CRR Calls on Senate to Lift Ban on Funding for D.C. Abortion Services

09.15.11 - (PRESS RELEASE) As the Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to vote on a budget bill for the District of Columbia’s fiscal year 2012, the Center for Reproductive Rights called on members of the Senate to defeat any efforts to re-impose the longtime ban on abortion funding in the city.  In the final bill funding appropriations for 2010, Congress included a provision that prohibits the city from using local tax money to pay for abortion services for low-income women. Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said this in response to the threat of an amendment that would impose a ban on D.C.:

“Congress doesn’t tell any of the fifty states how to spend their own public dollars—including paying for women’s abortion services—and it shouldn’t deny the District that power either. Congressional leaders and the White House steamrolled over the District’s decision to fund abortion services during this year’s federal budget negotiations last spring. Now, it’s time for a do-over.

“It is profoundly undemocratic to single out onejurisdiction and deny its residents the most basic privilege—the right to a voice in their local government. And it is clearly unfair to refuse poor women the same access to a constitutionally protected medical service as other women. We strongly urge members of the Senate to vote down this unfair policy and allow the District to protect the healthcare needs of D.C. women.”

Earlier this week, 59 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Senate Appropriators, urging its members to stand firm against any attempt to include a ban on D.C.’s use of its own funds.

Seventeen states pay for medically necessary abortions for poor women. In 2009, Congress voted to lift the ban on abortion funding and D.C. voted to fund low-income women’s medically necessary abortions. But a spending compromise made in April over the FY2011 federal budget repealed the policy approved by the District and reinstituted the rider.