One of the worst things about Obamacare is that it provides taxpayer funding of abortion. This is one of the nearly countless reasons why Obamacare must be repealed, and it’s one of the core reasons why it is crucial for Republican presidential candidates to show they have an alternative that would lead to repeal. So far, only Scott Walker has stepped up in this regard. For pro-life voters, this should matter greatly.
(Bobby Jindal, a second-division presidential candidate, has also released an Obamacare alternative, but it is so full of political holes—no answer for the poor or near-poor, disruptive to the employer-based market—that it would arguably be less likely to lead to repeal than no alternative at all.)
Yet Chris Jacobs, who until the last few weeks was the policy director for Jindal’s America Next, strangely charges that Walker’s alternative isn’t actually pro-life. The basis of Jacobs’s charge is that Walker—who put himself out on a limb in the first Republican presidential debate by opposing abortion even in cases of rape or to save the life of the mother—didn’t include explicit anti-abortion language in the white-paper overview of his plan. However, by explicitly calling for Obamacare’s repeal, Walker made clear that he would stop all of Obamacare’s taxpayer funding of abortions.
As for Walker’s own alternative, to think that it would allow taxpayer funding of abortion—as Jacobs suggests—requires one to be a bit disconnected from political reality. The 2017 Project’s “Winning Alternative to Obamacare,” on which Walker’s alternative is based, plainly declares that one of the many reasons why we cannot afford to “fix” rather than repeal Obamacare is that a “fixed” Obamacare “will provide taxpayer funding of abortion.” House Budget Committee chairman Tom Price, whose alternative is likewise based on the 2017 Project’s proposal, includes language in his legislative text (such text necessarily being far more detailed than a white paper) declaring that the bill’s tax credits couldn’t be used for abortion (see page 51). All three of these proposals offer the same non-income-tested tax credits, in the same age-based manner, in the same exact amounts ($1,200 for those under 35 years of age, $2,100 for those between 35 and 50, $3,000 for those 50 and over, and $900 for children). None of them would cover abortion.
But Obamacare does. The real question is whether the eventual Republican nominee will take down Obamacare with a conservative alternative that is a political winner with the American people, or whether all of us will continue having our tax dollars fund the abortions that Obama’s centerpiece legislation encourages.
