On Wednesday, the pro-abortion organization All* Above All announced that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and 63 other House members have introduced the EACH (Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance) Woman Act, to effectively undo the Hyde Amendment and require federal funding of abortion.
The bill would require that all health care or insurance obtained through the federal government, including Medicaid, Medicare, federal employee insurance, and the Veterans Administration; cover “all pregnancy related services, including abortion.” It would also forbid state and local governments from “interfer[ing] with the private insurance market, including the insurance marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act, to prevent insurance companies from providing abortion coverage.”
The organization condemns the Hyde Amendment for limiting federal abortion subsidies, 25 states for restricting insurance coverage for abortion, and the House of Representatives for passing the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act this January. In celebrating the EACH Woman Act’s introduction, Planned Parenthood called abortion-funding restrictions “penalties on low-income women.”
The EACH Woman Act would be the latest in a series of abortion defenders’ political priorities that restrict state options in setting abortion policy: Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton forbid most direct prohibitions on abortion, and the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate virtually any state and local policy that “interferes” with abortion in any way.
The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute admits that denying taxpayer dollars for the procedure resulted in about one-third of women who would have had an abortion if funding were available carried their pregnancies to term.
