Insurance Coverage and Abortion Incidence: Information and Misinformation

7 W ith a grim inevitability, the issue of restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion moved to center stage as the congressional health care reform debate came to a head in the fall of 2009. What was less predictable, perhaps, was that abortion opponents would misuse Guttmacher Institute research to bolster their assertion that anything short of a flat ban on coverage of the procedure would somehow greatly increase the number of abortions taking place in the United States. According to Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, enactment of the Senate version of the measure—notwithstanding its stringent abortion coverage restrictions— would “lead, as some experts project, to a 30 percent increase in abortions in America.This legislation, if passed, will be the largest expansion of abortion since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.”