SINCE 1976, pro-life and pro-choice advocates have come to a truce on one thing: Taxpayer funds are not to be used to pay for abortions except for in the cases of rape, incest and when the pregnancy is dangerous to the health of the mother. Codified in the Hyde Amendment, this compromise mainly pertains to Medicaid funds and must be renewed each year by Congress. But this year, House Republican Chris Smith of New Jersey has introduced the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act." This House bill not only proposes making the Hyde Amendment permanent, but it goes even further in limiting women's access to federal funds for abortion. This bill is an attack on women's rights, and the passage of such legislation would return women to an era full of inequalities.
Since its inception, the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" has received a large amount of criticism from its pro-choice opponents. The original uproar was over the attempted redefinition of rape that was included in Rep. Smith's bill. Instead of using the original language of the Hyde Amendment, the new bill sought to make taxpayer fund available for abortions only in the case of "forcible rape," eliminating other forms of rape such as coerced rape, statutory rape, date rape and rape in which women have been drugged or given extreme amounts of alcohol. Luckily, this provision of the bill was changed just last week to more closely reflect the original language of the Hyde Amendment.
Despite this victory for the pro-choice movement, the bill still goes beyond the claim made by its supporters that it only makes the Hyde Amendment permanent. Many pro-choice opponents of the bill believe that this legislation is actually a way to eliminate private insurance coverage for abortion. Susan Cohen of the pro-choice Guttmacher Foundation argued in a policy brief that the bill would "carry the argument against abortion funding to an extreme by preventing employers from taking a tax deduction for insurance plans that include abortion coverage. Moreover, individuals' premiums for plans that cover abortion could not be paid with pretax dollars. In addition, any costs incurred by an individual for an abortion would be disallowed under a flexible health spending account or for the purposes of a potential medical care deduction from federal taxes." Other pro-choice groups agree with this analysis of the bill, and believe that this would cause many employers to only offer health care packages that do not cover abortions. Currently, 86 percent of employer-sponsored health plans cover abortion. This number would surely drop if employers no longer received tax deductions for insurance plans that cover abortions.
This analysis is, however, contested. There is no question that the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion" bill would have impacts on tax policies. Experts agree that provisions in the bill would prevent self-employed people and those with health savings accounts from treating abortions as medical expenses, but the issue of employers not receiving tax deductions for insurance plans that ensure abortion coverage is more contested. One thing, however, is quite clear - when introduced, the tax effects of the bill must be fully explained so that legislators know for what it is they are voting.\nThough the controversial language about rape was removed, the fight by the pro-choice camp is far from over. Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York said that she considered the bill "the deepest attack on a woman's right to choose in my lifetime," and Jessica Arons, Director of the Women's Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress, argued that "Rep. Smith's bill would accomplish the unstated end of making abortion as difficult to obtain as possible without actually criminalizing it."
Allowing this bill to pass with the current ambiguous language toward tax benefits for employers would be a mistake. This bill does much more than extend the Hyde Amendment, and instead begins to infringe on a woman's right to use her own money for an abortion.
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