Washington, DC -- President Barack Obama's new federal budget calls for taxpayer funded abortions in the nation's capital. Although Obama has promised Americans he wants to reduce the number of abortions, one pro-life group says he is violating that promise by calling for taxpayer-financed abortions in the District of Columbia.

The budget Obama submitted to Congress urges the House and Senate to repeal a law sometimes called the Dornan amendment that has prevented tax-funded abortion in the District of Columbia for many years.

Congress, as authorized by the U.S. Constitution, holds complete legislative authority over the District of Columbia and, therefore, determines whether taxpayer dollars will be used to fund abortions for poor women there.

Although Congress has banned taxpayer-funded abortions in D.C. for years, the budget Obama released today, on Appendix page 1209 asks Congress to repeal the ban.

Douglas Johnson, the legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, told LifeNews.com on Thursday that the Obama budget makes it clear that the president has little interest in reducing abortions.

"Some wide-eyed journalists and various political shills for the Obama Administration continue to write fairy tales about how President Obama wants to pursue policies that would reduce abortions," he said. "That is a political scam."

"In reality, President Obama is pursuing a step-by-step strategy to expand access to abortion, and today's step is to urge Congress to authorize the funding of abortion on demand in the nation's capital, with funds appropriated by Congress," he said.

Johnson said the Obama budget replaces the taxpayer funding ban and replaces it with a meaningless bookkeeping requirement that would apply only to funds specifically contributed for federal program purposes.

That will result in more abortions taking place in Washington.

"If Congress goes along with the Obama proposal, the predictable result will be tax funding of several thousand elective abortions annually, including roughly 1,000 abortions annually that would not otherwise occur," Johnson explained.

Johnson says even pro-abortion groups have published studies showing that bans on taxpayer-funded abortions reduce the number of abortions by about one-third.

"The abortion industry's own studies suggest that many thousands of residents of the nation's capital are alive today because of the abortion funding ban that President Obama now proposes to repeal," he said.

"Today's White House action is one more evidence that President Obama is trying to pull off a massive policy scam -- he generates a smokescreen of soothing rhetoric about seeking 'common ground' and 'abortion reduction,' while step by step advancing concrete policies that will substantially increase the number of abortions -- and pay for abortion on demand with everyone's taxes," Johnson concluded.

From 1988 until 1993, Congress annually included the ban on the use of congressionally appropriated funds to pay for abortions in the District of Columbia.

The ban was rescinded during the early years of the Clinton administration and reinstated in 1996, though Johnson points out that the Washington city government illegally continued to pay for abortions for two subsequent years.

During the congressional debates of that era, evidence was cited that indicated that the city's abortion-funding policy was among the most permissive in the nation, and was not even limited to Medicaid-eligible clients, Johnson explained.

In fact, in 1994, then-Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly authorized the use of $1,000,000 from the Medical Charities fund, originally set up to help indigent AIDS patients, to pay for abortions.