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When I received this assignment, I thought it would be easy to take a clear position on the issue of whether I believed the Stupak Amendment to the House health care bill was worthwhile or even necessary. As I thought further, it became less clear to me, as someone who believes in the foundations of small government and individual liberty upon which this country was built, and given the reality of the time in which we live, it became more difficult for me to make a definitive statement.
First, from Bart Stupak himself, interviewed in the Atlantic, some background on the Stupak Amendment.
Stupak said his amendment does nothing more than apply current abortion law (the annually renewed Hyde amendment) to health care reform, that pro-choicers are "distorting the hell" out of it, that he's confident his language will be included in the Senate bill, and that pro-choice Democrats have only themselves to blame for its passage on the House floor Saturday night.
The amendment itself prohibits federal subsidies from being used to purchase insurance plans that cover elective abortions, on any of the regional exchanges set up under the House bill for low-income individuals, and other Americans who don't have access to coverage to shop for health insurance. It specifies that subsidized individuals can purchase supplemental coverage, out of pocket, that covers abortions. It does not restrict coverage of abortions in the case of rape, incest, or saving a woman's life.
Frankly speaking, the Stupak Amendment was a brilliant tactical move. It allowed so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats to support a bill that might have threatened their continued employment otherwise, and provided a way for Christian and Evangelical Democrats who support a robust public healthcare option out of a sense of social justice but who consider themselves pro-life (surprisingly, the two go hand-in-hand quite often), to both cast a yes vote and quiet their conscience. Bart Stupak may have earned the ire of his more progressive colleagues, but in the end, he preserved a coalition that Nancy herself seemed unable to.
For Republicans and most pro-lifers, including, to a limited degree, myself, the Stupak Amendment was a tiny positive in an otherwise thoroughly disappointing bill. Chocked to the gills with government graft and packed with the kid of freedom-curbing governmental bureaucracy I have nightmares about, the bill represented one of the largest and most expensive government expansions in history. It might have TRIED to solve a pressing problem in our society, but as Camille Paglia put it in Salon, it failed miserably:
As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can't my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we're hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors' offices. They'll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.
Even though three weeks ago we were told, flat-out, that the healthcare bill did not in any way provide for federally-funded abortion services, House Democrats were forced to stand up on the record and inform the American people that the “propaganda” they’d been “sold” by Republican leaders was, in fact, a carefully hidden reality. As I watched the Democrats erode the last shreds of trust moderate and independent Americans had in them by openly admitting that a GOP scare tactic was indeed, true, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of a creeping warmth in the cockles of my heart. In addition, 60 Democratic House members willingly cast their vote for the pro-life cause. They could have held out for a more weakly-worded amendment. They could have voted down Stupak and voted for something that wouldn't have explicitly denied healthcare funds to the abortion industry, or something that would have had to be “interpreted” somewhere down the
