Our guest blogger is Lucy Panza, a policy analyst with the Women’s Health and Rights Program at American Progress Action Fund.

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee released a draft FY 2012 budget for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education that reduces funding for health care reform by at least $8.6 billion and makes significant cuts to services for low income women and families – at the same time that women are falling deeper into poverty. Some highlights:

– Funding for the Title V Maternal and Child Health Services Block Grant is proposed at $654,489,000 – a $1.8 million reduction from the FY 2011 level;

– The $350 million Title V Maternal, Infant and Early Child Health Home Visiting program is eliminated;

– The $25 million Pregnancy Assistance Fund is eliminated; and

– $337 million in Title X Family Planning grants are proposed to be eliminated – this would eliminate Title X altogether.

– Funding for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative is reduced by $64.79 million — from $104.79 million to $40 million. 

These cuts, if enacted, would end publicly funded women’s health care as we know it. Just to take a few examples, the Title V proposed cuts would deny pre-natal health access to millions of mothers and preventive care access to millions of children. The elimination of Title X (signed into law by Republican President Nixon in 1970) would mean that millions of Americans who rely on publicly funded health clinics each year would go without services like mammograms, cancer screenings, and birth control. The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative funding would be diverted to ineffective, abstinence-only education. And these are just a few of the implications. Perhaps most offensive is the “pro-life” banner that the GOP waved in its own summary of the proposed budget:

Protecting Life – The bill includes several provisions to protect life. These include continuations of longstanding restrictions on abortion funding that have been included in the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Appropriations legislation in prior years. The legislation expands the Hyde Amendment to apply to funding provided through ObamaCare, includes language prohibiting funding for Planned Parenthood unless it certifies it will not provide abortions, and includes the text of the “Abortion Non-Discrimination Act.” The bill also bans funding for needle exchange programs, a provision that had been included in the bill until fiscal year 2010.

The reality underlying these cuts is the double kudos that Republicans expect to get from stripping health reform implementation of necessary funding while at the same time reducing access to reproductive health and rights. While no one can deny that budget-drafting is a form of policymaking, this House majority has unabashedly used the budget-making process to advance its out-of-touch ideological agenda. To name just one example, the current draft bans insurance coverage of abortion in the new health exchanges under the Affordable Care Act — restricting a common health benefit that most women currently have – in a budgetary proposal. What does this have to do with the budget? Nothing. There is no federal spending involved in deciding whether a state allows or prohibits insurance coverage of a particular health benefit, and it shouldn’t be in a budget proposal released by the United States House of Representatives.

This proposal is largely symbolic. Ultimately, it will fail because neither the Democratic-controlled Senate nor the White House – nor advocates on the ground, for that matter – will allow it to become law. But that should be no source of comfort – for one thing, bits and pieces of the proposal may end up in the final product. Yesterday’s budget proposal is a reminder of the long road ahead for reproductive health, rights and justice advocates – and how persistent the opposition is.

Our guest blogger is Jessica Arons, director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at American Progress.

Today the Hyde Amendment, which bans Medicaid coverage of abortion with few exceptions, turns 35 years old. Not even its sponsor, Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), could have imagined its unfortunate success. In its three and a half decades, the Hyde Amendment policy has crept into every government-run or government-managed program, including Medicare, the Indian Health Service, the Peace Corps, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, the military’s Tricare program, and federal prisons. And with the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, restrictions on abortion coverage crossed from the public into the private health insurance market as well.

While such restrictions have some effect on all women, poor women and women of color continue to bear the brunt of this cruel policy. Women enrolled in Medicaid — by definition those with the fewest resources — were the first targets of the Hyde Amendment, but two trends have converged to make them even more likely to need an abortion and less likely to be able to afford one.

The United States now has the highest number of people living in poverty since the Census Bureau started tracking the data in 1959. And 14.5 percent of women lived in poverty in 2010, up from 13.9 percent in 2009 — the highest poverty rate for women in 17 years.

At the same time, poor women’s rates of unintended pregnancy are far outpacing those of more affluent women. The unintended pregnancy rate for women with incomes under the federal poverty level rose 50 percent from 1994 to 2006, while women with incomes at or above the poverty line saw their unintended pregnancy rate decrease by almost 30 percent. Poor women’s unintended pregnancy rates rose regardless of their education, race and ethnicity, marital status, or age.

And so the chasm between these two Americas continues to grow wider. A poor woman is five times as likely as her higher-income counterpart to have an unintended pregnancy (132 versus 24 per 1,000 women of reproductive age), six times as likely to have a birth resulting from an unintended pregnancy, and five times as likely to have an abortion (52 versus 9 per 1,000 women). Indeed, more than two-thirds (69 percent) of women who have an abortion are economically disadvantaged.

Put another way, abortion is becoming a poor woman’s problem — just as more women are becoming poor. Yet because of the Hyde Amendment, a woman who qualifies for Medicaid due to her low income is denied coverage for abortion care. Instead, she and her family must divert scarce resources to pay for a needed abortion out of pocket.

The Hyde Amendment’s blatant discrimination against poor women violates the fundamental principles of fairness and equality that our country aspires to achieve. At a time when Americans are experiencing record rates of poverty and economic hardship, the Hyde Amendment only compounds an already difficult situation and cuts off aid to those who need it most.

Until the Hyde Amendment is repealed and poor women receive adequate support for all of their reproductive health needs, rich and poor women will continue to live in two different countries with two different sets of rights. This 35th anniversary of Hyde is nothing to celebrate.

Our guest blogger is Chris Mooney, a editor of The Intersection.

In a Q&A after his event yesterday to announce a “New Contract With America,” Newt Gingrich was asked if he would work to make “Christian social issues the law of the land,” by a questioner who cited stem cell research in particular.

Here was his response:

I am very much for adult stem cell research, and I am very much for stem cell research that comes from, for example, any device other than killing an embryo. But I am opposed to getting involved in a process of killing children in order to have research materials. And I think you’re finding, you look at what’s happening with stem cell research, we have less and less demand that you have anything except regular stem cells, because we’re learning how to use them. So I think that’s an ideological fight, rather than a scientific fight.

The bit about “killing children” is absurd. According to the NIH, most embryos used are leftover from in vitro fertilization clinics, and have been designated for research with the “informed consent of the donors.” They never have any chance of becoming children because they’re never implanted in a womb.

And not only are there no dead children here. Gingrich’s claim about adult stem cells — the “regular” stem cells, he claims — is also way off. He’s engaging in classic hype that the religious right uses whenever this issue comes up — claiming that we don’t really need embryonic stem cells because adult stem cells are so wonderful that they can take care of everything. That would surprise the International Society for Stem Cell Research, which offers this statement on adult stem cell hype by Dr. David Scadden:

Adult stem cell therapies are powerful, but they are not as wide-ranging as claimed. They have a narrow record of disease types for which the therapy is extremely valuable, a success story that is enormously encouraging evidence for stem cell research leading to methods of positively affecting people’s lives. It took approximately 25 years between discovery and routine clinical application of adult stem cell therapy. It is not known how long it will take for embryonic stem cells to become a useful therapy or whether they will ever directly do so. However, it would be unwise to ignore the potential for either adult or embryonic stem cells to result in a meaningful new approach. Adult and embryonic stem cells are complementary subjects of research and studying them side by side offers the greatest potential to rapidly generate new therapies.

Sorry, Newt. And this is a guy who likes science, at least when it suits him.

Gingrich ends the latest clip with a lampooning of evolution — we’re talking Bishop Wilberforce-type stuff.

I always tell my friends who don’t believe in this stuff, fine, how do you think — we’re randomly gathered protoplasm? We could have been rhinoceroses, but we got lucky this week?

Evolution by natural selection is not a random process–though this is a standard creationist talking point. So Gingrich almost hit an anti-science trifecta here — all he had to do was snub global warming too. So close!

Yesterday, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee released a draft spending bill for FY 2012 that could derail the the Affordable Care Act by cutting off funding until the courts rule on the law’s constitutionality. Overall, the budget reduces funding for reform by at least $8.6 billion and allows insurers to effectively flaunt consumer protections and increase health care costs. A sampling of the cuts:

- Rescinds $1 billion for the Prevention and Public Health Fund

- Rescinds $1.2 billion for Community Health Center expansion

- Rescinds $1.9 billion for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Center

- Prohibits funds for the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight

- Eliminates funding for the already defunct CLASS office

The budget remains deadlocked in committee, where two Republican lawmakers, Reps. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), “have objected to appropriations bills with spending levels higher than those contained in the House-passed budget resolution.” But should this measure — or something like it — eventually make it out of the House, Republicans wouldn’t just be going after the parts of the law they disagree with — the mandate or the employer requirements — they’d be striking directly at the heart of the law’s consumer protections and cost-saving initiatives.

For instance, defunding the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight would prevent HHS from enforcing provisions that prohibit discrimination against children with pre-existing conditions and allow young adults up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ policies, effectively empowering insurers to ignore the law and disregard Patients Bill of Rights. It would also halt the drafting of all new regulations and put an end to the federal government’s efforts to help states review and in certain cases deny unreasonable premium rate increases.

The budget would halt progress on developing and testing new, more efficient ways of reimbursing providers — and realigning incentives so that hospitals and doctors are rewarding for delivering quality care — and cut off funding to prevention efforts that help communities fight chronic conditions like heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes that are “responsible for 7 of 10 deaths among Americans each year and account for 75 percent of the nation’s health spending.” All this, while undercutting community health centers — the primary source of care for many Americans which President Bush not only championed but also greatly expanded.