND BOARD OF PHYSICIANS HAS LAUNCHED AN INVESTIGATION of notorious late-term abortionist Leroy Carhart, who set up shop in Germantown last December after Nebraska enacted a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of a baby’s gestation.

It seems that when the Board granted the hired killer a medical license to do business in Maryland, the regulators were somehow unaware of the true nature of Mr. Carhart’s operation and, um, professional experience. (Evidently the name “Carhart” raised no red flags for the licensing bureaucrats despite his notoriety as plaintiff in Carhart v. Gonzalez, the lawsuit which sought to bring down the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban.)

Now that Mr. Carhart is plying his trade in southern Maryland, near the nation’s capital, the board is being brought into reality by Operation Rescue (OR), which apparently obtained a copy of Mr. Carhart’s license application and found, writes Peter J. Smith for LifeSiteNews.com, “substantial misrepresentations and omissions” in what Mr. Carhart told the board.

OR president Troy Newman characterized the probe, reports Mr. Smith, as “‘a very serious complaint that is being taken very seriously by the Maryland authorities. If charged and convicted,’” added Mr. Newman in the LifeSiteNews report, “‘[Mr.] Carhart could face the revocation of his medical license in Maryland.’”

The allegations in the OR complaint, reports Mr. Smith, include charges that the abortionist “is conducting very late-term abortions in Maryland without hospital privileges, a dangerous situation given his involvement in a number of botched abortions and the death of [a] 19-year-old client during a third-trimester abortion.” The complaint goes on to “underscore,” writes Mr. Smith, “that [Mr.] Carhart lacks the necessary hospital privileges and protocols to save a woman’s life in case of an emergency and that he misrepresented his record and qualifications.

“The complaint alleges that [Mr.] Carhart falsely told the board in his application,” writes Mr. Smith, “that he is an emergency room doctor and university professor, when [Mr.] Carhart has had no hospital affiliation since 1987 and lost all formal ties with the University of Nebraska in the late 1990s.”

Astonishingly, according to the complaint, reported by LifeSiteNews, “[Mr.] Carhart left out his history as a late-term abortion provider both at his former Bellevue, Nebraska, clinic and his twelve years working at George Tiller’s Wichita, Kansas, clinic.”

A thousand miles away, Mr. Carhart is generating controversy in Iowa. At our press deadline Friday, Iowa state senators, in their last day of session, were seeking to discharge from committee a House-passed bill which would block Mr. Carhart from expanding his late-term abortion business to Council Bluffs, across the river from his former facility in Bellevue, Nebraska. The Democratic mayor of Council Bluffs was begging lawmakers to act on the post-20-week abortion ban in order to protect his community from Mr. Carhart’s plans.

Surviving Premature Birth

A GERMAN INFANT BORN PREMATURELY AT 21 WEEKS & FIVEDAYS (weighing just one pound) has gone home from the hospital more than four months later, now weighing seven pounds and eleven ounces. This report comes via an e-bulletin from our friends at Republican National Coalition for Life (RNC/Life).

“The child, whose life was ‘hanging by a thread’ according to doctors,” reports RNC/Life, “beat the odds, and there is ‘no indication’ that she won’t be healthy.

“Baby Frieda is the youngest European surviving premature baby,” reports RNC/Life. “In 1987, another premature infant, a little boy born in Ottawa, Canada, at the same stage of pregnancy – 21 weeks and five days – also survived. There are also reports of some babies, though less premature,” notes RNC/Life, “who were born physically smaller than Frieda and have survived.”

Top Priority

April 11, 2011, Washington Update by Tony Perkins, president, Family Research Council

For all the talk that Republicans were holding up the budget with social issues, the New York Times says that it was the President who was the real hardliner on abortion. A source inside the Oval Office explains that there was no quit in the Speaker over defunding Planned Parenthood. “Mr. Boehner, a Republican heavily outnumbered in the room by Democrats, was demanding a provision to restrict financing to Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortions.  Mr. Obama would not budge. “Nope. Zero,” the President said to the Speaker.  Mr. Boehner tried again. “Nope. Zero,” Mr. Obama repeated. “John, this is it.” A long silence followed, said one participant in the meeting. “It was just like an awkward, ‘OK, well, what do you do now?’”

For Democrats, there is no yielding on abortion. As Tim Carney points out in today’s Washington Examiner, nothing is more sacrosanct to this administration than the “right” to kill an innocent child. “On all the big fights during Obama’s Presidency, Planned Parenthood has gotten what it wants … .” Unfortunately, too many people have fallen for the line that the organization does plenty of “good work” to justify the billion dollars Americans have paid it. Yet as Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said, Planned Parenthood is not the only entity that can provide medical care in this country.

But it’s probably the only one spending $1 million a year to elect pro-“choice” Democrats. So liberals find ways to legitimize the funding with myths about Planned Parenthood’s services – like the lie that abortion is only three percent of its work (while somehow accounting for a third of its revenue). Susan Wills debunks that claim in “Things Planned Parenthood’s ‘Truth Team’ Forgot to Mention.” According to the organization’s own reports, “97.6% of the group’s ‘services’ for pregnant women in 2009 involved killing their children, and only 2.4% involved prenatal care or adoption referral.”

As for basic health care services, Wills notes that the organization performed fewer than 20,000 other services in its last reporting year – including zero mammograms. Suddenly the $363 million a year for “reproductive health care” doesn’t seem like such a bargain for taxpayers, does it?

Another Reason to Defund Planned Parenthood

April 27, 2011, Washington Update by Tony Perkins, president, Family Research Council (FRC)

Considering the rap sheet on Planned Parenthood, most people would probably agree that we have plenty of reasons to defund Planned Parenthood. But here’s another one for good measure. A Massachusetts affiliate of Planned Parenthood has launched a new website – paid for with state tax dollars – that promotes secret abortions to teenagers. The page promises teenagers that “getting an abortion is much easier than it sounds here” and then discourages adoption, saying it is “pretty rough on people.” Further down, the website goes on to explain how kids can dodge state parental involvement laws. As if that weren’t enough, the clinic talks about the fungibility of government funds – which means that federal law may ban Planned Parenthood from using taxpayer funds to pay for abortions, but thanks to that money, Planned Parenthood can free up other resources for its abortion business.

If you’ve followed the debate, you know that Planned Parenthood has thrown around some misleading statistics about what it does and doesn’t do. To help make sense of the confusion, FRC put together a fact sheet with information that you can trust, including some basic details on the abortion giant with citations to back up our numbers. For example, do you know that in 2009, a baby was aborted in a US Planned Parenthood clinic almost every 95 seconds? Or did you realize that according to its annual reports, this “tax-exempt nonprofit” has made almost $500 million in profit over the past ten years? In its own reports, the organization admits that out of its total services for pregnant women, abortion made up approximately 98%! For the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth on Planned Parenthood, [go to the FRC Internet website at http://downloads.frcaction.org/EF/EF11D15.pdf].

March for Life Speeches

Congressional speeches delivered at the Jan. 24, 2011, March for Life, transcribed by Life Advocacy Briefing from C-SPAN.org videocoverage; more to follow in future editions.

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI): I’m Congressman Tim Walberg from Michigan’s beautiful 7th District. And I’m glad to be back; they sent me home in 2008, but I came back in 2010. Talk about having new life! And I want to stand with you, because I know you stand with the unborn, you stand with people who desire life. You stand with the old people. You stand with my grandkids and my kids. But most importantly, we need to remember that we stand with the One Who said, “The thief comes but to rob and steal and kill, but I come to give you life and life abundantly” Stand for that for all. We’re on God’s side. We can’t miss!

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX): Howdy. I’m Randy Neugebauer, and I’m a pro-life Congressman from Texas. There was a sign back there awhile ago that said “Life is God’s Greatest Gift.” America’s number one goal should protect it. God bless you, and God bless America.

Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD): Maryland, where are you? Yeah. Maryland is a really blue state. With all those Maryland people here, America really is on the march for Life, aren’t we? Thank you for coming. For 18 years now, I’ve been the only Representative from Maryland here. I’m Roscoe Bartlett, and I’m glad to tell you that this year, in the nineteenth year, our delegation has doubled.  Dr. Andy Harris has joined us. Andy –

Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD): Thank you very much. I want to say “hello” to Joe my son, Dan my son here, Jessica my daughter, and I especially want to thank all the Students for Life, the future of the movement. God bless you.

Permission granted to quote with attribution. Reproduction rights granted only by express authorization.