Irreconciliable Differences in Stupakistan

Politico has a series of threads up on the Stupak Amendment, insurance coverage of abortion, and angry choice activists.  The first one

Joe Cannon draws it like it is ...

is on the amendment and what hopefully is its inability to survive the reconciliation process . The other is on the RNC pulling abortion coverage from its staff’s insurance plan. The men in this country clearly want to know what goes on between every woman’s pelvic bones.

Democrats will almost certainly kill the anti-abortion Stupak amendment in the process if they go to Plan B on passing health care — using a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill — budget experts say.

“There is no way on God’s green Earth that the Stupak amendment would pass muster in a budget reconciliation bill,” says Bill Hoagland, an insurance lobbyist who was the top GOP aide on the Senate Budget Committee for two decades and served as then-Majority Leader Bill Frist’s budget guru.

Democratic budget experts in Congress and the administration who asked not to be quoted on the record agree with Hoagland’s assessment.

The biggest problem Democrats have on the health bill right now is the difficulty they will have mustering a 60-vote coalition to shepherd the measure into a conference with the House. If they can’t do it, they may scale back the bill and try to put it through under restrictive “reconciliation” rules that would require a bare majority but limit the scope of what policies can be adopted.

An additional good post at TPM comes from Brian Beutler who investigates who is going to be most impacted by the amendment should it wind up in the final bill.

The Stupak amendment would forbid anybody who receives new government health insurance subsidies from buying policies that cover abortion. So why should women’s health care be treated differently than other kinds of health care? Is it fair to prevent women, forced into the health care market, from buying any insurance policy she wants, even if they have some government assistance?

But somewhat less prominently, these same combatants have been at odds about what the practical effect of the Stupak amendment would actually be. There’s substantial lack of clarity on that score–many say it’s likely that there will be no abortion coverage in the exchange at all, and others hypothesize that, over time, the norms in the exchange will come to dominate the norms across the insurance market. At this point, that’s all theoretical. But there is at least some data on the immediate practical implications of the Stupak amendment: It will, at least, directly and immediately impact a small, but growing number of poor and middle-class women.

Meanwhile, mainstream women’s and choice groups are awakening from their koolaid stupor and realizing we’ve been had.  Kate Michelman and Frances Kissling hammered away in this morning’s NYT.

A GRIM reality sits behind the joyful press statements from Washington Democrats. To secure passage of health care legislation in the House, the party chose a course that risks the well-being of millions of women for generations to come.

House Democrats voted to expand the current ban on public financing for abortion and to effectively prohibit women who participate in the proposed health system from obtaining private insurance that covers the full range of reproductive health options. Political calculation aside, the House Democrats reinforced the principle that a minority view on the morality of abortion can determine reproductive health policy for American women.

Many House members who support abortion rights decided reluctantly to accept this ban, which is embodied in the Stupak-Pitts amendment. They say the tradeoff was necessary to advance the right to guaranteed health care. They say they will fight another day for a woman’s right to choose.

Believe me, they will not fight another day for a woman’s right to choose because they never have since  the fetus fetish fanatics woke up and smelled woman’s  freedom. Religious fanatics continually push their religion-based pseudo-medical concerns on us all. We’ve been told that democratic pols were the firewall between going back to the days of backroom abortions,  herbal concoctions that frequently killed women, and the infamous hangers.  The time to draw the line in the sand is now. I’ve convinced myself to vote democrat blunder after blunder and dunderhead after dunderhead on the idea that our right to privacy would be preserved.  If they sell out on this one, they’ve sold out the very last straw for me.  There will be no going back for many of us.

**The parody of the MS magazine  cover  comes from Cannonfire. My guess is if we pressure him enough, we can get him to make T shirts and make him a millionaire.

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