Abortion as Health Care: Obama wants US to Pay for It

President Barack Obama has been very explicit about his support for abortion, as well as his desire to make the public foot the bill.

NEW YORK, NY (Catholic Online) - White House budget director Peter Orszag was asked yesterday whether "no taxpayer money will go to pay for abortions" under proposed health care legislation. "I'm not prepared to say explicitly that right now," he said.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue picked up on that remark:

"There was no reason for Orszag to sound tentative--everyone who has been following this issue knows that President Barack Obama has been very explicit about his support for abortion, as well as his desire to make the public foot the bill.

"Yes, he says he wants "common ground," but there is absolutely no evidence of his budging on this issue when it gets to the policy stage. And that is the only stage that matters in the end.

"Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, another champion of abortion-on-demand through term, commented yesterday about health care reform saying, "There are basically five different plans in Congress right now and there are a variety of ways."

"Is there even one plan that explicitly says abortion will not be subsidized? We know that the Democrats, following the party line adopted by the White House, have killed every amendment that would bar public funding of abortion. So who is kidding whom?

"If the Bush administration had said that it wants to seek "common ground" on gun control, and then decided to subsidize handguns in high crime areas, it would have been condemned from high heaven.

"The Obama administration's game of playing footsy with the abortion industry should similarly be condemned. Indeed, it represents the audacity of duplicity to dialogue about abortion and then send the public an invoice for killing kids in utero."

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The Catholic League is the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organization. Founded in 1973 by the late Father Virgil C. Blum, S.J., the Catholic League defends the right of Catholics – lay and clergy alike – to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination. It is led by its' President, William A. Donohue, Ph.D.