Pro-Life Works: Health Care Reform and Eugenics

January 22, 2010

Health Care Reform as an Aid to Margaret Sanger's Eugenics

On Christmas Eve, the Senate passed the Health Care Reform Act (HCR 3590), a bill that may pose one of the greatest threats to the Pro-Life movement to date by including a provision for tax funded abortions. Anti-Life Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has written an amendment into HCR 3590 allowing tax payer’s money to be set aside in a fund for lower-income women to obtain abortions.

While the bill itself explicitly states that no federal funds may be used for abortions, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebillius explained in a White House interview how the amendment negotiated by Senator Boxer will mandate that all Americans will be required to cover “women’s health care needs.”

“Everybody in the exchange would do the same thing, whether you're male or female, whether you're 75 or 25, you would all set aside a portion of your premium that would go into a fund, and it would not be earmarked for anything,” Sebillius said. “It would be a separate account that everyone in the exchange would pay….an accounting measure that would apply across the board, and not just to women, and certainly not just to women who want to choose abortion coverage.”

Furthermore, Section 1303 (a) (1) of the bill outlines a “State opt-out of abortion coverage.”  In general, “. . .a State may elect to prohibit abortion coverage in qualified health plans offered through an Exchange,” a measure that implies that state funds will cover abortion unless the state specifically acts to prevent it.

Several Senate Republicans, after a complete reading of HCR 3590, hosted a press conference on December 19, stating exactly how tax-funded abortions will affect Americans and explaining how it ignores the Hyde Amendment.

“There is no prohibition on abortion in federally subsidized exchanges,” said Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. “The Manager’s Amendment includes the reach of the Health Care Improvement Act without the Hyde language.”

 Indeed, the Managers Act both allows voluntary coverage of abortion (Section 1303 (b)(1), and also states that “The issuer of a qualified health plan shall determine whether or not the plan provides coverage of services described in subparagraph (B)(i) or (B)(ii)”, a direct reference to abortion, and which means it shall be an individual placed in charge of the health insurance plans who decides where tax payer money goes.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina pointed out the financial burden this will place on Americans, saying “the collection of premiums.... amounts to 72 billion dollars to pay for the offset.” In light of our current deficit, the likely source of funding those billions will come directly from American taxpayers.

The Hyde Amendment also gives states the choice to opt out of abortion coverage, but in the 30 years since its implementation, persons in support of legalized abortion have vehemently fought this option, and in theory, HCR 3590 provides the same option.  As Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia observed, “When five states opt out, there will be a legal challenge utilizing the Roe v. Wade precedent, saying they can't do that.”

Roe does state very clearly that each woman should have access to abortion, regardless of ability to pay-and with this health care bill, it will give abortion supporters the confidence to invoke that law. As Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas said while closing the press conference, when asked about segmenting private and public funds for abortions: “Same sort of segmenting, but it’s federal dollars; you’re just putting them in another pocket. And in the exchanges, you will have one that funds abortions....it’s still federal money.”

The National Abortion Federation currently blames the Hyde Amendment for what it calls an “injustice to lower-income women.”  Statistics from a Guttmacher report published in 2000 show that 20 to 35% of Medicaid-eligible women who would choose abortion carry their pregnancies to term because public funds are not available. 

“…How… their always numerous progeny run the gamut of police, alms-houses, courts, penal institutions, ‘charities and corrections,’ tramp shelters, lying-in hospitals, and relief afforded by privately endowed religious and social agencies….”,  wrote Margaret Sanger in The Pivot of Civilization (Published 1922).  This sentence crudely sums up Sanger’s opinions about the economically impoverished classes of society: people who are utterly unfit to breed, and whose fertility ought to be stopped through the application of eugenics.  This sentence also defines those whom abortion advocates consider most in need of abortion: women who cannot afford or are unable to support a child.  The Hyde Amendment has thus far prevented these women from getting abortions, but with the new health care amendments for tax funded abortions, this will no longer be the case.

Margaret Sanger’s eugenic goals included weeding out those she considered to be “a menace of the feeble-minded to the [human] race”. With almost perfect timing to coincide with tax-funded abortions, Planned Parenthood has built its second largest facility here in Houston. It is located at the junction of three neighborhoods largely populated by minorities who live at or near the poverty line. So now, with all-encompassing tax-funded abortions negotiated into HCR 3590, Sanger’s goals will come into being: preventing the breeding of those poor people she considered “mentally defective” and “degenerates” –minorities and the economically poor.

While women won’t be forced into abortion, those who previously would not have been able to consider abortion will now do so, and children who would have been born into the world will be exterminated solely because the government will pay for it. Sanger’s hope that economic class should dictate one’s ability to have a child may well be fulfilled, now that many women who are told they are too poor for children will opt for an abortion. Instead of these women and children being given the support to rise out of their situation, the state will give women an instant and short-lived solution to the ‘problem’ of lower-class pregnancy. Sanger may be long dead, but her ideas have lived on, and now, just as she had hoped, her ideas will have the government aid needed for their implementation.

Stephanie Hernendez,

Texas Right to Life Intern