USCCB: Healthcare Bill Proabort on Funding and Conscience

Sister Mary Ann Walsh has been the spokesperson for the USCCB for a good part of the last decade.

I've chided her performance as less than stellar over the years but her trajectory seems to have changed. The last year especially.

I'm rather astounded at this:

Sister Mary Ann Walsh of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says the language of the bill makes her "sick."

"Catholic bishops have urged the government to reform our ailing health care system for decades. To do this, the House and Senate have now passed bills with this aim, bills that must be reconciled into one final bill," Walsh writes.

"But the present state of affairs is enough to make you sick. The gamesmanship in Congress relates more to politics than health and has created serious problems," she continues.

She says that, "despite bishops' desire for health care reform, the proposed bills could turn the bishops from allies into opponents. So far, health care reform, it is not."

The first major problem Walsh notes is that the health care bill pays for abortions.

The bishops have argued for an "abortion neutral" bill, so that no one can use health care reform to put money into elective abortions, but Walsh says that's not what Congress has produced so far.

"The bishops appreciate the Hyde Amendment on abortion funding, which precludes using federal dollars for elective abortions or health plans that cover such abortions; they want similar language in health care reform legislation. Hyde, which passed first in 1976, tries to ensure what is becoming more and more understood in America, that no one should be forced to pay for another person's abortion and that the government should not be in the abortion-funding business," Walsh writes in the Post.