The Stupak Amendment sucks, without a doubt. It will make all women equal, how horrible! Allow me to explain.
Since 1976 the Hyde Amendment established a double-standard. Women who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid have been denied access to abortion except in non-federally-funded clinics, which have become so few-and-far-between that these women often have to travel to another state to get an abortion. The same goes for disabled women on Medicare, and for Native women who rely on the Indian Health Service. When the SCHIP was established, adolescent females joined the ranks of poor, disabled and Native women.
And now Firedog Lake, DKOs and liberal blogs are calling for action to preserve the double-standard?! We liberals want females on Medicaid, Medicare, SCHIP, IHS, to be subject to the Hyde Amendment, and all other females to have access to choice in the nearest hospital?!
As Jane Hamsher stated on FDL and HuffPo, leaders of Planned Parenthood of America and of NARAL have been getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and have established multi-million-dollar PACs. But she didn't point out PPA and NARAL do this not to repeal the Hyde Amendment. To protect the rights of women who can buy insurance or get it through their employer, so they can get an abortion whenever they choose at private hospitals or HMOs.
I'd have a lot more respect for this anti-Stupak "activism" if it were aimed at equality, not preservation of bourgeois liberalism. I'd have a lot more respect for PPA and NARAL if their target was the Hyde Amendment. But for 33 years, that has not been their focus. They accepted the Hyde Amendment, and "compensated" for it by asking for "charitable donations" to clinics that get no federal funds.
If we demand our representatives throw out all health reform to protect this "right for the privileged paying-insured", we are fools and inhumane - and hypocrites. We would be demanding that all females, as well as males, remain subject to the profiteering health care fiasco we call our health system. We are demanding government-sponsored health care and ignoring the 33-year-old Amendment that forbids abortion under government-sponsored health programs.
Bourgeois liberals were never going to start organized opposition to the Hyde Amendment until it impacts all liberals. I've waited for 33 years for liberals to demand true equality in the pro-choice movement. Separate is not equal. Reliance on clinics that depend on donations/charity is not equality. Firedog Lake should be pointing out the discrepancy, not jumping on the bourgeois liberal bandwagon.
I, for one, will be grateful if Stupak's amendment passes. We liberals will finally get off our asses, realize we're all in it together at long last, and work to repeal the Hyde Amendment. Or extend it to apply to no federal funding for war and the death penalty. With our private-industry-mercenaries and prisons, we're already halfway there.