No abortions would be better!

By Kathleen Gilbert

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 24, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com )- Now that the health care bill has made it out of the U.S. Senate, only one more revision stands between it and President Obama's desk – but once again the most troubling section appears to be the language governing abortion funding, which could still bring about the legislation’s ultimate demise.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) re-affirmed this week that he is holding together a group of conservative Democrats who have pledged to take down any version of the bill that contains government funding for abortion, which the Senate version does.

“Well, if all the issues are resolved and we’re down to the pro-life view or, I should say, no public funding for abortion, there’s at least 10 to 12 members who have said, repeatedly, unless this language is fixed and current law is maintained, and no public funding for abortion," Stupak told CNSnews.com Tuesday. "There’s 10 or 12 of us, and they only passed the bill by 3 votes, so they’re going to be short 8 to 9, maybe 6 to 8 votes. So they [Democrats] do not have the votes to pass it in the House.”

The House's expectations for health reform are set to clash with the Senate's on a variety of issues, particularly the public option and a surtax on the wealthy. While House Democrat leaders seem willing to compromise on these issues the liberal members of their party are less convinced. "The Senate health care bill is not worthy of the historic vote that the House took a month ago," wrote Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) Wednesday in an op-ed for CNN.com .

But the abortion issue raises perhaps the most clear-cut objection to the final bill version. A slew of false compromises and proposed funds-segregating schemes has been unable to silence objections to the legislation’s treatment of abortion in all stages of the bill's development.

In a Politico piece Tuesday, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) reaffirmed that the Senate health bill has thrown the Hyde amendment "to the winds and, with it, the hard-fought efforts of Henry Hyde and the pro-life movement to maintain this basic protection for the unborn."

"If the issue of abortion funding brings down this bill, it will be a victory for the cause of protecting innocent human life," wrote Brownback. "That would be an irony that Henry Hyde would have greatly appreciated."

Nonetheless, Stupak acknowledged that his Democrats were "under a lot of pressure" from the White House to keep mum about the abortion issue - pressure that may explain the sudden capitulation of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) Friday evening after weeks of holding tough for Hyde-amendment language.

Instead of a Hyde-amendment ban on abortion funding, the Senate bill's abortion language offered by Sen. Nelson gives states the ability to opt out of providing insurance cover for abortions, and institutes a funds-segregating scheme for premium dollars that go to abortion. Also, as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted in an interview with BlogHer Monday, all members of the new health insurance exchange will still be required to pay into abortion under the Senate bill.

Organizations such as Planned Parenthood and NOW have expressed opposition to the Nelson language. However, some suspect that the abortion lobby is simply bolstering the image of the Nelson language as a "compromise," similar to the half-hearted objections they raised to the House's Ellsworth amendment. Tellingly, abortion groups have not encouraged campaigning against the language, in stark contrast to their massive uprising against the House's Stupak language.

"I would chalk up NOW's opposition as token outrage to help abortion amendment (sic) seem like an actual compromise. As a Democratic aide wrote today:'Pro-choice Dems are cool with it;' that includes Barbara Boxer and Maria Cantwell Patty Murray," wrote John McCormack on the Weekly Standard blog.

On the other side, leaders of the pro-life lobby such as the National Right to Life Committee have hotly rejected the language as entirely inadequate, and are calling for the demise of the bill. "The new abortion language solves none of the fundamental abortion-related problems with the Senate bill, and it actually creates some new abortion-related problems," said the NRLC's Douglas Johnson, who called Nelson's language "light years removed" from the Stupak-Pitts amendment.

A Quinnipac poll this week showed overwhelming public opposition to government funding of abortion, by 72%-23%.

The Family Research Council noted that both the Senate and House bills are "seriously flawed," as both "still allow rationing of health care for seniors, raise health costs for families, mandate that families purchase under threat of fines and penalties, offer counsel about assisted suicide in some states, do not offer broad conscience protections for health care workers and seek to insert the federal government into all aspects of citizen's lives."

The timetable for the bill's future remains uncertain. Speaking to her fellow House Democrats, Speaker Nancy Pelosi projected a best-case scenario would place a final passage by the end of January or the beginning of February.

In anticipating the Democrats' strategy for getting the bill to the finish line, John Fund at the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday warned that "Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi would love to come up with a way to bash heads in private and skip any public discussion that further reveals just how incoherent and unworkable both the bills are."

"Luckily," he continued, "there is a subterfuge readily available that wouldn't require the House to swallow the Senate's bill unchanged but also ducks the traditional give-and-take of the conference committee" - namely, skipping the conference committee and dumping one version of the bill to give the other an all-or-nothing shot at becoming law.

In this case, since Sen. Reid appears to walk a thinner tightrope in keeping together enough votes for passage, the House version could be almost entirely discarded - and the Stupak Hyde-amendment language would go with it.

"Serious dialogue isn't what Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid are interested in right now," wrote Fund. If leaders decide to skip the conference, he said, "it will be the latest example of violating principles of transparency and accountability in the single-minded pursuit of legislative victory."