Cornerstone Action has a post on its blog about SB 486:
Essentially, SB 486 would force people to choose between (a) purchasing insurance coverage for abortions and (b) not carrying health insurance because it would MANDATE that health insurance policies cover abortions.
Cornerstone’s post covers the myriad problems with SB 486:
- SB 486-FN and it is sure to entangle our state in litigation as a violation of religious liberty and conscience rights, and it could also subject the state to a loss of federal funding under the Weldon Amendment. The provision beginning on line 10 of the bill, authorizing the commissioner to grant minimal exemptions as needed to keep federal dollars flowing, does not allay our concern. Those exemptions would likely be on a case-by-case basis in order to meet the minimum requirements of the Weldon Amendment. That would be unsatisfactory. Religious liberty is a fundamental right under both the U.S. and New Hampshire Constitutions. It should not rest on a commissioner’s case-by-case exemptions in order to be respected, nor should it rely on federal rules that can change from one Administration to the next.
- SB 486-FN seeks to force employers to be involved in employees’ abortion decisions, if the employer offers health insurance as an employee benefit. Nothing in the bill acknowledges that an employer or insurer could have religious or conscientious objections to abortion. The bill is clear that it would apply to all insurance policies that cover maternity benefits. No exceptions are listed. We believe that the lack of exceptions is a feature of the bill rather than an oversight by the sponsors.
- SB 486-FN is a politically motivated attempt to use insurance regulations to sidestep longstanding statutory and administrative restrictions on public funding of abortion. Its supporters want to extract from you what they cannot get any other way: expanded abortion funding.
Compare that to what New Hampshire’s abortion-lobby is saying about SB 486:
A pack of LIES. My Second Amendment right does not oblige the government to force others who do not want to exercise that right to SUBSIDIZE my purchase of a firearm. Yet that is exactly what Amelia Keane is saying about abortion … that the State must force consumers of health insurance who do NOT want abortion coverage to nonetheless purchase abortion coverage in order to make the cost of that coverage cheaper (accessible in her words) for people like her.
And according to Kayla Montgomery’s logic, the First Amendment is not a reality if the government doesn’t buy us all computers or smart-phones so we can use twitter. Wrong, again … my First Amendment right to fee speech does NOT require the government to force others to subsidize my speech.
Of course, the biggest LIE in all this is that there really is a constitutional right to an abortion at all (as opposed to a judicially-invented right), which according to people like Keane and Montgomery no longer just includes abortion up until the instant of birth but now actually extends to “post-birth abortions.”
But even if you accept that there is such a thing as a constitutional right to an abortion, that right is the right to have an abortion without the government placing an “undue burden” on you (Planned Parenthood vs Casey). The United States Supreme Court has NEVER said that abortion rights include government subsidies and, in fact, has said just the opposite that the State is NOT required to subsidize abortions.
