A new poll shows that 58% of Americans don’t want abortions to be paid for as part of any new public insurance plan.
Yet four of the five health care plans floating around Congress include language that would allow abortions to be paid for with public money. The only one that doesn’t – the Republican plan in the Senate – probably won’t go anywhere.
Joy Yearout, communications director for the Susan B. Anthony list, thinks that the plans’ inclusion of abortion is a direct result of Obama’s previously stated desire to include abortion in any public health care legislation despite more recent claims to the contrary.
“The President promised Planned Parenthood last year that abortion would be included in any health care legislation he proposed,” said Yearout. “It’s just a shell game.”
In the poll, fifty-eight percent of Americans disagreed with the statement, “If the government is going to make a public health plan available for all Americans it has an obligation to provide abortion services under that plan.” Fifty-five percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “Whatever my opinion on the issue, I think it would be wrong for the government to pay for abortions.”
“Today’s polling data offers the latest compelling reason for Congress to reject the President’s health care proposal without authentic language to exclude abortion funding,” said Yearout.
In previous statements, Planned Parenthood has claimed that the public health insurance plan would be funded by an exchange, which is “funded and paid for by private individual premiums, in the same way a private insurance plan is.”
But Yearout says that’s nothing more than a farce.
“Checks for abortionists would be coming from the U.S. government,” she said.
Abortion supporters frequently cite the “gender gap” as evidence that more men than women are against the procedure and public sponsorship of it.
But the Susan B. Anthony List poll showed that not only does this “gender gap” not exist, but it is actually reversed: 44% of women and 41% of men are less likely to be in favor of Obamacare if abortion is included in the plan.
Additionally, the poll showed that 2 out of 3 legislators overall and twenty-five percent of Democrats disapprove of abortion being included in health care legislation.