President Obama gave a speech to Congress that everyone here knows quite well. In that speech, in the very sentence following the one where Representive Joe Wilson made his infamous and ugly accusation, embarrassing himself and his party, President Obama made an important commitment to keep federal funding of abortion out of health care reform. This is the discourse that drove the Stupak Amendment, and it's important that we understand this in order to ensure that health care reform actually begins to happen in this country.
Here is the paragraph in President Obama's speech:
"There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally. And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place."
President Obama may be many things, but he cannot be accused of being anti-choice. Nevertheless, he made a commitment to not expand federal funding of abortions as part of health care reform.
However, an amendment by Rep. Lois Capps changed the health care bill in the House to allow indirect federal funding of abortions by allowing federal funds to subsidize individual purchases of private health insurance plans, most of which currently do fund abortions, provided that the expenditure exceeds deductible provisions of the plans, and to ensure that private plans are available which cover abortions in every insurance market. (Many, if not most, abortions don't and won't exceed the deductible because of the kind of women most likely to get abortions -- young, healthy women with low-cost, high deductible insurance plans -- so expanding insurance coverage with federal dollars was unlikely to have any effect on the funding of abortion in any case, a fact that pro-life advocates, also disingenuously, have ignored.)
Here is the full text of the Capps Amendment, for those interested in fact-checking before flaming. The amendment assures that abortion coverage is available to women in markets for private health insurance. It does not change the fact most abortions are unlikely to be paid for with private insurance dollars even if they are because most abortions are low-cost procedures and most women who get them are too healthy to have gone above the deductible provisions of their plans.
The Stupak amendment, for all the hurly burly it is causing here, is also just as anti-climactic regarding its actual impacts on abortion funding. It does, however, overcome a moral roadblock for a key contituency -- those who do not want to pay for someone else's abortion with public money. It doesn't change anything about the fact that most people who object to paying for others' abortions already do so because their private insurance carriers already cover those expenses. But it does stop public money from being used for abortion expenses, and apparently that was (barely) enough to get the votes needed to pass health care reform in the House.
That leads to my final point here: Without Stupak's provisions in the final bill that comes out of conference committee, upon which both the Senate and the House still have to vote, it is very unlikely that health care reform will pass, and an historic opportunity may be lost once again. Health care reform barely passed the House, with only 220 votes. Three votes changes the outcome. No Stupak, not health care reform. It's that simple.
This is a time for maturity on the part of progressives -- the kind of maturity that President Obama has displayed in his leadership on this issue. Leave the abortion funding fight for another day, because just giving more women access to health insurance, even without direct abortion coverage, leaves women with more affordable options for all health care expenditures they might need -- reproductive or otherwise. It's the right thing to do.