House of Representatives Removes DC Abortion Funding Ban, Rejects Ban on Funding for Needle Exchange

The House of Representatives tooks the first step toward allowing the District of Columbia to use its own funds to help low-income women seeking abortion to afford one and rejected an effort to ban safe needle exchange.

In a major victory for public health, the U.S. House of Represenatives voted on Thursday to remove the ban that has barred the District of Columbia from using local tax money to help low-income women pay for abortions and also
blocked a measure that would have effectively prevented the city from
paying for needle-exchange programs intended to reduce the spread of
AIDS among intravenous drug users, reports the New York Times.

Eleanor Holmes Norton,
a Democrat and the city’s nonvoting member of the House, said the
bill’s passage represented a major breakthrough for home rule.

Removing the rider that barred financing for abortions was especially
important, Ms. Norton said, because it “has created severe hardships
for low-income women in the District.”

“It has singled out the District and its women for unfair and unequal treatment,” she added.

A representative of the Catholic Church in the District denounced the change. 

Home rule--the right of the District of Columbia to control its own budget and to have representation in Congress–is a highly politicized issue and lack of home rule has left DC subject to the whims of the party in power. As the Times piece notes:

Because Washington
is not part of a state, Congress oversees most of its local system of
government and approves its budget. For decades, federal lawmakers,
most of whom live outside the city, have placed riders or “special
restrictions” in the bill authorizing how city officials can use local
tax dollars, and often these provisions went against the will of city
voters.

With a strong
Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, city residents hoped
over the last year to win more local autonomy and possibly voting
rights, particularly because President Obama, a co-sponsor of a 2007 bill to give the District of Columbia a voting member in the House, has said his stance is unchanged.

The Senate and House leadership support granting the city a House
member, but legislative efforts have been blocked by opponents who say
it first requires a constitutional amendment. Republican opponents of
voting rights for the city also fear that giving Washington a House
member would eventually lead to the city’s getting two senators, both
of whom would most likely be Democrats.

Susan Gibbs, a
spokeswoman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, said the
legislation’s loosening of restrictions on abortions was especially
disconcerting.

“The abortion rate in this city already exceeds
40 percent of all pregnancies,” Ms. Gibbs told the Times, citing 2005 data from a
report released by the Guttmacher Institute,
a nonprofit organization focused on reproductive health issues. “It’s
hard to figure out what the justification would be to increase funding
and encourage even more abortions.”

City Health Department
statistics, however, show that roughly 25 percent of all reported
pregnancies in 2005 ended in abortion, and that figure fell to 15
percent in 2007.

The city’s needle exchange programs have been a source of friction in relations between local leaders and federal lawmakers. Until 2007, when the ban was lifted, Washington was the only city in
the country forbidden by Congress from using both local and federal tax
dollars to distribute clean needles to drug addicts.

As the Times reports:

This year
Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, added a rider to a
bill that would have essentially reinstated the ban by prohibiting the
city from providing money to any needle exchange program that operates
within 1,000 feet of virtually any location where children gather.

That
rider was so restrictive that the only area left where programs could
have operated was graveyards or in the middle of the Potomac River,
city officials and needle exchange advocates said. Representative Jose
E. Serrano, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House
Appropriations Committee, fought to remove Mr. Kingston’s rider from
the legislative package that was approved Thursday, and succeeded.

The
bill also removed a similar rider that would have prevented needle
exchange programs anywhere in the country that receives federal money
from operating within 1,000 feet of places where children gather.

The bill would also free the city from having to obtain Congressional approval of its annual budget.