Health Care Reform Should Include Telling Women of Abortion Risks, Problems
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 21, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A leading pro-life advocate disagrees with President Barack Obama’s belief that there is a moral reason to support the pro-abortion health care restructuring bill in Congress. Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer says the moral imperative should be to tell women of abortion’s risks.
Obama participated in a phone call this week with liberal religious groups in an attempt to raise support for the health care bill among Christian voters.
Pointing to Obama’s comments accusing pro-life advocates of "fabrication" of the notion that the health care bill includes abortion funding and coverage, Bauer said the call was his "desperate attempt to sell government-run healthcare by exploiting religious faith."
"The president tells us there is a moral obligation to reform healthcare, but the reforms he and his allies want to push through would include provisions to force taxpayers to fund abortion," Bauer, the head of American Values, told LifeNews.com.
"Abortion is immoral primarily because it destroys an innocent human life. But abortion is immoral also because, as more and more empirical evidence makes clear, it harms women, psychologically and physically," he added.
Bauer, the former president of the Family Research Council, pointed to a recent article from Mayo Clinic physician Roger W. Harms about how abortion causes problems for women in subsequent pregnancies.
"Dr. Harms reviews some of the ways in which surgical abortion can cause physical damage to the mother, including by weakening her cervix and causing scarring on the inside of her uterus. Those effects can lead to other problems such as premature birth, and thus to an increased likelihood of fetal abnormality," he says.
"According to a report by our friends at LifeNews.com, other empirical research has shown that one induced abortion may raise the risk of subsequent premature birth by 20 percent," Bauer adds.
Bauer says real health care reform would involve Obama and abortion advocates acknowledging that abortion hurts women.
"The link between abortion and subsequent premature birth is well-established. But yet pro-abortion politicians and much of the mainstream media continue to insist that abortion is a healthy and liberating choice for women," he said.
"It seems that the mounting evidence about the harmful effects of abortion only prompts the Left to cling even more tightly to its tired mantra of abortion as healthcare," he concluded.
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