New York Times Taken to Task, Covers Up Abortion Funding in Health Care Bills
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 13, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — The New York Times is the latest mainstream media outlet be taken to task for covering up the abortion funding found in the Congressional health care bills. The Times joins the Associated Press, which flip-flopped after pressure from LifeNews.com, and CBS News in presenting a false picture.
A Wednesday piece titled "Frequently Asked Questions" is printed as an editorial from the newspaper.
"Abortion opponents say the legislation would use taxes to subsidize insurance that could cover the procedure," the newspaper says.
"Under the House bill, health plans could choose to cover abortion, but they generally could not use federal money to pay for the procedure and instead would have to use money from the premiums paid by beneficiaries," the newspaper explains.
The final sentence of the three sentence response to the question of having health care dollars pay for abortions let’s a pro-abortion lawmaker from Colorado defend the bills.
"Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, said the bill would keep current restrictions on the use of federal money for abortion," the Times says.
But Douglas Johnson, the respected legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, tells LifeNews.com that the Times story is, "unfortunately, all too typical of the sort of superficial, lazy treatment of the issue we are seeing in the mainstream media."
"Too many of these self-styled ‘watchdogs’ are really lapdogs for the abortion lobby. They are really gullible when it comes to swallowing misinformation that comes from their friends," Johnson explains.
Johnson pulled no punches in criticizing the Times for relying on one of the biggest abortion proponents in the House to make its claim that there is no abortion funding in the bill.
"It speaks volumes that the Times thinks the source for the straight dope on what a thousand-page bill does on abortion is Congresswoman DeGette, one of the leading pro-abortion advocates in Congress, and the biggest fountain of misinformation on Capitol Hill since Patricia Schroeder retired," he said.
Johnson laid out the scenario the bill presents whereby taxpayer dollars would assuredly be used to pay for abortions.
He told LifeNews.com the main House measure, HR 3200, would drastically change longstanding federal policy because of an amendment a House committee adopted before lawmakers went home for their August recess.
"The bill creates a nationwide insurance plan run by the federal government, and the Capps Amendment, crafted by leading pro-abortion lawmakers and adopted in committee, explicitly authorizes this government plan to cover all elective abortions," Johnson says.
"This means that any citizen who wants to take advantage of the public plan will be compelled to purchase coverage for abortion on demand. The federal agency will collect the premium money, receive bills from abortionists, and send the abortionists payment checks from the federal Treasury account," he explained.
Johnson concludes: "It is a sham to pretend that this does not constitute funding of abortion. If this passes, the federal government will be running a nationwide abortion-on-demand insurance plan."
Related web sites:
National Right to Life – https://www.nrlc.org
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