Pro-Life Amendment Timely On Roe v. Wade Anniversary
- Jan 22, 2008 - 1
Some call it coincidental. Others argue it’s providential. In any case, it serves as a chilling reminder of a gross injustice that has spanned three and a half decades in our nation.
As thousands of people participate in the March for Life in Washington and millions more throughout the country reflect in sorrow upon the 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, one of the U.S. Senate’s first items of business when it returns to the Capitol today will likely be consideration of legislation to permanently ban certain types of funding for abortions.
Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) intends to offer an amendment to the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (S. 1200) to codify a longstanding policy to bar federal funding of abortion with Indian Health Service (IHS) funds, except to save the life of the mother, or in cases of rape or incest of a minor.
The Vitter Amendment is equivalent to the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal funding of abortion through Medicaid. The Hyde Amendment, enacted in 1976 as part of the annual Health and Human Services (HHS) Appropriations bill, bears the name of longtime pro-life Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), who introduced it during his freshman year in Congress and continued to fight tirelessly for protections for the unborn until his death last year.
The IHS program, however, is funded through a different appropriations bill that does not contain a Hyde Amendment. Consequently, abortions continued to be funded through the IHS program until 1982, when the Reagan Administration curbed the practice with a temporary fix. In a 1988 reauthorization of the IHS bill, Congress went a step further by including a section that would apply the Hyde Amendment by referencing the HHS Appropriations bill. The Indian Health Care Improvement Act now before the Senate also contains this section.
But without the Vitter Amendment, a future White House administration could easily open up taxpayer dollars to subsidize abortions through the IHS program.
Passage of the Vitter Amendment would set in place one more safeguard against taxpayer-funded abortions, as well as give countless babies, not yet born, a greater opportunity to live. It would also send a strong reminder to pro-abortion members of Congress that the tide is turning in favor of life.
Though many senators will undoubtedly continue to stand behind their “right to choose” rhetoric, they cannot silence the growing band of pro-lifers who cry out for the estimated 50 million babies whose parents deemed them too costly, too inconvenient, or too embarrassing.
If you do not believe taxpayers should be required to fund abortions, please tell your senators to support the Vitter Amendment to the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (S. 1200).
Further Learning
Learn more about: Life, Abortion, Citizenship, Legislation
1 comments (post your own) feed
1 On Jan 22nd, 2008, at 2:53pm, Jim Williams wrote:
Why do we keep adding that phrase, “except to save the life of the mother” to pro-life laws? In today’s world of modern medicine how often is the mother’s life in danger? I do not claim to be up to date on everything in the medical field concerning pregnancy. It is sometimes inconvenient to carry the child to full term but there is no real danger to the mother’s life as long as she does what the doctor tells her to do. My wife had to stay in bed and lay on her right side for the last two months of her pregnancy, her life was no in danger as long as she did what the doctor told her to do. If she had insisted in going to work then her life and/or the child’s life would have been in danger. Do we not open up a can of worms that would encourage an immoral physician to say that the mother’s life is in danger, so that she does not have to bear the inconvenience of the pregnancy and therefore kill the child?