What Exactly Will FOCA DO?
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Tuesday, October 28, 2008 5:00 PM
Susan E. Wills is the Assistant Director for Education & Outreach for the Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Here is an interview she gave to The Westchester Institute about the Freedom of Choice Act, which Sen. McCain opposes and Sen. Obama has promised to sign as his first presidential act.
First, a little history:
Wills: FOCA has been introduced in Congress multiple times, in various versions, since at least 1989. Cosponsoring FOCA has become a sort of “oath of fealty” to Planned Parenthood and NARAL for those members of Congress most beholden to the abortion industry for their election. Its popularity has been limited to the hard core extremists on abortion—those, for example, who support even late-term abortions by the barbaric partial-birth abortion method. In the past, FOCA has not posed an imminent danger to the status quo. I can’t recall a time in the past 20 years when we’ve faced the possibility of a pro-choice majority in both Houses of Congress and a President willing to sign such a bill. The threat of a veto under President Bush during the past 8 years has kept recent versions of the bill from going anywhere.
The current version of FOCA was introduced just hours after the Supreme Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Carhart upholding the federal ban on partial-birth abortion. Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) explained the rationale and timing of FOCA in an April 18, 2007 “Dear Colleague” letter: “Today, the Supreme Court declared open season on women’s lives and their right to control their own bodies, their health and their destinies.” The current Senate version (S. 1173) attacks Carhart for “threatening” Roe v. Wade and failing to protect women’s health. Co-sponsors in the House version (H.R. 1964) number 109 and Senate cosponsors number 19.
Next, she’s asked what FOCA would do if signed:
Wills: FOCA would call into question virtually every abortion-related state and federal law currently in force. It would immediately supersede every federal law, such as the partial-birth abortion ban, restrictions on federal funding of abortion through Medicaid, and the ban on abortions in military hospitals. On the authority of FOCA, state laws protecting the lives of unborn children and their mothers could be immediately unenforceable. All the modest and reasonable state laws of the past 35 years (which have also been successful in reducing abortions) would fall to legal challenges based on FOCA. These include the following laws: protecting parental rights to be involved in an abortion decision, ensuring informed consent, regulating abortion clinic “safety,” protecting the conscience rights of doctors, nurses and hospitals to not be involved in abortion, and protecting women from non-physician abortionists among others. Significantly, taxpayers could also be forced to fund abortions for the uninsured.
But FOCA doesn’t only act retroactively, invalidating all current restraints on abortion. It also looks forward, with chilling implications.
it also forbids all governments (state, federal, local, agencies, officials, etc.) in the future from denying or interfering with a woman’s “right to choose” and forbids them from “discriminat[ing] against the exercise of the[se] rights ... in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.”
So any time the government addresses childbirth, it must address abortion equally favorably—superseding prior Supreme Court precedents. Public hospitals which offer maternity services must offer abortion services. Health benefits for pregnant uninsured women must include abortion services.
There’s more: including links to useful FOCA fact sheets and other materials. RTWT.
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