From people on the right, I hear that the recently passed legislation is one of the worst pro-abortion moves made by congress in the history of the country.
From people on the left I hear that the legislation explicitly disallows funding of abortions through any of its measures.
What does the bill actually say? What are the people on the right talking about? What are the people on the left talking about?
Basically the bill doesn’t change anything with regard to abortion at all. It retains the status quo. This non-partisan Politifact article explains the situation quite well.
With regard to whether abortion is legal or not, the bill literally changes nothing, and no one is claiming it does. What the abortion debate concerned over the health care bill was about federal funding of abortion. The situation got a bit complicated, and it’s riddled with politics, but basically the Hyde Amendment, which was introduced in 1976 and which gets renewed every year, bans the federal funding of abortion. The objection was this: because this health care bill provides government subsidies to people to help them buy health insurance from private insurance companies - which are allowed to offer abortion coverage - then the government would give people money to buy insurance that covers abortions. That would mean taxpayer-funded abortions, and a lot of taxpayers would not accept that.
To avoid that happening, both versions of the health care bill - the House version and the Senate version - inserted their own abortion amendment. In the House bill, Bart Stupak inserted an amendment which said that anyone accepting federal subsidies simply could not buy a private plan that covered insurance, unless they bought a separate abortion “rider”, paid for with their own money. In the Senate, Ben Nelson inserted an amendment that did allow those accepting federal subsidies to buy private plans including abortion coverage, but they had to set up two accounts: one to receive federal subsidies and to pay for most of their health care, and another, which could not receive subsidies, to pay for abortions. The Senate version is basically what ended up being signed into law. Bart Stupak only agreed to vote for the Senate version after Obama signed an executive order ‘banning federal subsidies for abortion’, but all that order really did was repeat the language already in the bill (it was mainly for political reasons, to give Stupak some cover). Bottom line is, it is still technically and practically illegal to use federal funds to pay for abortions. The bill changes nothing.
Objections
There’s a few different reasons why anti-abortion groups condemned the bill (there are valid concerns, but we have to be careful because there’s also a lot of politics mixed in. A lot Republicans were trying to stir up opposition to the bill any way they could, and abortion was a good flashpoint for doing that). Here’s the ones I know about:
**1) ‘Just bookkeeping’:**The first is that even if people still have to pay for abortions from a separate account, which won’t receive any federal subsidies, anti-abortion groups say that this is just a bookkeeping exercise. Money is fungible, so if federal subsidies pay for someone’s health care, that frees up their money to let them pay for their own abortions, and taxpayers are still effectively funding abortion. I think this objection is very poor: taxpayers also pay for agricultural subsidies for instance, and you could argue that technically “frees up money” to pay for abortions, but it would be ridiculous to suggest that means taxpayers are funding abortions for farmers as a result.
2) Community centers: Some anti-abortion groups have tried to be more clever in their criticism than the argument above, saying that the bill provides billions of dollars in funding to community health centers, which in turn provide abortion services. The problem is, this is false: none of the community centers which receive funding in the bill provide abortion services, because this would be illegal under the Hyde Amendment. I think they have some sort of response about community health centers not funding abortion yet, or something.
3) Abortion rate will rise: Some have simply argued that the health care bill will result in a rise in the rate of abortions, for various reasons I’m not too sure about. But the evidence doesn’t suggest it. Mitt Romney introduced a very similar health care reform in Massachusetts to Obama’s plan, and the number of abortions there dropped afterwards. The health care reforms make it cheaper for people to access birth control, make childbirth itself more affordable (it can be expensive) and provide people more security over whether they’ll be able to afford health insurance for a child.
Catholic groups have come out in support of the bill, pro-choice groups have condemned it for putting needless burdens on people trying to buy abortion coverage, and personally I think the abortion criticisms are primarily a result of people who oppose the bill anyway scanning around for a good flashpoint as a reason for their opposition. But there’s the debate for you. 
As a side note though, taxpayers basically do fund abortion already, in the form of the tax exclusion for employer-provided health care plans. Those are allowed to cover abortion. But that didn’t really get mentioned because congressmen wouldn’t win enough political support for trying to change that.
The objection my dad (a member of the Religious Right) raises is that the bill includes funding for prenatal care, and that’s obviously just a code word for abortion. Needless to say, my dad does not know much about the female side of reproduction.
This: http://jewishworldreview.com/kathleen/parker032810.php3 does a good job summarizing the conservative arguement about the how the healthcare bill subsidizes abortion.
Summary-The Hyde amendment only applies to HHS funds, the HRC bill establishes community health centers and mandates they perform ob/gyn functions. Since the law does not forbid abortions at these centers current interpretation of law means that abortions are ok to happen.
That’s an interesting article which makes a good case. It’s a much better-informed version of the second objection I laid out above, and Mike Huckabee among others have made it. This link provides the opposing case. Health care expert Timothy Jost argues that the health care bill appropriates funds to be transferred to community health centers, but then transfers them back into Department of Human and Health Services accounts from where they are distributed to CHCs, meaning they will indeed be directly subject to the Hyde Amendment. The National Association of Community Health Centers agreed, releasing a statement which said it believes the Hyde Amendment will continue to apply to the funding it receives from the health care bill, and that it is not aware of any community health centers that are planning to offer abortion services anyway (let alone being ‘mandated’ to offer them).
Furthermore, a memo for the Department of Human and Health Services says that even if the funds for community health centers were not subject to the Hyde Amendment, there are regulations governing any programs administered by Health Resources and Service Administration and Public Health Sciences departments, which would include the community health centers program:
Either way, no one in this specific debate is arguing that federal funds in the health care bill are being used for abortions, just that they could be in the future. Personally I’m not convinced.
Has your dad discussed his views on “prenatal care” with, for example, your mom?
Hmm. Tell him the code word to watch out for would be antinatal care, not prenatal. 'cause, you know, prenatal implies that natal will be happening at the end.