LaVonne Neff, over at Lively Dust, has said it so well so I'll just quote her. She estimates that it would cost each pro-abortion advocate 6 dollars a year to fund the abortion industry. So go ahead she says:
Personally, I'm glad the House voted in favor of health care and against public funding of abortion--I'm one of those politically liberal, pro-life Catholics. But pro-choicers, if you really want to make abortion easily available and totally free, stop whining and just do it. Really, you won't miss the ten cents. And by going private, you can keep your ideology from sinking the entire national health-care plan.
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I like the concept. Too bad we really don't have mechanisms to make something like this work.
"I'm glad the House voted in favor of health care and against public funding of abortion"
One of the problems with out system is that unless the House and Senate pass exactly the same bill, the two have to be reconciled in a "conference committee." What goes in the conference -- invariably by the party elite, behind closed doors -- can easily undo whatever minor victory the so-called pro-life Dems achieved.
If there is a conference, the resulting bill will have both a public option and public financing of abortion.
This is the problem with pro-life Democrats. They can vote for all the pro-life legislation they want. Unfortunately they still keep Pelosi et al in power, and she gets to choose which bills she will allow them to vote on.
@Paul,
It's called the US postal service. Seriously. I send money to crisis pregnancy centers through the mail. The pro-choicers can send it to Murder Inc. Lots of them do, but a great many are more concerned with getting me to fund abortion than spending any of their own money on it.
I'm strongly pro-life, so I'm glad this issue has been flagged in the health care debate. I'm also glad the Catholic Bishops have been a driving force here, because they otherwise support health care reform, so this obviously is not merely a right-wing attempt to derail the whole project.
Having said that, Neff's argument is cute, but it really isn't fair to the views of the pro-choice side. Their point is that abortion is a form of healthcare; excluding abortion funding from a comprehensive healthcare plan, they argue, deprives women of full access to care. The real debate should be sober and deep -- is a human fetus a being with moral status or not -- and the other side's arguments should be taken seriously. I think a human fetus does have moral status, but I'm not going to claim that is self-evident at every stage of fetal development.
I wish there could be an acceptable but powerful iconic image of abortion like the "Execution of a Viet Cong Guerrilla" image from 1968.
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