Republican Party Chair: Pro-Life More Important Than Government Health Care
by Michael Steele
March 18, 2010
LifeNews.com Note: Michael Steel is the chairman of the national Republican Party and the former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland.
President Ronald Reagan once said “I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion is already born.” Long before Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid and President Obama started trying to reverse Federal abortion policy, they all managed to make it safely out of their own mothers’ wombs. Lucky for them.
I’m grateful that half a century ago, a certain young, scared and pregnant woman didn’t walk into an Orwellian-named “community health center” funded by a Democrat healthcare scheme. If she had, I might not have made it out alive.
Instead, she walked into St. Ann’s Infant and Maternity Home, and we both received the medical and spiritual care that we needed. St. Ann’s made the connection between me and Maebell, the selfless, hardworking mom who adopted me and, later, my sister.
In the name of “health,” pro-abortion Democrats intend to turn community health centers – many of which are simply Planned Parenthood clinics – into taxpayer-sponsored abortion mills, funded with $11 billion appropriated outside of the usual protections banning federal funding of abortion.
What’s more, the Democrat bill, to be rammed through the House and Senate using procedural trickery, would require many Americans to pay a fee to subsidize the abortions of other Americans. That’s right.
Most Americans will be buying their family’s health insurance at the “public exchange” created by the bill, which is the insurance auction block designated for people whose employers decide it’s cheaper to pay a penalty to the government rather than continue providing the health coverage their employees enjoy today. At these exchanges, almost all of the plans could cover abortions. If you want one of these plans, even if you don’t want the abortion coverage, you will still have to pay a special fee to subsidize the abortions of others in the plan.
If a last-minute deal with pro-life Democrats hadn’t been cut, this issue would have brought down the whole bill last year.
However, this time around, the unborn aren’t so lucky; and it may still cost Pelosi the vote. If that happens, some pro-abortion Democrats will no doubt ask themselves why abortion remains such a big deal in America.
The reason is that the right to life is engraved in our national DNA.
If there is anything such as a collective American conscience, it surely includes the founding principles in the Declaration of Independence. Our founders pledged “(their) lives, (their) fortunes and (their) sacred honor” to the notion of “certain unalienable rights,” among which were “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The idea of denying an innocent, defenseless American her right to life still gets us all riled up, and all the more so when politicians want to stick us with the bill too.
If the right to life doesn’t trump the imposition of a bureaucrat-run healthcare scheme, I don’t know what will.
Democrats who brag about fighting for the “little guy” while supporting the taxpayer-supported slaughter of the innocents can’t hope to avoid the charge of hypocrisy.
Such distortion of our healthcare system is particularly offensive to the African American community, whose babies are aborted at a rate 5 times that of white babies.
And yet, the racial disparity doesn’t end there – Hispanic babies are aborted at a rate almost 3 times that of non-Hispanic white babies. Pro-abortion Democrats may think it politically fashionable to ram through “reconciliation” in order to satisfy their particular political agenda, but such disregard for the will of the people corrupts the very principles that have made us free.
There are many reasons for Democrats to fear the coming electoral wrath.
The reckless government takeover of the best healthcare system in the world, even with its flaws and need for reform, has provoked Americans. It will bankrupt us and saddle every child lucky enough to make it out of the womb alive with a $38,000 IOU to Uncle Sam.
It will bring Big Government right into the exam room, the delivery ward, and the hospice bed, where only our loved ones belong. We will surrender our most unalienable right – the right to life – to the whims of Washington bureaucrats and out-of-touch politicians intent on remaking America into their own extremist image.
But we need not despair! From Massachusetts to New Jersey to Virginia, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are supplanting the dubious “right” to substandard, inferior, government-run healthcare.
I’m encouraged that what started as a rumble in the town halls of last August will become a roar at the polls come November. Americans are taking back our country from a political class that has proven to be the greatest hazard to our national health.
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