Health-insurance reform legislation is moving closer – slowly – to floor votes in the House and Senate, which will almost certainly be followed by deliberations in a conference committee before a final bill emerges.

What we’re learning about the political gyrations taking place before the floor votes is that in the House of Representatives, they’re finally facing up to the fact that they will have to tell the truth about how this bill impacts the sanctity of human life. In their current forms, any health-reform bill currently under discussion would ultimately both require that insurers cover abortions in health-benefit plans and provide federal funding for abortion or its coverage. That threat to human life, not health reform in general, is what we are dedicated to stopping.

Click here to reiterate to your Member of Congress and U.S. Senators that you want the principles of the Hyde Amendment applied to health-reform legislation. Click here to communicate the same message to President Obama.

If you see the battle for the sanctity of human life as a purely partisan issue, it may surprise you to know that the champion of our point of view on this issue is a Democrat, Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan. He has long championed the idea that health-reform not become a financial windfall for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. Unless he prevails, unfortunately, that is exactly what will happen.

Most current legislation leaves the design of a federally approved benefit plan up to the Department of Health and Human Services. Under the concept of a “public option,” which is still in play on both sides of Capitol Hill, HHS would be directly responsible for the makeup of a benefit plan that will have tremendous price advantages over private insurers. It’s inconceivable that at some point, a pro-abortion administration (this one, which certainly qualifies as pro-abortion, or another) would include abortion coverage as payback for the industry’s support. And even if that doesn’t happen, an activist federal judiciary is almost certain to rule that abortions must be covered.

The answer to this problem has always been language that explicitly excludes abortion from the services that can be covered in a benefit plan, and to bar the use of federal funds for abortion or its coverage. The latter provision would do for health insurance what the Hyde Amendment does for Medicare funds – it protects the taxpayer from having the blood of innocent babies on its hands.
Stupak and up to 40 other Democratic Members of Congress understand this, and they’ve made clear to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that they’ll block health reform in their chamber unless these provisions are included in the final bill. Together with the vast majority of Republicans, who oppose health reform for the same reason as well as others, there are enough to derail the bill, and pro-abortions forces know it. So they’ve sent their acolytes to trash Stupak.

Take “Pastor Dan” Schultz, the Wisconsin-based Church of Christ minister who leads the Street Prophets Web site. Despite his religious credentials, he’s a shrill advocate of legal abortion, apparently and perhaps especially if the American taxpayer is footing the bill. On the Religion Dispatches Web site Oct. 27, Schultz irresponsibly accuses Stupak and the Democrats who agree with him of trying to “bring down reform.” Schultz’s conjecture is that Stupak is just posturing on behalf of “conservative Dems who were going to vote against reform anyway, and allow them to run against the party and its baby-killing ways.”

Apparently Schultz is so divorced from the notion of principled leadership that he can’t imagine that some legislators have ideals greater than handing Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama an easy victory on this issue. Believe it or not, there are some things more important than who pays for operations and how much, and that is whether we as a nation are going to tolerate our government mandating abortion coverage and paying for it with our tax dollars. Even many pro-abortion advocates draw the line at letting the federal treasury fund Planned Parenthood’s secular sacrament.

If Reid, Pelosi and Obama really want health reform, they wouldn’t let the abortion issue stop them; they’d let reform pass without it. Then, if they sincerely believe that abortion is health care, they could fight that issue another day. Health reform may not pass in the form that most pro-reform activists want in any event; if they insist on making it abortion-friendly, it may be doomed to failure.

That this issue wasn’t settled in favor of life long ago should tell you that they want it all: health reform, on their terms, and lavish federal funding for abortionists as a bonus. This isn’t about whether abortion will continue to be legal or not; it’s about whether you’ll get the bill for abortions under health reform.

CMC has not taken a position on the larger issue of health-care reform, but we’ll repeat here what we first said months ago: no reform at all is preferable to a reform bill that would mandate coverage of abortion or use federal funds for abortion coverage. If you agree with us, please join us in pressing the case for life to our elected leaders.

Click here to reiterate to your Member of Congress and U.S. Senators that you want the principles of the Hyde Amendment applied to health-reform legislation. Click here to communicate the same message to President Obama.

Other ways you can support the fight to keep abortion out of health-care reform include:

• Pray for the success of the pro-life community in stopping an abortion industry bailout, and that elected representatives’ hearts would be turned to realize the moral correctness of our position.
• Click here to forward this article to your e-mail contacts.
• Copy the Web address (URL) of this story and forward it to your Twitter followers and Facebook friends, urging them to send e-mails to their elected representatives and local media.

We can win this important battle – let’s keep the pressure up!