I suppose that there are certain votes that are considered mandatory for anyone who wants the support of anti-choice groups. I guess there isn’t too much nuance about it. You can’t vote against an anti-choice bill because it’s too extreme. You might support twenty anti-choice bills, but if you balk on one of them, you’re going to lose the support of the anti-choice community. That’s the only way to explain the unanimous support of the House Republicans and the defection of sixteen Democrats for H.R. 3, a bill that, among other things, introduces the vague concept of “forcible rape” into the law pertaining to health care insurance. Passed with a 251-175 majority, H.R. 3 is a truly radical piece of legislation.
The backdoor reintroduction of the statutory rape change relies on the use of a committee report, a document that congressional committees produce outlining what they intend a piece of legislation to do. If there’s ever a court fight about the interpretation of a law—and when it comes to a subject as contentious as abortion rights, there almost always is—judges will look to the committee report as evidence of congressional intent, and use it to decide what the law actually means.
In this case, the committee report for H.R. 3 says that the bill will “not allow the Federal Government to subsidize abortions in cases of statutory rape.” The bill itself doesn’t say anything like that, but if a court decides that legislators intended to exclude statutory rape-related abortions from eligibility for Medicaid funding, then that will be the effect.
Prior to 1993, the Hyde Amendment prevented the government from providing funds for abortion unless the life of the mother was at stake. Since 1993, however, there have been exceptions for victims of rape and incest. The Republicans claim that the rape exception doesn’t cover statutory rape, but they provide no evidence in support of that claim, and the inclusion of statutory rape language in the Committee Report is proof that they know that they’re trying to change the law.
Obviously, if one wants to distinguish between different kinds of rape, resources and guidelines must be put in place to investigate claims of rape.
This isn’t the only radical change introduced by H.R. 3. It also aims, quite effectively, to prevent women from obtaining or retaining health insurance that covers abortion even with their own money. It does this in a variety of ways, but mainly through a direct attack on the insurance provided by small businesses to their employees.
The new bill, introduced by Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, would bar outright the use of federal subsidies to buy any insurance that covers abortion well beyond the new exchanges.
The tax credits that are encouraging small businesses to provide insurance for their workers could not be used to buy policies that cover abortions. People with their own policies who have enough expenses to claim an income tax deduction could not deduct either the premiums for policies that cover abortion or the cost of an abortion. People who use tax-preferred savings accounts to pay medical costs could not use the money to pay for an abortion without paying taxes on it.
By denying subsidies to small businesses, the government would be effectively forcing them to provide insurance plans that do not cover abortions, including obviously abortions resulting from instances of statutory rape.
In other words, this is not your run-of-the-mill anti-abortion bill. It isn’t some parental notification bill, or compulsory sonogram-viewing bill. It doesn’t merely aim to make getting an abortion more difficult and humiliating. It’s trying to eliminate abortion coverage from private insurance policies and set up a new system of greater and lesser rape.
But this extremism did not provide an excuse for a single House Republican defection, nor did it prevent sixteen Democrats from following along.
Apparently, you can’t get credit for being “pro-life” unless you think the government should be in the business of investigating people’s tax forms to see whether their claim of rape was sufficiently forcible.
In case you are overly concerned by this legislation, you need not worry that it will pass in the Senate or be signed by the president. Not in this Congress, anyway, but it could happen in a future one if the Republicans have their way.
