Obama Staffer Speaks at Planned Parenthood Event, Urges Pro-Abortion Lobbying
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
July 23, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A top official with the administration of pro-abortion President Barack Obama spoke to gathering of Planned Parenthood activists last week. There, she promised leaders of the abortion business that Obama is a pro-abortion president and urged them to continue their pro-abortion lobbying efforts.
Tina Tchen, director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, spoke to more than 400 pro-abortion activists at the 2009 Planned Parenthood Organizing and Policy Summit last week.
Tchen is the former vice president of the National Organization for Women, a prominent pro-abortion organization, whom Obama selected as executive director of the White House Council on Women and Girls.
During the event, Tchen told the Planned Parenthood activists that if they want abortion as a part of the health care restructuring plan Congress is considering, they need to "bring it" — and up their lobbying efforts.
Tchen, who shared a panel with Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, told activists that Obama is committed to abortion and health care.
"I can say this directly from the White House, the President reiterated to all of us in the senior staff that health care is the most important issue," she said, according to a post on a pro-abortion blog site. "It is the signature issue that he ran on, it is what he believes is one of the singularly most important reforms that need to be made that affects America, that affects our economy."
Tchen also reminded the pro-abortion stalwarts that they had elected a president who shares their views and pointed them to his January 22 statement, his first as president on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, praising the decision that resulted in more than 50 million abortions and millions of women injured.
Abortion advocates have been "bringing it" when it comes to lobbying Congress to promote abortion in a government-run health care system.
"They’re spreading lies about health care proposals, attacking Planned Parenthood, and doing everything they can to hijack health care reform. We can’t let them get away with it — if they succeed, a generation of women will see their access to [abortion] jeopardized," Richards wrote about pro-life groups in an email LifeNews.com obtained yesterday.
She urged her supporters to tell members of Congress that abortion "must be covered in any health care reform legislation."
"Women must not be worse off after health care reform than they are today — that means including reproductive health care [abortion] in the reform package," she concluded.
Leading pro-life groups have made it clear that any final health care restructuring bill covers abortions unless there is a specific exclusion. That’s because it would be up to the Obama administration to determine whether taxpayer-funded abortions and insurance mandates on abortion are included.
The tri-committee House health care bill that is the main legislation, HR 3200, authorizes additional Medicaid/CHIP funding, which Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates to be $438 billion over the next ten years.
However, the bill also authorizes the purchase of what the CBO estimates to be $773 billion over the next ten years in health care premiums and cost-sharing costs for individuals and families whose income is too high to qualify for Medicaid/CHIP.
"H.R. 3200 contains no limitation whatever to prevent the use of any of these funds to pay for elective abortion and to pay for insurance coverage of elective abortion," National Right to Life’s Douglas Johnson explains in analysis provided to LifeNews.com.
"H.R. 3200 would certainly result in federal funding of elective abortion on a huge scale."
With CBO estimating that 73 million people would be covered either by Medicaid or by the federal premium subsidies, "this would result in a great increase in the number of abortions – a result directly contrary to Barack Obama’s promises to pursue policies that would reduce abortions," Johnson says.
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