House passes bill to protect conscience, ban federal abortion funding

Excerpted from LifeNews, October 13, 2011. House OKs Legislation Stopping Abortion Funding in Obamacare: "The House approved legislation, the Protect Life Act, to stop abortion funding in Obamacare. Senate Democrats are not expected to approve the bill and, pro-abortion President Barack Obama is expected to veto the measure if it reaches his desk.

"Members voted 251-172 for the pro-life legislation, with 236 Republicans and 15 Democrats supporting the bill and 170 Democrats and two Republicans voting against it. (See how your member voted here).

"H.R. 358, Protect Life Act, makes it clear that no funds authorized or appropriated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), including tax credits and cost-sharing reductions, may be used to pay for abortion or abortion coverage. It specifies that individual people or state or local governments must purchase a separate elective abortion rider or insurance coverage that includes elective abortion but only as long as that is done with private funds and not monies authorized by Obamacare.

"The pro-life measure also ensures that state laws 'protecting conscience rights, restricting or prohibiting abortion or coverage or funding of abortion, or establishing procedural requirements on abortion' are not abrogated by Obamacare. It also makes it so any state or local governments receiving funding under Obamacare may not subject any health care entity to discrimination or require any health plan to subject any entity to discrimination on the basis that it refuses to undergo abortion training, refuses to require abortion training, refuses to perform or pay for abortions, or refuses to provide abortion referrals."

CMA letter of support for the Protect Life Act, sent to Members of Congress: "For our members, as for many faith-based hospitals and clinics nationwide, conscience rights are essential to the practice of medicine. In a survey of 2,865 faith-based healthcare professionals, conducted by the polling company^TM, more than nine out of ten (91 percent) faith-based physicians agreed, 'I would rather stop practicing medicine altogether than be forced to violate my conscience.'
"Since faith-based physicians are among the most likely to be serving the poor and those in medically underserved areas losing these life-affirming professionals to discrimination and job loss especially imperils the poor and patients in medically underserved areas.

"We are already facing critical shortages of primary care physicians. The Obama administration's decision to rescind the only federal conscience regulation protecting life-affirming physicians and institutions from discrimination now threatens to make the situation far worse for patients across the country who depend on faith-based health care. "The administration has indicated in federal court documents its plan to act on this threat to rescind the conscience-protecting regulation no later than March 1. That makes legislation such as HR 358 all the more crucial to pass.

"Therefore, we urge that any attempts to weaken the strong conscience protections of HR 358 be vigorously opposed. Abortion advocates have a long history of using cloaked terms and overly broad definitions of “emergencies” or “medically necessary” to advance their ideological agenda.

"The result of such verbal engineering to undermine the clear intention of HR 358 would be the loss of conscience protections for healthcare professionals and the corresponding loss of healthcare access for patients."

ACTION ALERT:
Voice your values on conscience-protecting legislation at CMA's Freedom2Care legislative action center.