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

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