Gov. Robert Casey has told President Clinton that Pennsylvania will not obey an administration directive that would require the state to help pay for hundreds more abortions each year for poor women who claim their pregnancies are the result of rape or incest.
“I have no intention of following it,” Casey told Clinton in the Jan. 14 letter. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obtained a copy of the letter Monday.
Clinton was not yet aware of Casey’s letter, said Ginny Terzano, a White House news secretary.
“I don’t think it’s reached the president’s desk,” she said.
Terzano affirmed Clinton’s support for the order, saying, “This is a directive that the president is supportive of” and “that’s a bottom line.”
Casey’s defiance puts Pennsylvania at risk of losing the $2.9 billion a year it gets from the federal government in Medicaid funding. However, officials said such an extreme result was unlikely.
Several states have objected to the Dec. 28 directive, but Casey is the first governor to proclaim his defiance openly, said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee.
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Although Casey and Clinton both are Democrats, theirs has not been a warm relationship. Clinton favors abortion rights, while Casey thinks government should outlaw abortion.
Kathryn Kolbert, one of the nation’s leading abortion-rights lawyers, said Casey’s efforts to limit abortions for rape and incest victims were “extraordinarily cruel” and predicted that the governor would lose in court.
“I think the governor’s lawyers probably ought to go back to the drawing boards,” she said.
At issue is a 1988 Pennsylvania law that sets the circumstances under which poor women who are victims of rape or incest can get an abortion under Medicaid.
The law requires a Medicaid recipient to report a rape or incest to authorities before she can get an abortion. The law is designed, according to proponents, to prevent women from fraudulently claiming rape or incest to get a free abortion.
Clinton’s directive, issued by an official at the Department of Health and Human Services, gives abortion physicians the right to waive that requirement if the doctor determines that a woman “for physical or psychological reasons” cannot report the crime.