While Saturday night’s 60-39 vote to move the health care bill forward was disappointing, all is not lost.
Americans have all this week, while their senators are home for the Thanksgiving break, to contact local offices and urge their senators to vote NO on the 60-vote hurdle coming up after the holiday. Did we mention the bill still includes federal funding of elective abortion? Yes, it does. And we now know that the “reform” will cost far more than the $849 billion that the Dems are touting.
So eat a lot of turkey this Thanksgiving, and while you’re at it, make a quick phone call to your senators’ local offices and say “vote NO” on the next health care vote coming up. Just go here, type in your zip code, and then click on your senators’ names to find the contact information for their state offices. Quick and easy.
It seems that Rep. Brad Ellsworth, an Indiana Democrat who traditionally votes pro-life, is helping the Democrat majority work up “compromise” language to exclude abortion funding from the health care bill.
Only funny thing, the proposed language doesn’t actually exclude abortion funding.
No surprise there. Democrats tried already—via the Capps Amendment—to change the bill to make it “sound” like they weren’t using federal funds to pay for abortions. We didn’t go for that attempt, either.
Perhaps Democrats on the Hill think that pro-life activists, pro-life Americans and pro-life lawmakers cannot identify a phony pro-life amendment when we see one?
The only thing that will work is for Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Hoyer to allow a vote on the Stupak-Pitts amendment. The real pro-life amendment. The one that would ensure that no federal funds are used for abortion and plans that cover abortion.
One has to wonder what Rep. Ellsworth was up to—did he cut a deal with his party? We don’t know. What we do know is that the House health care bill still explicitly funds abortion and not even a good, pro-life Democrat can make us believe otherwise.
What is the value of a life? Or, perhaps, what is the value of your life?
What worth does the world place on those who are ill, impoverished, or broken emotionally or physically?
What is the Christian vision of the human person? Do we know it? Do we live it out?
These weighty questions are dealt with in a short powerful film (20 minutes) called The Butterfly Circus. You may recognize actor Eduardo Verástegui from Bella fame. You will certainly not forget Nick Vujicic.
We all have a choice to live our lives in ways that inspire others or let our brokenness define us. The Gospel reminds us that our identity does not come from fallenness, but from our redemption through Jesus Christ.
Behold, He is making all things new!
Fact: 71 percent of Americans don’t want their tax dollars being used to pay for abortions under the government health care proposal.
Fact: 150,000 Americans signed a Focus Action petition to their lawmakers asking them to keep government funding of abortion out of the health care bills.
Fact: The current health care bills still include government funding of abortion.
Fact: Congress needs a wake-up call.
So what did Focus on the Family Action do about all this? We took those 150,000 petitions straight to Capitol Hill. And the media showed up. And so did 10 U.S. representatives and senators. And collectively, we called on Congress to listen to the voices of tens of millions of Americans across this country who do not want their tax dollars being used to pay for abortions in any government health care plan.
On hand to speak on behalf of Focus on the Family Action was Tom Minnery, Senior Vice President of Government and Public Policy, and he was joined by almost a dozen lawmakers, like Senators Sam Brownback and Jim DeMint, and Representatives Eric Cantor, Mike Pence, Mary Fallin, and Lincoln Davis.
And every single petition was hand-delivered to the appropriate lawmaker. I know that–because I was part of the team who delivered them. What a great experience.
You can watch the entire news conference here or just watch our Focus Action Update video summary of the conference. If video’s not your thing, you can simply read our wrap-up of the press conference and petition delivery
We’ll be watching what our lawmakers do as a health care bill (yet to be determined) heads to both chambers of Congress for a vote. We hope and expect that there will be some maneuvering by pro-life lawmakers in the House and the Senate to offer language that would exclude abortion funding from the bill, since all other attempts in committee were voted down by the pro-abortion Democrat majority.
And late last week, Democrat Alan Mollohan was joined by 29 other House Democrats in sending a letter to Speaker Pelosi asking her to adopt language similar to the Hyde Amendment that would prevent federal funds from being used for abortion. This letter is the third group letter signed by pro-life Democrats concerned about abortion in health care reform. Will Democrat leadership in the House listen this time?
Add another one to the list: A survey finding that a majority of Americans (polled) oppose abortion as it exists today in the U.S. Conducted in May by The Marist Poll for the Knights of Columbus, the poll found 86% of Americans believe abortion should be “significantly restricted.”
Remember that the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton, declared abortion legal for any reason during the entire term of pregnancy. Do most Americans support that? No, not according to this poll – or any other I recall seeing.
It continues to be true that Americans don’t like abortion and want much less of it.
Some of the poll’s other findings: 79% believe “health care workers should not be mandated to perform an abortion if it conflicts with their personal values,” including 64% of strong “pro-choice” supporters polled who agree with this statement, and 53% of those polled think abortion “does more harm than good for a woman in the long run.”
This follows a May 2009 Gallop poll, finding that more Americans identified as “pro-life” than as “pro–choice” for the first time since Gallop began asking that question in 1995. The Pew Research Center released a poll in late April revealing that the number of Americans saying that abortion should be legal in all or most cases declined from 54% to 46% since 2008.
Certainly poll questions can influence results but these are the same questions asked by pollsters on the topic of abortion for years – and the outcomes continue to point to a public ready for policy and legal change.
Keep it up, pro-life America! The tide is turning!
