Dr. Michael New has extensively documented the life-saving effect of laws restricting the taxpayer funding of abortion. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, in a recent report, arrives at the same conclusion.
The Guttmacher Institute recently released a literature review about the effects of restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortion. Overall, the results indicate that there is a very strong consensus among both public-health researchers and economists that public funding restrictions lower abortion rates. The Guttmacher literature review contains citations to 20 academic studies documenting this. These studies analyze data from a range of sources including surveys and aggregate data from the federal, state, and local level. Conversely, Guttmacher identifies only about four studies which show that the effects of public-funding restrictions are inconclusive.
In fact, NARAL has complained that the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal Medicaid funding of most abortions) "forces about half the women who would otherwise have abortions to carry unintended pregnancies to term and bear children against their wishes instead." Many, many people are alive today who would have been killed in utero were it not for the Hyde Amendment -- likely somewhere between one and two million people, according to National Right to Life.
A new report from the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights includes a few revealing statements on this subject. For example: in calling for the repeal of federal funding restrictions on abortion, the Center complains, "A significant percentage of poor women, unable to afford and access the service, forgo abortion altogether." When the funding isn't there, some women just don't have abortions.
If the president and Congressional leaders were truly committed to "common ground" and reducing the number of abortions (as President Obama assured the pope), they would take abortion funding out of health care. As it stands, the health care "reform" plan promises to significantly increase the number of dead babies in this country.
