I’m starting to think it’s a pattern. I’m starting to think it may be that only opponents (or at least non-fans) reported this particular bit of legislation honestly.
Here’s the CNS version:
The legislation would prohibit taxpayer funding for abortions and bar women from using subsidies under the Obama health care law to buy health insurance that covers abortion, except in those cases involving rape or incest or when the mother’s life is endangered. Also, the legislation would protect health care providers who are opposed to abortion for moral or religious reasons.
Again: that’s it. It doesn’t spell out that that means the legislation would make it legal for health care providers – including hospitals, not just individuals – to refuse to do abortions even to save the woman’s life. Given the preceding sentence about funding, which does include that exception, readers are primed to assume the opposite.
This probably helps to explain the lack of outrage, and the people like the staffer in one representative’s office who say “oh no, of course hospitals won’t let women die.”
Is that staffer willing to place a bet on whether religious types at hospitals would let women die if they thought they could legally get away with it? FFS, just look at the virulent anti-women legislative efforts in the last few years, the pharmacists who think they don’t need to provide prescriptions, the personhood crazies, the attacks on Planned Parenthood, with the latter, especially, sure to lead to premature deaths.
I’m sure that a thriving industry of back street abortions will spring up to fill the gap.