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Medicaid funding could be cause of abortion battle
CHARLESTON -- After a year that saw their favored legislation stalled, abortion opponents hope the current legislative session will be more fruitful, despite the torpor of an election year.
Although 44 bills related to abortion have been introduced in the House and Senate so far, abortion foes are heavily promoting a bill that would limit the amount of Medicaid dollars the state spends on the procedure to those cases in which the federal government requires it.
Abortion rights supporters, though, point to the state's steadily declining abortion rate as evidence that new legislation isn't required to reduce the number of abortions in West Virginia.
The ultimate factor in whether the bill gains much traction, though, could be whether lawmakers have the taste for tackling a controversial issue in an election year.
"I think you get to a saturation point at times with legislators," Sen. Roman Prezioso said Tuesday, the 35th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortions.
As chairman of the Senate Health and Human Resources Committee, the Marion County Democrat will get a chance to vet any abortion-related legislation that has a chance of passing the Senate. He said members of the committee are reviewing the abortion bills, including ones that would limit state funding.
The federal government requires states to provide funding for abortions in cases of rape, incest or where the life of the mother is endangered. Seventeen states, including West Virginia, provide broader funding for abortions sought by women eligible for Medicaid, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In the 2007 fiscal year, West Virginia's Medicaid program spent roughly $228,000 on abortions, according to Shannon Landrum, executive assistant to the state Medicaid commissioner. That number will likely increase, though, as doctors have up to a year to bill Medicaid for services.
It's unlikely, though, that the final tally will exceed the approximately $400,000 the state spent on abortions in the 2006 fiscal year, Landrum said.
State Medicaid officials did not have immediate access to the number of abortions paid for with state funding.
West Virginians for Life, an influential anti-abortion group, favors the legislation limiting Medicaid funds to federally required cases. Melissa Adkins, the group's executive director, argues that with legislative leadership largely in the anti-abortion camp, such legislation has a good chance of success.
Last year, the group supported a bill that would have toughened parental notification requirements for minors seeking abortions, but that measure did not make it to a vote by the full Legislature.
The Medicaid bill has a better chance, Adkins said, contrasting it with a strategy adopted by abortion foes elsewhere in the country aimed at amending state constitutions to recognize fertilized eggs as human beings.
"That would still require the passing of additional legislation and the overturning of Roe v. Wade before that amendment has any effect," Adkins said. "This bill is something we know is constitutional and has a lot of support."
A report last week by the Guttmacher Institute found that West Virginia is in line with a nationwide trend of a decline in abortion rates. Although the Guttmacher Institute favors abortion rights, both sides in the debate on the issue consider its abortion surveys the most comprehensive in the United States.
The abortion rate in West Virginia fell to 6.7 per 100,000 women aged 14 to 55 from 6.8 in 2000, a decline of 2 percent. Since 1992, the state's abortion rate has fallen by 25 percent. The Guttmacher Institute recorded 2,360 abortions in West Virginia in 2005, although state data released last May found an even lower number.
The national rate is 19.4, the lowest since 1974. There are six states -- Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming -- with lower abortion rates than West Virginia.
Those figures have bolstered abortion rights supporters' argument that new legislation is unnecessary.
"These restrictive measures aren't useful, and they're not getting at the goal of preventing unintended pregnancy," said Margaret Chapman, executive director of WV FREE, an abortion rights group.
Chapman's group argues that expanding sex education and family planning options will do more to reduce the abortion rate than limiting Medicaid funds.
