The battle to pass health-care reform is teaching pro- choicers some bitter les sons.
Abortion-rights supporters went berserk Saturday, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi let pro-life Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) introduce an amendment to prevent the reform bill’s health-insurance exchanges from covering abortion in federally subsidized policies.
Terry O’Neill, the National Organization for Women president, charged that women would be forced “back into the back alleys to die.” She claimed Stupak’s measure reversed Roe v. Wade, ridiculously alleging that lack of access to insurance that covers abortion is tantamount to outlawing abortion.
Then, the ultimate slap at President Obama (who opposes the Stupak language): “There’s no question that Hillary Clinton would have fought for our rights.” Men are such meanies!
On a conference call after the vote, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) railed against male Republican members who’d shouted “objection” as female Democratic members argued against the Stupak amendment. She accused them of “back-of-the-hand” treatment of women, likening rowdy parliamentary behavior to domestic violence.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) joined the chorus, calling Stupak’s amendment “radical” and complaining that “the leading voices [opposing abortion rights] always, since I’ve been in Congress, have always been males. And that is one of the reasons why I think it is so important to have more women. Not that every woman is pro-choice. But most of the women are.”
Congress should vote the way “most women” feel about abortion? Boxer should be careful there — because the trend lines for the pro-choice movement are not in her favor.
A May 2009 Gallup Poll found a shift from the past: More women said they were “pro-life” than “pro-choice” by 49 percent to 44 percent. In October, Pew found 52 percent of women in favor of keeping abortion legal, vs. 42 percent wanting it outlawed — a five-point drop for the pro-abortion-rights side over the last year. That’s hardly overwhelming support of abortion rights by women.
According to a Politico report, heated confrontation before the health-care vote had Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) telling Rep. Rosa De- Lauro (D-Conn.) that there are “more pro-life votes in the House than pro-choice” and that abortion-rights advocates had better acknowledge that reality.
Indeed: Ladies, it’s time to wake up from your time warp. It’s not the 1970s anymore.
True, most of the pro-life votes were Republicans, but 64 of the “radicals” who voted for the Stupak amendment were Democrats; 20 of them call themselves pro-choice. What gives?
In his analysis of the vote, Nate Silver of the Web site FiveThirtyEight found that 11 of the 20 pro-choice Democrats who voted for Stupak (and also voted for the health-reform bill) are rated as vulnerable for re-election. He concluded: “Whereas health care is a sine qua non for most Democratic base voters, [these members] seem to be betting that the pro-choice position might no longer be.”
And the 40 or so pro-life Democrats who voted for the Stupak amendment didn’t end up in Congress by accident. Rahm Emanuel, then heading the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, recruited many of them: He’d realized that, to win in more conservative districts, Democrats needed to field more conservative nominees.
Newsflash: Without these pro-life Democrats, the House wouldn’t have passed the health-reform bill. It’s self-defeating to get mad at them for being exactly who they were elected to be — and casting them as radical is just far-fetched.
The question now is: Who’ll win the death match between Stupak amendment supporters and opponents? All eyes turn to the Senate.
Stupak warned senators against stripping his language from the final bill, telling The Wall Street Journal: “If they are going to summarily dismiss us by taking the pen to that language, there will be hell to pay.”
If he can unite these factions, President Obama will have earned that Nobel Peace Prize. kirstenpowers@aol.com