Short Answer: Yes. Yesterday Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius repeated what President Barack Obama had stated in his State of the Union speech last Tuesday. They will include a provision explicitly outlawing the public funding of abortion in any health care reform bill. At first glance, this appears to reinforce the status quo. Under the Hyde amendment, there is no federal funding for abortion except in the cases of rape, incest or a threat to a woman's life.
Unfortunately, the President's proposal appears to go farther than the status quo, undermining the abortion coverage that millions of American women currently have. Several states (unfortunately, not Maine) do cover abortion under state Medicaid programs. And, as the New York Times points out, the President's proposal may mean a repeal of abortion coverage for millions of women. That's because most private plans do cover abortion, treating it like any other medical procedure. The President's proposal may lead private insurers to drop abortion coverage, especially if new rules prevent any public subsidy of a plan that does cover abortion.
Martha Burk of the Center for Advancement of Public Policy has a great column at Huffington Post about this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-burk/throwing-women-overboard_b_281498.html
It's about time that the government treated women equally and treated all of our medical procedures as medical procedures. The Guttmacher Institute collects and analyzes data related to abortion. They note that "More than six million women become pregnant annually. Slightly fewer than two-thirds of these pregnancies result in live births and 20% result in abortions; the remainder end in miscarriage."
http://www.guttmacher.org/in-the-know/index.html
Millions of women each year make the medical decision to have an abortion. It is wrong for President Obama and Secretary Sebelius to erect barriers between women and their doctors to prevent women from accessing a full range of medical care. It denies women equal protection under the law, and it endangers women's health and safety.
Prohibiting abortion coverage under healthcare reform discriminates against women. You can take action on Planned Parenthood's website to tell Congress how you feel:
http://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/healthreform/index.htm
