By Steph Sterling, Director of Government Relations and Senior Advisor, National Women's Law Center
Cross-posted from NWLC's blog, Womenstake
Yesterday, news broke that H.R. 3, the bill being voted on today in the House, narrows the longstanding exception that allows federal funds to be used to pay for abortion care for rape victims. Even though House Republican leaders took the word "forcible" out of the bill itself, they used what’s known as a Committee Report to try and change its meaning without anyone noticing — so that, once again, only victims of "forcible" rape can get abortion coverage.
What's my take? If you're going to target girls who have been raped, own it. Stand up for it. If you want to deny abortion care to young girls who have been victimized by adults, if you want to deny abortion care to the kinds of sexual predators on Dateline who target young girls on the Internet, tell us why. Fight for it. Make your case.
But don't stick it in a bill, hope no one notices, pull the language when women find out, and then go ahead and do it anyway, under the radar, by manipulating the record and lying about the law. It's unbecoming. It's undemocratic. And, as my Mom used to say, it just makes it worse.
Because now we wonder: what else are you doing that we don’t know about? We know that proponents of H.R. 3 oppose Roe v. Wade and want to make abortion illegal altogether. So when they say one thing publicly about "forcible" rape and then manipulate the record to do the opposite, what else are they doing?