President Obama, Speaker Pelosi pull out all stops
to pass massive pro-abortion health care bill
-- the days immediately ahead will decide the issue!
Issued Monday, March 8, 2010
Please forward this alert to any pro-life lists.
President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are making a final, all-out push to ram through a massive health care restructuring bill that the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) has branded “the most pro-abortion single piece of legislation that has ever come to the House floor for a vote.”
The health care bill (H.R. 3590) has already passed the Senate, on December 24, 2009. In order to enact it, however, Obama and Pelosi must convince a majority in the House of Representatives to also vote for the bill.
The Associated Press reported on March 7: “In private pitches to Democrats, President Barack Obama says he will persuade Congress to pass his health care overhaul even if it kills him and even if he has to ask deeply distrustful lawmakers to trust him on a promise the White House doesn’t have the power to keep. . . .The party’s strategy calls for House Democrats, despite many misgivings, to go along with a health care bill the Senate passed in December [HR. 3590]. Obama would sign it into law, but senators would promise to make numerous changes demanded by House Democrats.”
“House members who vote for the Senate bill will be accountable to their constituents for what the Senate bill contains, including its pro-abortion mandates and subsidies, without regard to . . solemn assurances that Congress will revisit the issue in future legislation, or any other artifice or gimmick,” said NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson, in a detailed statement on the Senate bill issued by NRLC on March 5. “Any House member who votes for the Senate health bill is casting a career-defining pro-abortion vote.”
Even if you previously have called your representative to oppose the health care bill—please do it again! And ask any like-minded friends and relatives to do the same. Remember, President Obama and Speaker Pelosi are putting all their muscle into this, and they are getting plenty of help from the mainstream news media. It is critical that your representative gets loud and clear guidance from the people who he or she actually represents.
TAKE ACTION NOW!
Time is short. Most political observers agree that if Speaker Pelosi does not succeed in ramming the Senate bill through the House by the time Congress goes into recess for Easter on March 26, the bill is effectively dead. Pelosi wants to force the vote by March 19. But, she does not yet have the votes. “I think we can get there, but I’m going to need help from any place I can get it,” Pelosi told one group, according to the Los Angeles Times (March 8).
Whether she succeeds or not depends on what House members hear from their constituents during the next two weeks.
Stupak: He Brings Good Things to Life
Standing up for what’s right sometimes means standing alone. And no one knows that better than Congressman Bart Stupak (D-Mich.). Despite angry calls to his office and outrage from the leadership of his own party, the Michigan Democrat refuses to give up on his language to ban taxpayer-funded abortion in the final health care bill. “You fight for a principle you’ve believed in your whole life,” Rep. Stupak says. “[You don’t] fold up the tent.” He knows his values are unpopular with the Democratic leadership, but he’s used to it. When he ran for Congress in 1992, his party’s political consultants refused to work with him because they didn’t believe a Democrat could win on a pro-life platform. On ABC’s “Good Morning America” earlier today, the man standing between the unborn and a powerful abortion lobby showed that he’s ready to prove his critics wrong--again.
Rep. Stupak: [T]he bill that they are using as a vehicle is the Senate bill. If you go to page 2069 through page 2078, you would find in there the federal government would directly subsidize abortions ... [W]e’re not going to vote for this bill with that kind of language in there. The president says no federal funding for abortion. I have eight pieces of legislation we currently have in federal law that say no public funding for abortion. [He can] take any one of these eight, insert the language, and we’ll be happy… If there’s a will, there’s a way. [Saying you can’t do it under reconciliation rules] is just an excuse they’re giving. Look, give us our language. Let’s keep current law: no public funding for abortion…
Stephanopoulos: Let me be clear here. If the president doesn’t change the language, if your language is not accepted, you and your 11 colleagues who voted ‘yes’ the last time will vote ‘no’ this time. Does that mean you’re prepared to take responsibility for bringing down this whole bill?
Rep. Stupak: Yes, we’re prepared to take responsibility… I want to see health care. But we’re not going to bypass some principles and beliefs that we feel strongly about.
“Before, when we talked about pro-life Democrats,” Rep. Stupak told the New York Times, “you’d get a snicker and a laugh. We were just always overlooked. We’re not overlooked anymore.” Nor should they be. This is a powerful coalition, led by a principled leader, worthy of America’s respect.
In several weeks hundreds of pro-life women will converge on the halls and offices of our state Legislature. Though representing diverse communities and counties across the state, we will be united with one urgent message to our legislators: Protect Life Now!
Make plans to be a part of the 7th Annual Pro-Life Women’s Day on the Hill as we welcome luncheon guest speaker, former Planned Parenthood facility director, Abby Johnson. This is one special event you won’t want to miss! Date is Wednesday, March 31. Contact or call 615-298-5433 to make your reservations.
Abby Johnson, Fighting For Life
Abby Johnson quit her job. That simple act has become a national news story because Johnson was the director of a Planned Parenthood facility in Texas who said she experienced a “change of heart” while participating in an abortion procedure.
“I had never seen an abortion happen on an ultrasound,” she said. “My job during the procedure was to hold the probe on the woman’s abdomen. I could see the whole profile of the baby 13 weeks head to foot. I could see the whole side profile. I could see the probe. I could see the baby try to move away from the probe.”
Johnson worked at the Planned Parenthood facility in Bryan, Texas, for nine years, first as a volunteer and then as the director. Her duties included running the family planning and abortion programs. The facility performed abortions two days a month. Although she had seen ultrasounds before, including during her own pregnancy, Johnson said she had never seen an ultrasound image during an abortion. She is unclear why she was asked to be in the procedure room on that day, because it was not a normal part of her duties. Still, Johnson said, the experience changed her forever. She knew it was time to leave after she watched the baby “crumple” while being vacuumed out of a patient’s uterus.
“I just thought, what am I doing?” she said. “And then I thought, never again. I looked out the window and saw a couple of people praying and I thought, that’s where I need to go.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control, African American women have 40 percent of the nation’s abortions, but make up only 13 percent of the population. That black children are being aborted at such a high rate has not been a subject of discussion among the Democrats in the Congress and the White House, who insist on leaving the door open for abortion funding in the health care bill.
But a recent article in the New York Times suggests that the disproportionate price being paid in the African American community for the pro-abortion advocacy of Planned Parenthood is beginning to be noticed.
According to the piece, Georgia Right to Life changed its tactics last year by having minority outreach coordinator Catherine Davis visit black churches throughout the state, “delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.”
Pro-life activists have long known that Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, explicitly recommended the “eugenics value” of abortion as a means of suppressing minority populations. But now the story of the nefarious roots of the abortion movement are gaining traction among the African Americans that Davis met with.
As a result, Georgia Right to Life expanded its outreach effort by leasing space on 80 Atlanta billboards, all bearing the message, “Black children are an endangered species,” along with a special Web site, http://www.toomanyaborted.com. Full story at LifeNews.com
Doctors announced that President Obama passed his annual check-up--but the most important one may come in November. Whether voters still think he and his party are “fit for duty” on Election Day may depend on what happens in the next few weeks. Despite last week’s high stakes talk, the President is tossing aside the same bipartisanship he promoted on television to force his reforms through a reluctant Congress. According to White House advisors, all signs point to the reconciliation process, which would protect the bill from Republican opposition by calling for a simple majority vote.
Right now, however, it’s unclear whether Democrats even have enough of their own party on board to succeed. A handful of key “ayes” have already promised to peel off the House majority if Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) moves forward with legislation that removes Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) outright ban on taxpayer-funded abortion. Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.) told Congressional Quarterly on Thursday, “I will not vote for a health care bill that doesn’t have the House abortion language in it.” His Mississippi colleague, Rep. Gene Taylor (D), agreed. “It’s a fairly safe bet that if they include the Senate language on abortion, the legislation would go down.”
Of course, Speaker Pelosi would have us believe that the President’s plan (a mildly modified version of the Senate bill) does erect a wall between taxpayers and the bloody business of abortion. During Friday’s press conference, there weren’t enough lie detectors in the greater metropolitan area to process all the whoppers. “Let me say it this way, there’s three, three, I don’t want to say principles, but three standards that we are using as we go forward, and I talked to the Catholic Bishops about this and people on all sides of the choice issue… Federal law prevents federal funding of abortion. There is no federal funding of abortion in this bill. There’ll be no expansion or diminution of a woman’s right to choose… This bill that passed the Senate does not have federal funding of abortion.”
Not surprisingly, the Catholic Bishops have a different take on the conversation. In a counter-statement, the USCCB was flabbergasted. “We do not know how anyone who has spoken to the bishops could conclude that the Senate health care bill does not fund abortions. As bishops have said in their letters to Congress, abortion problems in the Senate bill are so serious that, despite our strong support for expanding access to health care, we will have to oppose the bill unless they are resolved.”
