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People are wondering: does President Obama’s executive order, which obtained the votes of (almost all) the Stupak coalition, change anything about the outcome?

Unfortunately it changes very little, and will have no ultimate effect. I will offer a reasoned summary of the relevant issues here, recognizing of course that the liberal Catholic groups praising this bill are no more likely to listen to reason now than they were before yesterday’s vote.

The pro-life movement had and has several specific concerns about this health reform Act. First, the Act funds abortion-covering insurance, it therefore makes abortion insurance available to thousands of women who don’t now have abortions due to lack of insurance, and it changes 32 states from ones that have laws against administering abortion insurance and turns them all into states that do administer abortion insurance.

Second, the Act fails to restrict $11 Billion in funding to “community health centers” from going for abortion.

Third, the Act vastly expands government power and funding without including a corresponding limit to stop that power and funding from making and facilitating conscience violations against pro-life health providers.

Fourth, the Act allows HHS to define abortion into various elements of health care, like “ambulatory patient services,” “prescription drugs,” and “preventive” services.

On the first point of funding abortion insurance and initially forcing states to assist, the Executive Order changes nothing at all. By its terms, it repeats exactly the abortion-insurance funding scheme in the Act. There’s simply no change.

On the second point, the Order does, while it lasts, prevent HHS from taking the initiative to fund abortion with the CHC money, but this limit has little significance because it will be immediately struck down when Planned Parenthood and its abortionist allies are denied CHC funding and then sue. Federal courts have long held that if funding broadly covers Ob/Gyn care it can’t omit abortion unless the statute explicitly excludes abortion. The Order is powerless to change that precedent.

Third, the Order does absolutely nothing to protect conscience rights. Although it mentions conscience rights in the introduction, the Order contains no implementing directives to do anything about conscience rights. This is telling, since President Bush’s mere attempt to enforce existing law was immediately and forcefully eliminated by this President last year. The Order says that existing conscience law will remain in place, but that is largely meaningless because existing laws like the Church and Weldon Amendments don’t apply to much of the new government power and funding in this Act. What both the Act and this Order explicitly fail to do is apply existing conscience rules to all the new government power and funding (which the House bill, and a proposed Senate amendment, would have done). And again, HHS already has acted not to enforce existing laws, even if they did apply. This order changes absolutely nothing from the Act in favor of conscience rights.

On the fourth point, again the Order has no effect. The order doesn’t talk about HHS’s power to define abortion as health care–it only talks about using an accounting scheme to claim that abortions aren’t funded. HHS remains as free as it is in the Act to include abortion as health care in the regulatory decisions it makes.

In summary then, President Obama’s executive order changes almost nothing to alleviate pro-life concerns over this Act. It fully allows federal funding for abortion insurance, it cannot change the fact that CHC funds will be used for abortion, it follows HHS policy against conscience rights by utterly failing to do anything on the issue, and it does not change any of HHS’s ability under the Act to define abortion as health care.

Any pro-lifer concerned about the Act would, objectively, have the same concerns against the Act with or without this executive order.