Clinton Outraged as Bush Team Defines Birth Control as Abortion

By Anastacia Mott Austin

A draft of a Bush administration proposal to expand the definition of abortion to common birth control methods means that women may have a harder time getting access to reproductive health services.

The draft, written by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHH), would require hospitals and health care centers that receive federal funding to allow staff who hold certain beliefs, among them that common contraceptive devices are the same as abortion, not be forced to supply them to patients.

The crux of the issue is wording contained within the DHH draft memo that defines abortion as any method, including prescription drugs, which ‘terminates life" between conception and birth. Some forms of birth control prevent a fertilized egg from implanting into the uterine wall. This semantic issue has been a hot topic within the abortion rights topic for years.

Hillary Clinton (D-NY), is incensed at the idea that the definition of abortion could be expanded to include birth control. "This is a gratuitous, unnecessary insult to the women of the United States of America. These rules pose a dire threat to women's health, to health-care providers, and to uninsured and low-income Americans seeking care. It is a disgrace, but unfortunately it is not a surprise." She vows to fight to end the plan.

The proposal would mean that certain hospitals could refuse birth control, including emergency contraception to assault victims, even if the right to access contraception was part of that state’s law.

Said Clinton to reporters, "Under these Bush rules, an ideologically-driven hospital administrator or an emergency room supervisor or a doctor or a nurse on duty could deny [a rape victim] access to emergency contraception, so the woman who survived the assault would now be at risk of becoming pregnant, denied the care she needs in her hour of greatest need."

Added Clinton, "The more I learn about these rules by the Bush administration, the more appalled I am and the more determined I am to stop them."

Jill Morrison, a senior attorney at the National Women’s Law Center, explains that the proposal would expand protection to staff members who are opposed to any kind of "health service" he or she might see as morally objectionable. Meaning, health workers who before were allowed to refuse to participate in an abortion procedure could now also refuse to dispense even commonly used forms of contraception like the birth control pill. "What this does," said Morrison, "is take the extra step of trying to conflate the two [abortion and birth control]. It's an attack on a woman's right to contraception."

Several Democratic senators have joined together to write letters of protest to Health and Human Services secretary Michael Levitt, asking him to not instate the new wording of the proposal.

"Our first effort is to get the Bush administration to rescind the regulation, not issue in its current form," said Clinton this week at a joint news conference with New York Representative Nita Lowey "If that doesn't succeed, we're going to be looking for legislative steps that we can take to prevent this regulation from ever going into effect."