President to Propose Return to Tax Funding of Abortion : Budget: Lawmaker who backs abortion rights doubts Congress will go along with lifting of 16-year-old ban.

WASHINGTON —  President Clinton will propose ending the 16-year-old ban on federal funding for abortions, the White House announced Tuesday, but a key abortion rights backer in Congress warned that the effort could fail on Capitol Hill.

White House spokesman George Stephanopoulos said that Clinton’s budget documents, which will be submitted to Congress next month, will not contain the so-called Hyde Amendment, which has prohibited the use of federal funds for abortion since 1977.

“For 16 years, you’ve had the federal government flat-out prohibiting states from spending the money to pay for abortions, whether or not they’re medically necessary, whether or not they result from a case of incest, whether or not they threaten the life of the mother. The President feels that goes too far,” Stephanopoulos added.

Although Clinton had promised in his presidential campaign to overturn the amendment, named for Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), polls show that the public overwhelmingly opposes the use of government funds for abortion. At issue is whether Medicaid money should be spent to provide abortions for poor women who cannot otherwise afford them.

“We start to lose when they get into taxpayer dollars. . . . The votes are not there” to pass appropriation legislation without some form of the ban, said Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s civil and constitutional rights subcommittee and one of Congress’ most ardent battlers for abortion rights.

Before the ban was put into place, Medicaid funded about 300,000 abortions a year.

Hyde predicted that lifting the prohibition would lead to another 1 million abortions a year, costing the government an additional $200 million. He offered no comparative figures for the cost of welfare and other government services for children born as a result of unwanted pregnancies.

Hyde vowed to reinstate his amendment when the appropriation legislation is introduced.

The federal funding question has not been put to a straight test since 1983. Four years ago, Congress voted to allow Medicaid to pay for abortions of pregnancies resulting from rape and incest, but then-President George Bush vetoed the bill. Congress also could approve some similar kind of modification this time.

Federal funding is one of a host of abortion-related issues that Congress must face on a series of bills that it is expected to consider over the next few months. Edwards’ subcommittee is drafting legislation intended to write into law Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that established the right to abortion.

Taken together, the measures will test how far Congress is willing to move on abortion rights in the wake of the election of a President who supports them.

“There are a lot of members of Congress who support legal abortion, or even the Freedom of Choice Act, who would oppose tax funding. On the other hand, it’s been 10 years since they’ve voted on the Hyde Amendment,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, the nation’s largest anti-abortion organization.

During his campaign, Clinton put heavy emphasis on reversing the setbacks that the abortion rights movement believed it had experienced under Bush and former President Ronald Reagan. On his second full day in office, the President swept away a series of executive orders, including bans on fetal tissue research, abortion counseling in federally funded family planning clinics and the performance of abortions at military hospitals overseas.

Still in question is whether abortion will be included in the President’s proposal for reforming the nation’s health care system, which he expects to submit to Congress in May. Stephanopoulos declined to comment on how the issue would be treated in that plan. But abortion rights advocates are insisting that abortion services be included in the basic set of health benefits that Clinton hopes to guarantee every American.

There, too, he can expect a fight. “We had always hoped that poor women would be taken care of in the health bill, but I don’t know if we will be able to do that. Right now, we don’t have the votes,” Edwards said.