Will Saletan notes a pretty savage irony in the House health care bill fight. Excerpt:
I don't mean to exaggerate the House and Senate bills. They don't nationalize medicine or set up a single-payer system. As socialism goes, they're modest. But they do mandate, standardize, and subsidize health insurance. They mix public with private. And when you do that, you invite public-sector problems into matters that used to be nobody's business.One of these problems is that people don't like their tax money being used for procedures that offend them. You may think that's stupid. You may point out that your tax money is used for wars you don't like. But you don't have two or three dozen swing votes in the House. Pro-life Democrats do. They don't have the clout to ban abortion, but they have the clout to keep tax money from paying for it.
Until health care reform came along, this wasn't your problem. It was a problem for women who depended on public programs like Medicaid. But you wanted a better world. You wanted health insurance for everyone, and you wanted the government to help pay for it. Congratulations. You've brought the tax moralists into your life.
And, supremely:
There's something poignant about the last-minute outrage of the pro-choice groups. The complaints they're leveling--that people had more choices in the private market, that the House bill radically upsets this market, and that it violates Obama's promise not to deprive anyone of their existing coverage--are hardly novel. Republicans have issued such warnings all year. But liberals didn't pay attention until the coverage in jeopardy was abortion.
UPDATE: TMatt writes about how the media completely missed the reality of pro-life Democrats, and why they matter. I love this bit from the WSJ Terry quotes at the end of his entry:
... Democrats now have to make some decisions that may anger their Planned Parenthood wing. The fight itself will be interesting, judging from a claim by Diana DeGette (D., Col.) in yesterday's Washington Post that 40 Democrats will vote against a final bill unless the Stupak amendment is stripped out. Of course, if it is stripped out, that will put even more pressure on those 64 Democrats who voted for the amendment."We won because [the Democrats] need us," says Mr. Stupak. "If they are going to summarily dismiss us by taking the pen to that language, there will be hell to pay. I don't say it as a threat, but if they double-cross us, there will be 40 people who won't vote with them the next time they need us -- and that could be the final version of this bill."
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BTW,
I think this perception problem is surmountable if we hear the argument made from the progressive pro-lifers (or at least those who consider themselves at most, marginally pro-choice) more - particularly if they are making the liberal arguments against abortion.
We'd need to hear from the gay who doesn't want homophobic parents aborting someone that might turn out to be gay. We'd need to hear from the libertarian who scan distinguish between acts that do not violate the right to consent and inviolate right to life (contraception, non-procreative sexual conduct like gay intimacy), acts that clearly violate the right to consent (rape, bestiality, pedophilia) and rights that arguably violate the right to consent (abortion). We'd need to hear from the career-oriented woman who opposes abortion rights.
And less, much less from the conservatives and the religious right since the arguments that they make do undermine the advances we have made in gender equality, privacy rights, gay equality and religious freedom. Biblical precepts do not sway those who don't believe. Liberal-to moderate women must cringe when they hear the stereotypical bible-thumper commend the wife (and it is always the wife and not the husband) who takes time off from work to care for the kids).
Their legal arguments do undermine the rights to not only abortion but privacy rights in general (since they deny that any such rights exist) and their push for "state's rights" has a bad ring to it given (a) that term's use to oppose the civil rights of African Americans) and (b) it would allow each state to decide when an embryo or fetus is and is not a human being.
Thank you, Liam, for your reference to the pro-life establishment being wedded at the hip to the Republicans. They shrieked that Obama was the "most pro-abortion president ever." If he signs the health care bill with the Stupak amendment, that finishes that argument, doesn't it?
Hello Karl,
They are done for what _you_ consider to be elective reasons, perhaps, but you'll find vanishingly few women willing to undergo and abortion for any reason but the fact that they feel they have no other options.
I will only reply that the human capability for self-serving justification is nearly boundless. The Guttmacher study (and let us remember just exactly who Guttmacher is) doesn't address that.
But let's be candid: I agree that women in these situations are under a great deal of pressure - from others. If they feel they have few options, it is because those around them make it so. Abortion in this sense is a collective occasion of sin.
At the end of the day when abortion is decided, as Favog notes, someone ends up dead. Some of us just don't consider that to be "an option." Or rather - that there has to be a better option.
The Mighty Favog
That's right, 33 years of the Hyde Amendment, and these grand dames don't get galvanized until the gummint might make them have to pay cash money to abort Junior.
So much for abortion being a matter "between a woman, her doctor and her God," eh? No, now half of Americans (at least) must violate their rights of conscience in order to fund some women's "right to privacy." Well, at least MIDDLE-CLASS women's "right to privacy" . . . poor women on Medicaid would still be, so to speak, *screwed* because of the Hyde Amendment.
And this is equally surreal from the other side, where we've have tax subsidies funding health care plans with abortion. And despite what some people here think, something like 95% of health insurance covers abortion. It's often the sole elective procedure covered! Why? Because it's cheaper than childbirth.
So for decades, the middle class, with health insurance, has had their abortions subsidized by the government, and, for decades, the lower class has had their government insurance barred by law from covering abortion.
And then suddenly the middle class, who is finding itself without commercial insurance and going to need the public plan, suddenly says, oh, yeah, the government should provide full abortion coverage.
And suddenly the other side leaps in and say 'Not only should the government plans not cover it, but we're going to rig the rules where insurance companies who provide abortion coverage can't even participate in the public exchange'.
While, in fact, totally ignoring the people who are still getting tax subsidies for their insurance. Because, apparently, those people aren't poor. Or, as someone else pointed out, it's a tax cut, and that trumps abortion.
Both sides there have, I think, revealed their true colors, and both of them have a boot firmly planted in the poor's face, or, at best, have failed to notice such a boot until it affected them.
I've always opposed outlawing abortion on pragmatic grounds, namely, that it wouldn't work, the middle class would jet off to Canada and the poor would use unsafe procedures. And if you simply want to fine people for it, well, you just made it more expensive, that's all. It always baffled me that people didn't see this. (I think progressives have learn more from history in this regard, re: Prohibition.)
And I've always suspected that the debate was rather more about poor vs. rich than anything else, as so many middle class people seem to think the problem is 'those other people' getting abortions. There's some hilarious web sites out there where they interview pro-life people who, nevertheless, got abortions. (Because their abortion was, of course, 'important'.)
I'm moderately amused to have been demonstrated to be correct, that a goodly portion of what is posing as abortion debate is really a class debate about the (imagined) promiscuity of the poor.
Pro-choice. Wow. I was under the delusion that every woman, unless she is RAPED has a choice not to have sex during her fertile time. Or anywhere around it if she's uncertain exactly when that is. Unless she is RAPED, she has the choice to be responsible for her own body and "take ownership her reproductive cycle" before she conceives. Why call terminating a pregnancy a "choice." Sounds more like an "out" or an "escape" to me.
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