by Ben Johnson
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 13, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – The founder of the House Tea Party Caucus is warning that the Obama administration’s pro-contraception stance and disregard for religious liberty could lead it to restrict the number of children American women are allowed have.
Last Tuesday, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, R-MN, told GBTV’s “Real News From The Blaze” program she disagreed with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ argument that paying for contraceptives saves money by reducing health care costs – and that her analysis sets a dangerous precedent.
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann
“Going with that logic, it isn’t far fetched to think the president of the United States could say…we need to save health care expenses…[so] the federal government will only pay for one baby to be born in the hospital per family. Or two babies to be born per family. That could happen.”
“I’m not saying he is going to do it,” Bachmann clarified. “I’m saying he has the power and authority to do it.”
“Michele Bachmann is correct. There’s nothing that prohibits Congress and the federal bureaucracies from saying they will only pay for up to two births,” John Vinci a staff attorney for Americans for Limited Government, told LifeSiteNews.com. “Constitutionally, nothing prohibits the federal government from rationing the health care it subsidizes.”
“Certainly what Congresswoman Bachman claimed is not out of the realm of possibility given what we know about the extreme views of some members of the Obama administration, and the new powers they have assumed via Obamacare,” agreed Father Peter West, vice president for mission for Human Life International, in a statement e-mailed to LifeSiteNews.com.
Vinci, who edits the website ObamacareWatcher.org, said the economic principles of national health care make rationing inevitable. “Because of scarcity rationing must occur,” he told LifeSiteNews. “Under a healthy free market system, scarcity is regulated by price. With ObamaCare, we have rejected free market principles of price as the regulator of scarcity and have replaced it with bureaucrats.”
Mandating “free” contraception, and requiring employers to pay for a host of other services, will hasten the process, he said. “Since drug manufacturers no longer have to compete on price, what keeps them from raising their prices? And when the federal government figures out that health care costs are rising, nothing keeps them from limiting the benefits through rationing.”
Fr. West said moral principles also underlie such a decision. “In 1968’s Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI made four famous predictions, all of which have come true. The fourth had to do with the coercive use of contraception by governments, and we see this most clearly enforced in China with their abusive one-child policy.”
With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, he said, “we see the framework for tyranny even in the United States.”
“Obama’s science czar, John Holdren, has openly advocated for coercive government population control, including forced abortion. Vice President Joe Biden ‘understands’ China’s destructive one-child policy and couldn’t bring himself to condemn it once challenged on his statement.”
In his 1977 book Ecoscience, co-authored with population control advocates Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Holdren wrote, “compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.” Holdren also called for “a comprehensive Planetary Regime” to set appropriate population levels for every country in the world.
Vice President Biden told a Chinese audience he was “not second-guessing” the nation’s one-child policy during a visit last August.
“The more we find out about ObamaCare,” Fr. West told LifeSiteNews, “the more we learn that it is a blank check for the administration to do whatever it wants, unchecked by Congress, and in complete disregard for the Bill of Rights.”
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