Poll Finds Just One-Third of Americans Back Pro-Abortion Health Care Bills
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
October 2, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A new national poll finds just one-third of Americans back the pro-abortion health care bills in Congress. Meanwhile, the nation’s Catholic bishops condemned a Senate committee’s vote against an amendment that would have cut off taxpayer-funding of abortions in the Baucus health care bill.
The latest FOX News poll shows a decline in the support for the government-run health care bills pending in Congress, each of which fund abortions.
Now, just one-third, 33 percent, of Americans favor the bills while a majority of 53 percent of those polled oppose it.
This compares to 38 percent favoring and 48 percent opposing the legislation two weeks ago.
Americans are split along party lines with 60 percent of Democrats supporting the pro-abortion health care bills and 85 percent of Republicans opposing it. The reason for the storng opposition overall is that independents join Republicans in opposing the bills, by a 57-27 percent margin against them.
Meanwhile, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is upset that the Senate Finance Committee did not approve the Hatch amendment, which would have stripped the massive abortion funding from the Baucus bill and, it says, made the legislation more palatable.
“The bill remains deeply flawed on these issues and must be corrected,” said Richard Doerflinger, Associate Director of the USCCB’s Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities.
Doerflinger also condemned the panel for rejecting a second Hatch amendment that would offer more conscience protections for medical workers who don’t want to do abortions or refer for them.
“It is especially disheartening that the Senate committee would not even support longstanding conscience language on abortion that has already been accepted as part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s health care reform bill."
In a recent letter to the Senate, the USCCB had called for improvements in the bill to meet the bishops’ key criteria for genuine health care reform: protecting life and dignity.
The USCCB’s recent letter had said that “so far, the health reform bills considered in committee, including the new Senate Finance Committee bill, have not met President Obama’s challenge of barring use of federal dollars for abortion and maintaining current conscience laws.”
Doerflinger said this remains true, so “these problems must be corrected on the House and Senate floor.”
The poll was conducted by Opinion Dynamics Corp. from September 29 to September 30 with 900 registered voters.
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