No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend for yielding and for her leadership, and for reminding us that this bill passed the House last year in identical form. The only thing changed are the dates, because obviously they had to be updated. It is a 12-page bill which can be very quickly read by any Member. And the only reason we have to be here is because the Senate wouldn't provide a vote on it. So the Senate just shelved it, and we are now bringing it back up on the floor.
Madam Speaker, because abortion dismembers, decapitates, or chemically poisons unborn children to death--the part of abortion that my friends on the other side of this issue have a keen reluctance to not look at and to avoid, abortion methods--we know we will soon have the pain-capable legislation on the floor, and it will come to the floor. We know that children suffer excruciating pain from dismemberment. Piece by piece, a child is literally pulled apart--arms, legs, torso, and decapitation. That is the reality of abortion, Madam Speaker.
Because of all of this, Americans have consistently demanded--and now in ever-growing numbers--that public funds not pay for abortion. I would point out to my colleagues that yesterday the Marist Poll found that 68 percent of Americans oppose taxpayer funding for abortions, and that includes 69 percent of women; 71 percent of the next generation, the millennials, oppose taxpayer funding for abortion.
Madam Speaker, H.R. 7 will save lives. We know the Hyde amendment has probably saved at least 1 million lives, children who are on soccer fields today or in school, perhaps even getting married, people who live because the Hyde amendment has been in effect since the 1970s. Over a million children are alive because of that restriction of abortion from Medicaid funding.
H.R. 7 seeks to accomplish three goals. It makes the Hyde amendment and other current funding prohibitions permanent, so they don't have to be included in the annual appropriations bills. It ensures that the Affordable Care Act faithfully conforms with the Hyde amendment, as promised by the President.
It provides full disclosure, transparency, and prominent display of the extent to which any health insurance plan on the exchange funds abortion. Now, that is all being done stealthily, hidden from the consumer. They have no idea when they are buying a plan that the plan is paying for abortion on demand.
Let me remind my colleagues that in the runup to passage of the Affordable Care Act, Americans were assured by President Obama himself, right there at the podium, and he said in September of 2009 that ``under our plan, no Federal dollars will be used to fund abortion.'' That is the President's word.
He also said on March 24, 2010, in order to get a number of pro-life Democrats, he gave them his word and wrote that the Affordable Care Act ``maintains current Hyde amendment restrictions governing abortion policy and extends those restrictions to newly created health insurance exchanges.'' Nothing, Madam Speaker, could be further from the truth.
We asked the General Accountability Office last year to look into how many of these plans were paying for abortion. They came back and said well over 1,000 insurance plans on the exchange were funding abortion on demand, completely contrary to what our President told us would be the case in a speech to all of us in 2009 and then in an executive order that he issued.
Agree or disagree on the abortion issue, but let's always be truthful. President Obama told us funding wouldn't be in there, yet it is.
There is also problems with transparency. Senator Ben Nelson, in order to procure his vote, said there has to be two payments for abortion if it is included when the bill is on the Senate side.
He said: ``If you are receiving Federal assistance to buy insurance and if that plan has any abortion coverage, the insurance company must bill you separately, and you must pay separately from your own personal funds--perhaps a credit card transaction, your separate personal check, or automatic withdrawal from your bank account--for that abortion coverage. Now, let me say that again. You have to write two checks: one for the basic policy and one for the additional coverage for abortion.''
That is not being implemented either, so the premium is all rolled into one. Again, conscientious pro-life Americans who do not want to be complicit in the wounding of women and the killing of babies are paying for abortion, and many of them don't even know it.
I hope that Members will vote for the rule, and to those who think that there will be no debate and vote on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, that will come to the floor; and, again, you defend dismemberment abortions at 20 weeks, 21 weeks, 23 weeks, where the child suffers excruciating pain.
I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Madam Speaker, I thank Chairman Pitts so very much.
Madam Speaker, on September 9, 2009, President Obama stood 6 feet from where I stand now, right at that podium, and told lawmakers and the American public in a specially called joint session of Congress on health care reform that ``under our plan, no Federal dollars will be used to fund abortion.''
In an eleventh hour ploy to garner a remnant of pro-life congressional Democrats--and they were convinced, and they were deceived--needed for passage of ObamaCare legislation, the President issued an executive order on March 24, 2010, and it said, in pertinent part: ``The act maintains current Hyde amendment restrictions governing abortion policy and extends those restrictions to newly-created health insurance exchanges.'' That is absolutely, I say to my friends, untrue.
Despite an appalling degree of nontransparency, we finally asked the Government Accountability Office to look into it. Last September, they came back and said 1,036 ObamaCare exchange plans covered abortion on demand. GAO also found that a separate billing of the abortion surcharge required by the act is not being enforced by the administration, and the abortion funding premium, again, in 2015 is being illegally rolled into the total plan costs.
Health care consumers are, therefore, unaware when they buy their health insurance whether or not they are paying for abortion on demand. If the Hyde amendment had been applied to ObamaCare, the number of ObamaCare plans covering abortion on demand would be zero.
At its core--I believe my colleagues should know this by now, some don't on this side of the aisle and some on that do--the Hyde amendment has two indisputable parts. It prohibits direct funding for abortion and funding for any insurance plan that includes abortion, except in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.
ObamaCare violates the Hyde amendment by funding insurance plans that pay for abortion on demand. H.R. 7 seeks to accomplish three goals: make the Hyde amendment and other current abortion funding prohibitions current--and that includes the D.C. rider permanent; ensure that the Affordable Care Act faithfully conforms with the Hyde amendment, as promised by the President of the United States; and provide full disclosure, transparency, and prominent display of the extent to which any health insurance plan funds abortion on the exchanges.
Last January, the House passed H.R. 7 by a vote of 227-188. It languished in the Senate for a year--never took it up. This is the same bill. It has been through regular order. Hearings have been held, as well as markup.
The American people, Madam Speaker, strongly oppose taxpayer funding for abortion. The Marist poll that was just released yesterday found that 68 percent of all respondents oppose using taxpayer funding for abortion, and a whopping 69 percent of women are against taxpayer funding for abortion, and 71 percent of the millennials are against taxpayer funding for abortion.
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Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend.
We live in an age of ultrasound imaging, the ultimate window to the womb and the child, that precious child, who resides there. We are in the midst of a fetal health care revolution, an explosion of benign interventions designed to diagnose, treat, and cure the precious lives of these children.
Abortion is antithetical to that. It dismembers, chemically poisons, shots to the heart, to stop the heart from beating. As you know--and I know my friend from New York is next to speak--at testimony before your committee, Dr. Levatino said--and he is an abortionist--he said the baby can be in any position in the uterus.
You just reach in with a Sopher clamp and grasp whatever you can. You pull out an arm, he went on to say. You pull out and reach in again and again, and you tear out the spine, intestine, heart, and lungs.
These are gruesome procedures. That is what abortion is all about: the dismemberment and chemical poisoning of children.
H.R. 7 will save lives. There is no doubt about that. The Hyde amendment--I remember when Henry Hyde was told that 1 million, maybe even more than 1 million children have survived because of the Hyde amendment.
Tears came down his face, knowing that those kids are now in the world, going to school, having their own families, playing soccer, and doing other great things.
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Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Madam Speaker, one of the things that people seem to forget here is that ObamaCare both authorizes and appropriates the money so that it is outside the purview of the HHS appropriations bill. That is why this legislation is needed. The President promised he would apply the Hyde amendment, but he has not.
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