When White House budget director Peter Orszag was asked whether “no taxpayer money will go to pay for abortions” under proposed health care legislation, he replied, “I’m not prepared to say explicitly that right now.”

There was no reason for Orszag to sound tentative—everyone who has followed this issue knew that President Obama has been very explicit about his support for abortion, as well as his desire to make the public pay for them. Sure, the president says he wants “common ground”, but there is no evidence of his budging on this issue when it gets to the policy stage. In the end, that’s the only stage that matters.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, another champion of abortion-on-demand through term, commented on health care reform saying, “There are basically five different plans in Congress right now and there are a variety of ways.” None of the plans being touted explicitly says that abortion will not be subsidized. We know that the Democrats, following the party line, have killed every amendment that would bar public funding of abortion. So who is kidding whom?

If the Bush administration had said that it wanted to seek “common ground” on gun control, and then decided to subsidize handguns in high crime areas, it would have been condemned from high heaven. The Obama administration’s game of flirting with the abortion industry should similarly be condemned. Indeed, it represents the audacity of duplicity to dialogue about abortion and then send the public an invoice for killing kids in utero.

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