More Taxpayer Funding of Abortion in the Senate Health Bill

Chuck Donovan / January 14, 2010

The Nelson-Reid agreement on abortion is not the only source of taxpayer funding for abortion. An obscure addition to the Senate version of health care reform that was adopted on Christmas Eve is a gift package with unexpected contents: even more taxpayer funding of elective abortions. According to a new analysis just released by National Right to Life Committee legislative director Doug Johnson, Sec. 10503 of the Reid “Manager’s Amendment” to H.R. 3590 directly appropriates funds for community health centers (CHCs). These funds would not be covered by the annual abortion funding limitation known as the Hyde Amendment or by any other existing limitation.

The funding amounts are huge – $7 billion over five years, beginning with $700,000,000 in the fiscal year that begins October 1, 2010. The fact that H.R. 3590 appropriates these funds directly means that they will not be included in the annual Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS) spending bill, even though the community health center money is appropriated by H.R. 3590 to the HHS Department. Moreover, the underlying authorizing law for community health centers, 42 U.S.C. 254b and Section 330 of the Public Health Services Act, contains no language limiting abortion funding, and it is unlikely in the extreme that the Obama Administration would administratively rule such funding out-of-bounds in future CHC grant-making. (more…)