The Trust Women Political Action Committee reports on its website:
This week, the House Committee on the Judiciary had its first hearing on H.R. 3 (the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act) and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce had its first hearing on H.R. 358 (the Protect Life Act). … Below is some of the commentary from around the internet on the hearings.
[…]
- Rep. Steve King spent his allotted time describing what he refers to as “dismemberment” abortion–no, he does not have a medical degree, let alone a college degree [Huffington Post]
- Chairman Trent Franks refused to allow Washington DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton to testify on how the legislation would affect her constituents [NBC Washington]
- Despite saying they were going to remove the “forcible” rape language, it still remains in the legislation [Huffington Post
[…]
- The House Democrats argued that the bill does much more than permanently extending the status quo of the Hyde Amendment [Washington Post]
- Vicki Saporta from the National Abortion Federation illustrates how H.R. 358?s conscience law would kill women [The Hill]
Please note, there are two separate bills being discussed in these hearings: “H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” and “H.R. 358, the Protect Life Act.” The second of those two bills is the one I wrote about last week, in specific regard to a new provision in the bill that essentially allows health care facilities to deny immediately needed abortions to women who show up at hospital emergency rooms needing abortions to save their lives, and to refuse to refer such women to other medical facilities where they can get the abortions. The provision does this by prohibiting the government from penalizing (via removal of funding) health care facilities that deny abortions to women in immediate need of them and that refuse to refer the women elsewhere. In other words, a hospital that refuses to save a woman’s life by performing an abortion and refuses to provide her with an alternative referral will not and must not be denied federal funding in consequence.
Here is the precise, exact text of this provision, which is now in the bill and posted online:
‘‘(g) NONDISCRIMINATION ON ABORTION.
‘‘(1) NONDISCRIMINATION.—A Federal agency or program, and any State or local government that receives Federal financial assistance under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act), may not subject any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination, or require any health plan created or regulated under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) to subject any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination, on the basis that the health care entity refuses to—
“(A) undergo training in the performance of induced abortions; ‘‘(B) require or provide such training; ‘‘(C) perform, participate in, provide coverage of, or pay for induced abortions; or ‘‘(D) provide referrals for such training or such abortions.
‘‘(2) DEFINITION.—In this subsection, the term ‘health care entity’ includes an individual physician or other health care professional, a hospital, a provider-sponsored organization, a health maintenance organization, a health insurance plan, or any other kind of health care facility, organization, or plan.
I have cleaned up the typographical “noise” to make the above quote easier to read (i.e., the line numbers in the margins of the original transcript, end-of-line hyphenation, etc.), but the text is copied and pasted and that’s exactly what it says. I can’t link to it directly because it’s a .pdf file that you have to download on your hard drive — it doesn’t open in a browser window. But you can see it and read it for yourself by clicking on the linked word “here” in the first paragraph on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce site (linked above, and again here).
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