Charles A. “Chuck” Donovan

More than a week into the enrollment period for health insurance via the federal-state insurance exchanges, whether existing plan options include elective abortion remains anything but clear.  Under Obamacare, a cluster of Multi-State Plans (MSPs) are likely to include elective abortion coverage in 27 states.  In each of those states, at least one MSP is required under federal law to exclude elective abortion coverage so that individual subscribers can select an option that squares with this element of conscience.  But how to tell an elective-abortion plan from one that does not include it?

In this report, CLI President Chuck Donovan documents how multi-state plans (MSPs) created under the Affordable Care Act are one pathway that would allow for an additional 111,500 publicly subsidized abortions per year.

The Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) is a non-profit pro-life and bioethics research and policy organization.  As such, CLI supports the protection of all human life from conception and appreciates the opportunity to comment on West Virginia law pertaining to abortion, abortion regulation, and women’s health.  CLI strongly supports policies which will protect the health and lives of women and unborn children.  To that end, CLI advocates gestational limitations on abortion and government regulation, rather than private accreditation, of abortion clinics at the same level as other facilities that provide outpatient surgical care.

In a new video released by commentator William Saletan at Slate magazine, the author critiques videos released by the activist group Live Action regarding clinics that perform late-term abortions.  In those videos, Live Action shows interactions between women whose pregnancies are in the range of 23 completed weeks of gestation.  Saletan critiques the editing of the video to omit points he argues show the clinics in a more favorable light, then states, “Here’s the big thing… even if you didn’t administer an injection, that kills the fetus inside the womb, which nearly all of these clinics do, the mere expulsion of the fetus, even at 21, 22, or 23, weeks is, itself, fatal.  That fetus is not prepared to survive the womb.”

Charlotte Lozier Institute President Chuck Donovan discusses the importance of accurate and reliable abortion reporting in the states at the New York Times.

This paper surveys the current state of federal and state adoption tax credits, which provide relief to families who choose to adopt a child. The paper makes several recommendations including making the adoption tax credit refundable so that adoption is an option for more families as it is such a positive force for children, families, and the country as a whole.

National and state abortion reporting laws and policies in the United States are a patchwork that falls far short of fulfilling the potential of this information to inform and guide public policy.   The composite picture they reveal is at once impressionistic and incomplete, non-contemporaneous and of limited use in providing a true and timely rendering of the impact of public policies and attitudes on the reality of abortion in the United States.

The tragic news of the death of an expectant mother in Ireland has drawn worldwide attention in a way, it is safe to say, deaths of other expectant mothers (like Tonya Reaves, who died as a result of a botched abortion at Planned Parenthood last July) have not.  The death of Savita Halappanavar is worthy of the closest scrutiny, because she and her family, as well as every expectant mother in Ireland, has a right to know if the sequence of events that led to her death was a case of medical malpractice or neglect, a result of the Irish law on abortion, a result of misapplication of that law, an admixture of these factors - or even unavoidable.

On March 21,2012 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published the final version of its advanced notice of proposed rule making (ANPRM) for mandatory preventive services coverage under the Affordable Care Act (77 Fed.Reg.16501).

Thanks to a detailed abortion reporting policy for New York City and a riveting graphic just published by the Chiaroscuro Foundation, we know that the city’s abortion ratio is 41%, using a Guttmacher Institute formula calculated as "abortions per 100 pregnancies ending in abortion or live birth."