Health care plans must cover abortion-causing drugs, Obama administration says
- Aug 1, 2011 - 2 -
The Obama administration announced Aug. 1 that insurance plans must cover without cost to women contraceptives that can cause abortions.
Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said last year’s controversial health-care reform law –- dubbed “Obamacare” by its critics — would provide no-cost coverage of drugs with abortion-inducing properties such as “ella,” Plan B and Next Choice. The HHS action was expected. The department incorporated in its guidelines recommendations released July 19 by an Institute of Medicine committee.
The services will be required in insurance policies that begin their plan years Aug. 1, 2012, or thereafter, according to HHS.
Under the guidelines, all methods approved as contraceptives by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would be included in a range of services offered to patients free of charge.
Emergency contraception, also known as the “morning-after” pill, is basically a heavy dose of birth control pills. While the two-step process can restrict ovulation in a woman or prevent fertilization, it also can block implantation of the early embryo in the uterine wall. The latter effect would cause an abortion, pro-life advocates point out.
Ella, though approved as emergency contraception by the FDA in 2010, is more closely related to the abortion drug RU 486, according to pro-life organizations. Like RU 486, it blocks production of the hormone progesterone, destroying the placenta that provides nutrition to the embryo and causing the tiny, unborn child’s death, the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists says. Ella also can block implantation.
Pro-life advocates decried the Institute of Medicine recommendations both when they were announced and when they were accepted by HHS.
Upon their recommendation, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, criticized the use of government funds to kill the unborn as “an abomination.”
Jeanne Monahan, director of the Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, said Aug. 1 the requirements “will violate the consciences of millions.”
The Obama administration included an amendment that allows religious institutions to choose whether to permit contraceptive coverage in their insurance plans, but Monahan called it “a fig leaf of conscience protection of certain churches that fulfill very specific criteria.”
“[R]eligious groups that provide social services, engage in missions work to people of different religious faiths, religious health insurance companies, let alone religious health care providers and individuals in such health plans are not protected from any discrimination whatever,” Monahan said in a written statement. “The new rule will force many Americans to violate their consciences or refrain from participating in health care insurance, further burdening an already costly system.”
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America and NARAL Pro-choice America — two of the country’s leading abortion rights organizations — praised the new guidelines.
“Today is a historic victory for women’s health and women across the country,” Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards said in a written release.
Land, the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, took issue with an assertion by Adam Sonfield of the Guttmacher Institute that the “morning-after” pill does not prevent the implantation of an embryo and thereby cause an abortion. Sonfield said the medical field defines pregnancy as beginning with the implantation, not the fertilization, of an egg, The Washington Post reported.
“The ‘medical field’ is attempting to define something far above its pay grade,” Land said in a statement. “God has already made it clear in Holy Scripture that human life begins at conception, or fertilization, and all of the unique, biological characteristics of that particular child are determined at the moment of conception, not implantation (Jeremiah 1:5, Psalm 139:13-16, Psalm 51:5). The use of taxpayers’ money to fund killing such babies is an abomination.”
The HHS guidelines also require health plans to cover without co-pay such services as counseling to prevent unintended pregnancies, testing for human papillomavirus for women over 30 years of age, screening for HIV and counseling on sexually transmitted infections.
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1 On Aug 16th, 2011, at 12:36am, John D wrote:
Those verses do not demonstrate God’s delineation between a human and a ball of cells. They do speak of forming in the womb and being knitted in the womb, which seems to imply that there is a time before this “formation/knitting” when the person has not yet become a human being.
The old laws state that if two men are in a fight, and one of them happens to hit the other man’s pregnant wife and the fetus dies causing a miscarriage, the man who hit her is only supposed to pay a little bit of money to the other father.
Yet, if a bull gets free and tramples someone trying to escape, you are to put the bull to death. So a human accidentally kills a fetus, no problem just pay some cash. A bull accidentally kills a living human, and the bull gets put down.
As you can see, the fetus is not necessarily considered a human in the Bible.
-John
2 On Aug 16th, 2011, at 6:36am, Larry Little wrote:
Richard Land…...you are so full of IT. Abortions don’t kill babies. Babies do not occupy the womb. Babies are babies after delivery, not before…Babies are also those 18 year old’s sent to Iraq and other Republican wars to become a wet spot in the desert…....Abortion isn’t the real issue here, the issue here is you have no business practicing medicine or impose your religious fanaticism. Defending the Bible and peddling mythology is your way of making a living but those of us who know it is a book full of errors,contradictions, exaggerations and outright falsehoods depend on medical science for our reproductive decisions, not orders from a pulpit.