“Clearly, the pro-life organizations’ strategy was independent of a Democratic or Republican agenda. Little surprise, then, that it alienated partisans on both sides—the partisans at Commonweal included,” they wrote.
Public Discourse accused Commonweal of partisanship in their “persistent misrepresentation” of President Obama’s executive order on abortion funding, the funding of Community Health Centers, and the original Senate compromise language on insurance funding.
Commonweal’s praise for the executive order, they said, ignored court precedent defining Medicaid as including abortion services unless statutory law explicitly forbids it.
“The statutory requirement prevails over the executive order,” the Public Discourse editors said, noting the need for the language of the pro-life Hyde Amendment.
“The new legislation did not extend the Hyde Amendment to new funding streams,” they continued. “The House bill would have done that; the Senate bill did not. No wonder Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood made no real effort to resist the executive order. The order was, as she put it, merely ‘symbolic.’”
A gap in the health care funding restrictions also will result in funding for abortions at Community Health Care Centers, they warned. Further, the new health care law lacks a “critically important” clause of the Hyde Amendment which bars funding for health plans that include elective abortions.
“Over the course of the health care debate, the major pro-life groups and the Catholic bishops faithfully adhered to the cause of life. They recognized the hollowness of Obama’s executive order, anticipated the threat posed by funding of Community Health Centers, and saw through an insurance funding scheme that claims to honor the Hyde Amendment’s principle while gutting its policy and violating its spirit.”
These actions sometimes advanced or retarded health care, but their steadfastness in their principles “deserves praise,” the Public Discourse editors concluded.