President Barack Obama Violating Pledge For No Abortion Funding in Health Care
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
November 2, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — During an address to Congress in September, President Barack Obama promised there would be no abortion funding in his health care plans. However, a new report today indicates Obama has been personally lobbying members of Congress to vote for the current bills, all of which fund abortions.
During the speech, Obama said, "One more misunderstanding I want to clear up — under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions."
Since then, Obama has come under fire from some liberal activists for not doing enough to push through the current health care reform bills.
Yet, a new Politico report issued today indicates that "in private meetings and chance encounters and during Air Force One flights, Obama has worked behind the scenes" to promote the current pro-abortion health care bills.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a top abortion advocate who is responsible for the Capps amendment that allows abortion funding in the new health care reform bill Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled last week, confirmed to Politico that Obama has been lobbying for the bills.
"He’s making phone calls, meeting with members" and spending considerable time lobbying members of the Senate, Waxman confirmed.
In fact, Politico notes that, earlier this month, Obama asked pro-abortion Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden to stay in the Oval Office after a key strategy meeting with Wyden and others in order to personally lobby him to support the Baucus bill, which funds abortions.
“He made it clear, it was important to him,” Wyden said about the private meeting.
Meanwhile, aides indicated that Obama and Pelosi have numerous phone calls each day — giving Obama considerable opportunity to press for a ban on abortion funding. But with the new Pelosi health care bill including massive abortion funding and subsidies, pro-life advocates say Obama’s pledge is clearly disingenuous.
Douglas Johnson of National Right to Life says the pledge Americans can count on is the one Obama made to Planned Parenthood during a July 2007 speech where he said his health care legislation would create a public plan that would cover abortions.
"Obama has never recanted his promise that the federal government plan will cover elective abortion — he just wants to pretend that a federal agency could spend ‘private’ funds, an untenable claim," Johnson tells LifeNews.com.
"The White House and top Democratic congressional leaders are trying to smuggle federal government funding of abortion into law, behind smokescreens of misleading, contrived language," he added.
Fr. Frank Pavone, the national director of Priests for Life, has also noticed the contradiction between Obama’s rhetoric and actions.
He points to a conversation Obama had with pro-life Rep. Bart Stupak, who is leading the charge for an amendment to remove the abortion funding from the bill, where Obama defended his statement by saying his plan hasn’t been proposed yet.
"Every time the President has spoken of not wanting to fund abortion in ‘his’ health care plan, no one has really known what measure he was talking about," Pavone said.
"Now we know from his conversation with Congressman Stupak that the President’s ‘plan’ has never seen the light of day. Or maybe, to paraphrase former President Bill Clinton, it depends on what the word ‘plan’ means," he said.
And while Obama has been lobbying members of Congress to support the pro-abortion health care bills, his top spokesman has been misleading reporters about how the Hyde amendment would supposedly stop abortion funding eve though it doesn’t apply to the bills.
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