Anti-abortion activists are outraged by a backdoor maneuver that scuttled a proposal to limit the number of taxpayer-financed abortions at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. A House/Senate subcommittee voted last week to forbid public financing for “medically necessary” abortions for poor women carrying a deformed fetus. But early this morning, the huge state budget bill that cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee did not include that prohibition. Kim Gordon of the Iowa Right to Life Committee says republican legislative leaders in the Senate let her group down. Gordon says the state should not targeting handicapped, or not perfect people to be paying for their death. Gordon says you just don’t find public support for the idea of taxpayer-financing for abortions that target “not-perfect” babies. Gordon says the proposal did not forbid so-called “medically necessary” abortion, but simple said taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used. Advocates of abortion rights say the publicly-financed abortions performed in Iowa City are for severely deformed fetuses, some of which have no brains and could not live outside the womb.
