Abortion and health-care reform: Which side misleads more?

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Alas, neither side is telling the truth and nothing but the truth in the debate about whether abortion should be covered under proposed federal health-care reform plans. Both anti-abortion and pro-choice organizations tell half-truths. It’s just that one side’s claims are more egregiously false than the other’s.

Anti-abortion organizations haven’t been sober truth tellers. The National Right to Life and the Family Research Council continue to insist that “Obamacare” will provide “direct” taxpayer funding of abortion. In fact, none of the congressional health-care reform bills likely to pass provides direct funding of the procedure, which is to say from the government to any eligible woman seeking an abortion, the funding mechanism that Medicaid uses in states like my native California.

Yet as misleading as pro-lifers’ claim is, it is closer to the truth than that made by pro-choice advocates like President Obama and others. They deny that federal money would be used to subsidize abortions. Obama in his Sept. 10 speech to a joint session of Congress contended that “under our plan no federal dollars will be used to cover abortions.” Columnist Cynthia Tucker wrote that health-care reform bills “set(s) up an elaborate accounting system which separates private money from public money” to pay for abortions.

Both statements are misleading. Obama’s is technically accurate but beside the point. It fails to note that proposed health-care reform plans would provide indirect funding of abortion. Insurance plans that offer abortion coverage, such as Kaiser Permanente, would receive federal dollars. Tucker’s statement is also a half truth. As Megan McArdle pointed out,

Democrats had originally tried to get around this by requiring insurers to “segregate” the public funds and only use private funds to pay for the abortion coverage, but this is transparently silly; money is fungible.  There is no effective difference between giving someone $300 for an abortion, and giving them $300 to cover their dermatologist’s bills so that they can afford to go have an abortion.

Or as FactCheck.org, an independent politically neutral site, concluded about the president’s claims:

The truth is that bills now before Congress don’t require federal money to be used for supporting abortion coverage. So the president is right to that limited extent. But it’s equally true that House and Senate legislation would allow a new “public” insurance plan to cover abortions, despite language added to the House bill that technically forbids using public funds to pay for them. Obama has said in the past that “reproductive services” would be covered by his public plan, so it’s likely that any new federal insurance plan would cover abortion unless Congress expressly prohibits that. Low- and moderate-income persons who would choose the “public plan” would qualify for federal subsidies to purchase it. Private plans that cover abortion also could be purchased with the help of federal subsidies. Therefore, we judge that the president goes too far when he calls the statements that government would be funding abortions “fabrications.”

So which side’s half-truth is worse? I say the pro-choice argument is. It misleads and denies about what would a new direction in federal policy – the indirect funding of abortion. The anti-abortion argument, by contrast, distorts the nature of this new direction. It’s the difference between denying the truth that your sister is pregnant and making the false statement that her husband is the real father.