Daily Beast: Where Do Refugee Women Turn for Abortions?
“…[T]here’s an abortion law that has largely been left off the campaign trail and quietly ignored by the Obama administration. It’s a law that, as it is currently being interpreted, refuses abortion funding to refugees who have been raped. But the Helms Amendment … doesn’t actually include that explicit prohibition. As an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA), it specifies that no federal assistance funds ‘may be used to pay for the performance of abortions as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.’ Terminating a pregnancy resulting from rape, as abortion rights advocates have repeatedly pointed out, is not really a matter of ‘family planning’…” (Allen, 2/3).