In a move that is wildly out-of-touch with the Pro-Life popular opinion of mainstream Americans, Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) introduced the EACH Woman Act of 2015, which seeks to dissolve provisions of the Hyde Amendment, and to radically expand taxpayer-funded abortion on-demand. Naturally, key members of the abortion lobby and abortion industry have gleefully lobbied behind Lee’s anti-Life crusade.
The EACH Woman Act seeks elective abortion on-demand paid for by taxpayers, and disingenuously markets this objective as “equal access to abortion coverage.” The Act demands health insurance coverage of abortion as “critical to the health of every woman,” insisting that a woman’s income or the type of insurance she has should have no bearing on her ability to undergo an abortion. Consequently, the Act expects Medicaid, Medicare, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, publicly-funded health centers, and private health clinics that contract with taxpayer-funded government programs to ensure abortions to all women seeking them.
Notably, the Act places absolutely no limitations on this taxpayer-funded abortion on-demand. Due to the absence of any limiting provisions, the Act presumably intends to extend taxpayer-funded abortion coverage to women seeking abortions for any reason, at any stage of gestation. Yet, the legality – let alone the taxpayer funding—of abortion on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy is radically at-odds with popular opinion in the United States.
The Hyde Amendment, which Lee and her compatriots seek to cripple, is an appropriations rider (rather than a permanent law) that has been attached to various budget bills each year since 1976. The rider ensures that federal funds are not used to directly cover the medical costs of elective abortions except in rare circumstances (these exceptions have varied depending on where the rider is applied). Because of the legislation, taxpayer-funded programs like Medicaid cannot pay for the elective abortions of participants. The passage of the Hyde Amendment is considered the first major Pro-Life legislative victory following the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion on-demand in 1973.
The abortion lobby’s move to undercut the Hyde Amendment comes as Congress scrutinizes the lavish government funding of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion conglomerate in the nation. Planned Parenthood officials conveniently keep the existence of the Hyde Amendment in their back pocket to pull out whenever the suggestion that their more than half-billion in taxpayer funding is padding their abortion cartel. Planned Parenthood insists that, because of Hyde, their organization’s abortion business and “non-abortion services” are totally separate.
Yet, Planned Parenthood Action Fund is one of many groups rallying behind the EACH Woman Act of 2015. Poised to lose taxpayer funding in the wake of the façade-shattering footage released by the Center for Medical Progress, Planned Parenthood is apparently willing to sacrifice their key argument in favor of continued taxpayer funding – the Hyde Amendment – if doing so would open new, federal revenue streams from which they could profit.
Other groups backing the EACH Woman Act include the usual suspects: NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Daily Kos, Lady Parts Justice, the National Organization of Women (NOW), and The Nation (among others).
