President Barack Obama's health care reform law may bring
new benefits and coverage to women. But Obamacare has also unintentionally provoked a slew of new restrictions on insurance coverage of abortion
Since Obama signed his health care plan into law in 2010, 21 states have enacted laws restricting private insurance companies from covering abortion, and more may follow.
The result is that women in 23 states won't be able to go to an Obamacare insurance exchange and buy a health plan that includes coverage of abortion, except under extreme circumstances.
State legislatures from Alabama to Pennsylvania to Wisconsin dusted off the anti-abortion playbook of the 1980s to pass laws that prohibit health insurance companies from including abortion as a covered service, beyond
exceptions such as protecting a pregnant woman's life. In some states, women theoretically are permitted to buy separate coverage for abortion, but abortion rights activists say such plans are impossible to find.
"What they're trying to do make abortion more difficult to access and unaffordable for women, and this is one of the ways they can do that," said Gretchen Borchelt, director of state reproductive health policy at the National Women's Law Center in Washington. "It's part and parcel of the larger effort to make abortion harder for women to get."
But the new laws on health insurance wouldn't have happened without the passage of the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, and the intense Republican opposition to the law, advocates on both sides of the abortion issue say.
