The Senate will take up a bill next week on health care coverage for Native Americans and, when it does, a pro-life senator plans an amendment to make sure none of the funds pay for abortions. The amendment from Sen. David Vitter would codify a longstanding policy against funding of abortions with federal Indian Health Service (IHS) funds.
Here is the letter I sent my senators:
Dear Senator ______:
I encourage you to support the Vitter Amendment to the Indian Health Services bill.
Banning the use of Federal funds for elective abortions should easily be an area of common ground for prolife and prochoice citizens and their elected representatives. Even those who do not object in any way to the use of Federal funds for the destruction of innocent unborn children would, if properly educated, object to the additional risk to mothers' health and well-being Federal abortion funding carries.
Research by the solidly pro-abortion Centers for Disease Control and publicized in their 1978 Abortion Surveillance Summary, showed that cutting Federal funding for abortion reduced the number of Medicaid-eligible women hospitalized for abortion complications. Other research shows that public-pay patients have a higher rate of abortion complications than private-pay patients.
Only an individual with a strong ideological devotion to abortion, stronger than his devotion to women's well-being, would wish to see more poor women suffering abortion complications that land them in the hospital.
Don't let the empty, shrill rhetoric of such extremists sway you from doing what is right for both unborn children and their mothers. Support the Vitter Amendment.
Of course, the hardcore extremists will bring up the isolated case of Rosie Jimenez, who bought into the alarmist publicity of the abortion lobby and as a result didn't realize that the illegal abortion she arranged was only $10 cheaper than an abortion arranged by Planned Parenthood. The abortion lobby wanted a body to hang around Henry Hyde's neck when he cut Federal funding for elective abortions, and they went into overdrive making sure that the idea "Illegal abortion is my only option" would be firmly planted in the minds of Medicaid-eligible women. They got the body they wanted. And responsibility for her death belongs as much on their doorstep as on the doorstep of the midwife who pocketed her cash instead of referring Rosie for either real help or a (presumably safer) abortion elsewhere in town.
They also ignore the 17 women who died of supposedly safe, legal abortions in 1977, along with the hundreds of women who have died before and after the Hyde Amendment went into effect.
Don't let the political banshees who goaded Rosie into a needless death win. Laws don't kill women; abortionists do.
Go here to contact your Senator.
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