The familiar liberal bias of National Public Radio is abandoned in their posting of this editorial from National Review Online.
-- From "The National Review: No Public Money For Abortion" by The Editors, National Public Radio 11/6/09
What pro-lifers, Democratic and Republican, seek [in the health care bill] is simple and should be noncontroversial: that public money not be used to fund abortions. Abortion is the most controversial subject in American politics, and anything that modifies its status quo needs careful consideration — consideration that is independent of other complex issues, such as health-care reform.
. . . [Democrat Congressman Bart] Stupak's challenge reveals something important: Democrats' repeated assurances that the health-care bill would not fund abortions were dishonest. Factcheck.org, hardly a pro-life mouthpiece, has found President Obama misleading the American public on the subject: "Despite what Obama said," Factcheck writes, "the House bill would allow abortions to be covered by a federal plan and by federally subsidized private plans." If the Democrats had been telling the truth about funding abortions through the health-care bill, then Stupak's proposed amendment would be superfluous, and its inclusion in the legislation unremarkable.
Instead, Speaker Pelosi and other Democratic leaders worry it will pass. They have engaged in backroom maneuvers to block a vote on the amendment and substitute a fig-leaf "fix" of their own. The fake compromise is the Ellsworth amendment, which, relying upon the fiction that funds paid into a federal program are private "insurance premiums," establishes an abortion money-laundering procedure that would do nothing to stop public funds from being used to procure abortions. Studies of the impact of public funding of abortion strongly suggest that the effect of this amendment would be to increase the abortion rate a great deal — and make a mockery of the president's professed commitment to finding common ground with pro-lifers in an effort to reduce that rate.
If President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and other Democratic leaders want to have a national debate about abortion at this moment, we welcome that. But cowering in the legislative murk surrounding health-care reform is underhanded, and ought to be denounced as such by people of good faith, Republican or Democratic, pro-life or pro-choice.
To read the entire editorial, CLICK HERE.
