Among the numerous issues with the development and content of the CRomnibus bill is its failure to address some of the major concerns of the pro-life base of the Republican Party.
As observed by Sarah Torre at The Daily Signal, the spending bill provides $35 million in taxpayer funds to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), an organization that is associated with China’s coercive One-Child Policy.
“Concerns about UNFPA donations were multiplied by a report released in 2011 that identified the organization among four of the U.N.’s largest aid agencies found to have stockpiled a total of $12.2 billion in unused donations in 2009,” wrote Torre.
A recent review of China’s One-Child Policy by Dave Andrusko, editor at National Right to Life News, puts the funding in further perspective.
In May of 1984, Andrusko states he “authored the first amendment ever to a foreign aid bill to deny funding to organizations such as the UNFPA that are complicit with China’s forced abortion and involuntary sterilization policies.”
“Jack Kemp and Senator Bob Kasten made it law,” he writes. “The Kemp-Kasten Amendment today remains part of the foreign operations appropriations law yet under Obama it has not been taken seriously.”
Andrusko continues:
Unlike Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush, Mr. Obama thus far has provided $227 million in tax payer funds to the UNFPA, an organization that supports, plans, implements, defends and whitewashes the Chinese government’s brutal program…
For over three decades, the UNFPA has consistently heaped praise on China’s population control program and repeatedly urged other countries to embrace similar policies.
Torre also notes that by continuing to fund Obamacare, the CRomnibus will still be allowing tax subsidies for elective abortions.
A recent lawsuit illustrates the problem.
As Breitbart News reported Wednesday, a pro-life family from Connecticut challenged in court the fact that they could not purchase a health insurance plan on its state’s Obamacare exchange that did not require its participants to pay for the elective abortions of others.
Barth Bracy explained that because federal law prohibits taxpayer funding of abortion, Obamacare requires every exchange health insurance plan that includes abortion to collect a separate “abortion surcharge” fee to pay for these procedures. The surcharge, however, is not enumerated in the premium but is, instead, added to the total owed.
“It must be a separate fee collected from each enrollee each month,” Bracy continued. “But, nobody is doing that and they’re not following the law.”
Ultimately, the Bracy Family dismissed its lawsuit after Access Health CT added health plans to the exchange that would not require them to pay for abortions. His attorney, Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) Casey Mattox, said, “Americans should not have to pay a special fee for other people’s abortions in order to take care of their own family’s health.”
U.S. Rep. Chris Smith’s (R-NJ) “No Taxpayer Funding of Abortion Act” is intended to end this nontransparent entanglement of taxpayer funds with abortion.
Torre further observes that while the CRomnibus continues traditional pro-life provisions, it fails to address the major conscience violation issue occurring in California.
As ADF reports on its website, in October it joined with Life Legal Defense Foundation (LLDF) to file a formalcomplaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding the state of California’s move to force all employers, including churches, to pay for the elective abortions of others in their health insurance plans. Both ADF and LLDF allege that California’s “coercion of abortion coverage violates federal law.”
“Forcing a church to be party to elective abortion is one of the utmost-imaginable assaults on our most fundamental American freedoms,” said Mattox. “California is flagrantly violating the federal law that protects employers from being forced into having abortion in their health insurance plans. No state can blatantly ignore federal law and think that it should continue to receive taxpayer money.”
As Tony Perkins of Family Research Council wrote Wednesday, the CRomnibus failed to include the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act (ANDA), which would have given a course of action for those in California whose rights of conscience are being violated.
Perkins states that while Republican leaders fell short on the inclusion of ANDA, the spending bill did include some “reporting language,” meaning that HHS must respond to claims of conscience objectors to abortion – like those in California, and a warning to insurers about the requirement of transparency for their plans that cover abortion.
ANDA, however, is now included in the Health Care Conscience Rights Act, which was introduced last year by Rep. Diane Black (R-TN).
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