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

(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budget repealed the policy approved by the District and reinstituted the rider.