How DC Home Rule Will Help Low-Income Women Seeking Abortions

http://www.thenation.com/article/175595/how-dc-home-rule-will-help-low-income-women-seeking-abortions#axzz2bBoTvct5


Artists celebrate Flag Day in Washington, DC, on June 14, 2011. (Courtesy of Flickr.)
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DC residents realize that if the district is ever going to wrest control over local revenue spending from Congress, then they have to take matters into their own hands.
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“Home rule,” an expression synonymous with administrative and budgetary autonomy, is closer than ever to being achieved in DC, thanks to multi-pronged efforts both inside and outside of Congress. The federal government currently dictates how DC can spend its own local tax dollars, which make up 70 percent of the district’s budget. The lack of home rule has had profound implications for not just needle exchanges and medical marijuana programs that the City Council approved and Congress rejected but also for low-income women. House Republicans have repeatedly prohibited the district from using local funds to help Medicaid-enrolled women access abortions, even though the mayor, city council and the district’s congressional representative, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, are all in favor of doing so.

he best hope for DC autonomy may come in the form of an amendment to the Home Rule Charter, which 83 percent of the district’s voters supported in a referendum in April. Though the House Appropriations Committee dismissed the referendum as “an expression of the opinion of the residents, only,” that lacked “any authority to change or alter the existing relationship between federal appropriations and the District,” it went unchallenged during a thirty-five-day period of congressional review that just concluded.

“I don’t think Congress was paying attention to the charter amendment,” Congresswoman Norton told The Nation. Absent a double take by Congress, the charter amendment will become law January 1, 2014, to be implemented for the next fiscal year.