Mr. Speaker, let me begin by thanking the gentleman for yielding me this time and for his great service to this body, to the people of the United States. And let me express my regret that he will not be yielding time in the future.
Mr. Speaker, this bill comes before us is an omnibus bill because we did not take all the bills, vote on them on the floor, and the Senate did not do it either. This bill has some real inadequacies in its appropriation. In what promises to be a very cold winter, an inadequate LIHEAP appropriation; a $10 million cut in housing for people with AIDS, as if that scourge is going away from us; and a lot of other inadequacies in funding.
What I want to focus on is a major policy change that has been referred to by several other speakers, the so-called Weldon gag rule. This Federal refusal clause would allow not just hospitals but insurance companies, HMOs, to order their doctors not to perform abortions, not to refer people to abortions, not to tell people about abortion as an option. So whose conscience are we protecting? The board of directors of the insurance company? The doctors? The patients?
This is an outrage, because it will mean that women who want to have abortions, that women who might want to have abortions, that doctors who think they ought to tell women about their options are told to shut up. By Federal law they cannot do this, because we care about limiting access to a constitutional right, because that is the real purpose of this.
The proposal would preclude State and local governments with oversight authority from enforcing basic health care certifications and licensing requirements in the area of abortion; and in deciding whether to approve a hospital merger, for instance, they could not say no if this would decrease the availability of abortion services or even referral services in an area. Under the bill, States would be precluded from requiring that health care companies provide even referrals for abortion services as a condition for participating in the Medicaid program.
Now, this invasion of States rights, this invasion of the conscience of the women, this invasion of the conscience of the doctors is very deliberate. It is because the people who wrote this clause do not want people to have the freedom to decide for themselves, do not want them to be able to avail themselves of their constitutional rights.
This is not a conscience protection clause. This is a gag rule, and it ought to be defeated.