Harry Reid has released the manager’s amendment that Ben Nelson has reportedly agreed to vote for, meaning that the Senate bill has 60 votes. The abortion language includes the phony segregation of funding language that was rejected in the House. It would allow individual states to opt out of the abortion-funding program–in other words, the default position is to pay for abortions; states would have to pass legislation to not fund abortions. But states where public abortion-funding is mandated by state court rulings would be required to pay for abortions:
There are 13 states where the state supreme court has required public abortion funding according to this map from the ACLU (assuming it’s up to date). Four states have decided through their legislatures to pay for Medicaid abortions. So Ben Nelson is going to allow federal tax dollars to pay for abortions in California and New York? Update: The title of this post should have been: taxpayers in all 50 states forced to pay for abortions.
