There is a temporary impasse about abortion funding in the House, with pro life Democrats balking at the current bill because it could have federal money fund abortion. From the story:
House Democrats are at an impasse over whether their remake of the nation’s health care system would effectively allow federal funding of abortion. At least two dozen anti-abortion Democrats believe it would, and while their opposition is unlikely to stall the legislation in the end, they are at odds with Democratic leaders just weeks ahead of anticipated floor action on the bill.
Lawmakers on the other side say they’ve compromised as far as they can to address the anti-abortion lawmakers’ concerns by specifying that people receiving government subsidies to buy health insurance couldn’t use that money for abortions.
Negotiations to find common ground have not yielded fruit. “We have a difference of opinion at the moment we cannot bridge,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where the abortion language was approved. “We have done everything we can to ensure that there will be no federal funds for abortion services.”
No they haven’t. Waxman is so disingenuous. They could spell out explicitly that non therapeutic abortion is not to be covered by any public plan or by any policy which is fully or partially paid for by public subsidies or vouchers. They could require that abortion coverage be a rider, the cost of which would be fully paid for by the insurance policy holder. They could revoke the Capps Amendment that gave the bureaucrats the power to determined whether abortion would be a covered service under the plan. They could make sure that the bureaucrats–who will put in most of the dirty details–cannot cover abortion.
They could, but they won’t. They want abortion to be covered, I think, more than they want a health care bill to pass.
October 23rd, 2009 | 1:38 pm
Yes and they also want a pathway to euthanasia, if not outright. I believe these goals are more important to the Waxmans of the world than insuring healthy twenty year olds.
October 23rd, 2009 | 4:20 pm
Good for Stupak. I’ll have to remember him the next time I’m tempted to pooh-pooh the notion that there can be such a thing as a pro-life Democrat.
October 23rd, 2009 | 11:33 pm
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October 24th, 2009 | 12:22 am
Exactly, the farce only extends insurance to 90%, but supercedes/evades the anti-abortion public funding provisions. The intent is not, and never was universal insurance, but public abortion funding. If they want to fund abortion, why don’t they do what veterans and churches do for our charities; fund it themselves.
October 24th, 2009 | 4:48 am
[...] writer Wesley Smith points out how the bill could be [...]
October 24th, 2009 | 9:13 pm
I don’t believe in legalizing drugs. But how did “abortion rights” ever become such an issue in the first place? Any woman dumb enough not to realize that abortion is bad for women, and who would be willing to abort her own child of her own free will, doesn’t seem a good candidate for reproduction in the first place, and this really is a matter between a woman and her own body. It’s not the business of society, or doctors, or the boyfriend, or anyone else, and it’s not even something to be discussed, let alone a matter of law.
October 24th, 2009 | 9:29 pm
Religion butts into it, but then religion butts into a lot of things, and makes sure that people have no chance to think independently from birth. It doesn’t take religion to figure out the abortion issue, and politics never belonged in it, that’s for sure, and neither does the law. I’m a lot more worried about the elderly and about the disabled than I am about the foetus, not that I don’t understand the principles of the life issues movement; but this is going to keep being a polarized movement with tragic results until somebody figures out that this is what happens when women are allowed to vote and drive (some can do the former with intelligence and the latter with competence and some can’t, and the whole thing is still too new for sound results, at which there may never be time for the world to arrive the way things are going) and we’re still only a generation or two into the “transformation in society.” I agree with Michael Savage’s dictum that liberalism is a mental disorder; the hate, the illogic, the death culture, the “pro-choice” fervor all are part of it. In fact the abortion issue is their driving force because of what i just noted. But the alignment of the right-to-life movement with religion is not the way to deal with it, especially considering the history and the more recent hypocritical behavior of the Roman Catholic Church. Maybe other Christian denominations — the ones that haven’t signed on to the death culture — and the traditional branch of Judaism could take it on, together — but the “religious right” doesn’t seem to have been able to do the job, or the job would have been done by now and we wouldn’t have these freaks running the country now. Where does the Muslim religion stand on abortion and life issues? Buddhism? Hinduism? Native American religion? What else is out there?
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