House passes Protect Life Act, now Senate’s turn
- Oct 18, 2011 -
In “a great day and an encouraging day,” as Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, described it, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill to bar federal funding of elective abortion under health care reform as well as extend conscience protections under the law. The 251-172 vote last week in favor of the Protect Life Act (H.R. 358) makes it the latest in a series of pro-life bills to clear the House this year. Now the measure faces another hurdle: getting the Senate to vote on it.
To see how your representative voted on the Protect Life Act, please click here.
Thanks to a surge of pressure by countless pro-life Americans, the House approved the Protect Life Act by a healthy 79-vote margin on Oct. 13. Sponsored by Reps. Joe Pitts (R-PA) and Dan Lipinski (D-IL), the bill would ensure that under the 2010 health care reform law no federal dollars are directed to health plans for abortion and that health care providers opposed to abortion are afforded conscience protections.
Arguably the biggest of the many problems of President Obama’s signature health care law is that it lacks provisions restricting abortion funding and extending conscience protections. Only an executive order affixed to the reform, necessary to secure passage last year, offers any semblance of protection. But it’s little more than a disposable piece of paper that lacks force of law and will not hold up under court scrutiny, as many analysts on both sides of the issue attest. The Protect Life Act was crafted to close those loopholes.
It would do so by applying two longstanding pro-life measures to Obamacare: the Hyde Amendment, a rider attached to health appropriations bills annually since 1976 to bar most abortion funding under Medicaid, and the Hyde-Weldon Amendment, a rider approved each year since 2004 to provide conscience protections to health care workers who object to abortion. Neither of those amendments otherwise applies to Obamacare.
Some opponents of the Protect Life Act derided even the action of holding the vote, calling it nothing more than a waste of time and political posturing. But consideration of the measure was in keeping with the conservative House leadership’s Pledge to America, an agenda released a year ago committing to advance a series of bills, several of them on sanctify of human life issues, in the 112th Congress.
With the House having done its part, challenges now are coming from the White House—it has threatened a veto of the bill—and the Senate. The “world’s greatest deliberative body” is, ironically, showing no signs that it will even deliberate on the Protect Life Act. Such inaction—the House passing legislation and then the Senate sitting on it—is becoming a distressing theme of business on Capitol Hill on life issues.
In May, for example, the House approved the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 3), which would codify a government-wide ban on elective abortion funding. Like the Protect Life Act, it garnered strong, nearly identical support: 251-175. Yet the Senate still has not considered the bill, nor does it appear poised to do so.
Even as polls consistently show that most Americans do not support taxpayer-funded abortion, many in Washington still have not gotten that message. The American people deserve to know where their elected officials stand on these all-important issues. Tying federal dollars to abortion in any capacity, including under health care reform, is fiscal irresponsibility of the first order.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and your senators need to know that the Protect Life Act is important to the American people. If you agree, please urge Leader Reid to bring the Protect Life Act to the floor for a vote, and urge your senators to call for a vote and then support the bill themselves. You may also want to thank your representative if he or she voted for the Protect Life Act.
To see how your representative voted on the Protect Life Act, please click here.