Does health care include abortion?

AUL's Charmaine Yoest has a nice editorial in the Washington Times on abortion and health care.

Lost in the debate over whether or not abortion "is in there" -- whether or not you can flip to a certain page and point to a particular clause related to abortion funding -- is an understanding among political elites that this is a watershed battle over definition. It's existential, if you will, and comes down to a very straightforward question: Is abortion health care, or is it not?

An inadvertent answer from the abortion advocates' side emerged during the debate over HR 3200 in the House Education and Labor Committee on July 22, after Rep. Mark Souder, Indiana Republican, offered an amendment to exclude abortion funding from health care reform. Rep. Lynn Woolsey, California Democrat, clearly miffed, responded:

"[Abortion] is a legal medical practice and by even having to talk about it ... we're not talking about having your tonsils out. ..."

No, indeed we are not. As a matter of public policy, we still have the ability to differentiate between an abortion and a tonsillectomy. But this is precisely the debate we now confront. Planned Parenthood and the abortion lobby defines abortion as health care, as being morally equivalent to a tonsillectomy, and health care reform is their vehicle for imposing that view definitively with the full force of the federal government....

This is quite literally a defining moment for the pro-life movement. On Planned Parenthood's Web site, the very first category under "Health" on the navigation bar is the "Abortion" category. This is their agenda -- to win by definition. If the abortion lobby succeeds at equating abortion with health care at the federal level, they will have shifted the entire debate. They've been marking this turf for years with poll-tested messaging, describing abortion as 'reproductive health." Now they are reaching for their ultimate objective of removing the "reproductive" adjective and making it mandatory health care, plain and simple.