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House Democrats broke into a paroxysm of self-congratulation for passing a health reform bill. By embracing the Stupak-Pitts amendment, however, they entered the women’s hall of shame. They had promised no more limitations based on preexisting conditions. But House leadership allowed a codicil: Except if you are a woman.
The Stupak-Pitts amendment to the health bill is a sweeping ban on insurance coverage of abortion. It expands the 1976 Hyde amendment, which outlaws abortion coverage by existing Federally funded programs, to middle class women participating in the public option, even if they pay from their own pocketbooks. Hyde began a juggernaut of restrictions on abortion and birth control that I’d hoped the current health care debate would rectify.
Headlines blaring, “Abortion an Obstacle to Health-Care Bill,” got it backward. And the biggest obstacle was President Obama’s approach, which meshed all too well with Speaker Pelosi’s: they are both so averse to feather-ruffling that one wonders why they entered the rough and tumble of politics in the first place. No amount of Rahm Emmanuel’s mean-guy interference could have kept this chicken’s eggs from breaking, let alone its feathers in place.
Smart as he is, why didn’t Obama know that when you start from a position of compromise, you'll end up with a fragment of what you wanted, if that? The public option is too weak to exercise serious cost-cutting control. And now women have been sacrificed, like so much detritus, even though we are 51 percent of the population and (in case they haven't noticed) 60 percent of Democratic voters.
In response, I’m seeing the most intense wave of anger building among women voters of all ages since the Senate’s 1991 trashing of Anita Hill culminated in the 1992 “Year of the Woman”.
I am not convinced by after-the-fact reassurances that the final bill will reflect the already unjust status quo via the Capps amendment “compromise” that codifies existing restrictions. That’s because the table for expanding prohibitions on abortion was set by the Democrats themselves.
Nancy Pelosi and I walked together on the frontline of the March for Women’s Lives in April 2004—at 1.2 million strong, the largest civil rights protest ever mustered in the nation’s capital, demonstrating that the majority of Americans stood for women. But Pelosi, like many Democrats, allowed herself to be frightened by misinterpreting Republican victories that fall.
Frankly, John Kerry lost that election all by himself, in no small part by taking increasingly equivocal positions on issues—from war and peace to abortion—that concerned women. That Karl Rove’s grassroots machine then prevailed over Kerry’s demoralized base shouldn’t have shocked anyone. But post-election, the losing Democrats took the predictable circular position and started shooting at one another. Pelosi excoriated me for blasting anti-choice Tim Roemer’s candidacy for chair of the Democratic Party, a possibility that was one of the first signals to me of principles gone rogue.
The Democrats jubilantly regained control of the House in 2006. But in doing so they built their own Trojan horse and rolled it right into the center of the party’s soul. Howard Dean, who had entered the 2004 presidential race proclaiming himself the candidate from the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” became, ironically, one of the main architects of a desperation plan to recruit any anti-choice pol who had a chance to defeat a Republican.
Some strategists, like Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinert, assert this was the smart way for the Democrats to gain a governing majority. But if party powers had recruited, supported, and funded progressive women candidates at the level they wooed Blue Dogs, they could have saved both their integrity and their majority, and they’d be much stronger today.
Pelosi said she was “breaking the marble ceiling” when she accepted the speaker’s gavel. As sparkly-eyed and optimistic as any other attendee, I wrote about her swearing in for the Women’s Media Center, saying she would be smart to “spend less time cultivating the ‘Blue Dog’ Democrats and recognize the progressive women as her greatest asset.”
Clearly she didn’t get that message.
But many women in
