Colorado Democratic lawmakers are hoping that ‘money talks’ in order to push through their latest agenda to have taxpayers pay for abortions. The politicians emphasize that abortions for low-income women should be prioritized because not only would it support “equity and fairness in health care” but “a birth is more expensive than an abortion.”
National Review reports Colorado House Speaker Julie McCluskie said at a committee hearing this week, touting a legislative fiscal analysis that claims taxpayer-funded abortions could save the state a half million dollars or more annually.
Dr. Catherine Wheeler, a pro-life OB-GYN and former abortion provider, told the committee, “Seriously, the bill’s sponsors are saying that if more babies die by abortion it will be cheaper for the state.”
“The analysis is so simplistic that it insults the intelligence of lawmakers who earnestly wish to understand the implications of state funding,” Dr. Thomas Perille, president of Democrats for Life of Colorado, told the committee. He called it “fiscal malpractice.”
The bill, SB 183, was filed in February, a few months after 62 percent of Colorado voters approved Amendment 79, which made abortion a constitutional right in the state and repealed a prohibition on public funding. SB 183 would also require public-employee insurance plans to cover abortions.
McCluskie is one of four Democratic co-sponsors of Senate Bill 25-183, which would require Colorado taxpayers to pay for abortions for women on Medicaid or enrolled in the state’s Child Health Plan Plus program, or CHP+. The bill already passed the state Senate on a 22–12 party-line vote earlier this month.
“Ultimately, we do achieve a cost savings because of the averted births that will not take place,” McCluskie told the House Health & Human Services Committee.
National Review reports on how the fiscal analysis was conducted: “Based on a constant enrollment of 333,330 females ages 15 to 44 in Medicaid or CHP+. It estimates that 1.67 percent of them will seek abortions each year; about half will be procedural abortions, with a reimbursement rate of $1,300, and half will use abortion pills, with a reimbursement rate of $800.”
Having taxpayers foot the bill is “expected to increase the number of averted births by 30 percent,” with the average reimbursement for labor and delivery at $3,850, the analysis says.
So if it’s cheaper to kill the baby, where do you stop. Because by that logic you can justify killing children of people on welfare just as easily.