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How Obamacare provides taxpayer funded abortions

Remember the “pro-life” legislators who promised that Obamacare wouldn’t fund abortions? Where are they now? Sarah Torre of the Heritage Foundation has a lengthy article explaining how Obamacare entangles taxpayers in the funding of abortion-on-demand. This is not an article about the contraception mandate that has been so much in the news lately. It’s about how the state exchanges subsidize insurance plans that cover elective abortions. She writes:

For the first time, the federal government will provide an “affordability tax credit” to millions of low-income and middle-income individuals and families to help subsidize the purchase of health plans on the exchanges. By allowing health insurers that sell plans on many state exchanges to cover abortion while remaining eligible for federal subsidies, Obamacare opens new avenues for federal funding of abortion coverage. These federal tax credits could facilitate the purchase of health plans that cover elective abortion for millions of Americans who did not have such coverage previously…

This raises a question: Can’t citizens simply buy a health plan that doesn’t fund abortions? In some cases, maybe so. But in many states that won’t be an option. Torre explains:

For those living in the 26 states and D.C without opt-out laws, individuals and families that wish to avoid health plans with abortion coverage could have few or no options in their state’s exchange until 2017…

This system could place many Americans in an unwanted and unnecessary dilemma, forced to choose between violating their values by directly subsidizing abortion or forfeiting the health care coverage that meets their family’s unique needs.

I can remember when “pro-choicers” used to say that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” How quickly that policy collapsed under the Obamacare regime in which abortion would be unsafe, federally funded, and prevalent.

8 Comments

  • Esther O'Reilly

    This does raise interesting questions—should Christian families feel responsible for abortions the government is choosing to subsidize with their money? God does call us to provide for our families, and that includes health care. I’m not so sure it would be a black and white choice. I think one could prayerfully make the choice to care for the family and leave the rest in God’s hands. After all, the government funds all kinds of things Christians don’t approve of with taxes, including abortions, but Jesus still commands us to pay taxes. To me that’s God saying the sins of the government are not on our heads, even if they use our money for it.

  • buddyglass

    Wikipedia says Stupak is working as a lobbyist now. Nice of you to put “pro-life” in quotes, btw. Stupak earned a 0% rating from NARAL in 2003 and a 100% from NRLC in 2006. That’s from ontheissues.org. Unsure if either of those organizations has given him a rating more recently.

    • James Stanton

      Denny put social justice in qoutes as well so he’s not being very subtle with his biases.

      In any case, abortion rates are lower in many western countries with universal healthcare systems compared to the United States. Some historical anomaly of jurisprudence left us with more liberal abortion laws than much of Europe and thus we are cursed with indifference on the part of many social conservatives to the noble cause of making sure every citizen in the “greatest nation in the world” has access to healthcare.

      • buddyglass

        The obvious response: the countries you have in mind don’t actually have lower abortion rates; they just don’t count all their abortions, many of which are caused by abortifacient hormonal birth control and/or “morning after” pills.

        The reason those countries have fewer “traditional” abortions, btw, is that they have fewer unintentional pregnancies to begin with. I’m not convinced the price of birth control in the U.S. adequately explains the difference either. Large swaths of U.S. society are “broken” in ways that render them fundamentally less responsible than their counterparts in those Western countries.

        One other observation: the U.S. abortion rate varies greatly by state. There are probably many states where the rate is comparable to those foreign countries.

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