From Charmaine Yoest at the Wall Street Journal March 4, 2010

[bold emphasis mine]

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It’s now becoming clear that Barack Obama is willing to put everything on the table in order to be the president who passes health-care reform. Everything, that is, except a ban on federal funding for abortion.

Last September, the president promised that “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.” Yet the legislation most likely to move forward in Congress would be the single greatest expansion of abortion since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

The White House knows how to turn Mr. Obama’s September commitment into legislative action. I met with senior White House officials and told them that only adding a so-called Hyde Amendment to the health-care reform bills would fulfill the president’s promise to protect Americans from subsidizing abortion.

The Hyde Amendment dates back to the 1970s, when congressional leaders discovered that Medicaid was paying for nearly 300,000 abortions a year. This had not been an intended outcome of the Medicaid program, which was created in 1965 with strong bipartisan support. So in 1976 Rep. Henry Hyde introduced an amendment to the Health and Human Services appropriations bill prohibiting taxpayer funds from paying for abortions.

Read the rest here.