What Katha Pollitt said:
If healthcare reform becomes law, you can thank prochoicers. In the end, forced to decide between sacrificing abortion coverage and voting down coverage of everything else for 30 million people, abortion-rights supporters took the hit. Prochoice representatives, who had vowed to vote against any bill that restricted access to abortion more than the infamous Hyde Amendment has already done, will have reversed themselves and voted for it. (Don't kid yourselves, the Senate bill is a major blow to abortion rights. As antichoice evangelical David Gushee told followers stuck on Stupak: "Accept victory while you can get it.") NARAL, Planned Parenthood and NOW stepped back. You can call prochoice leaders hypocritical or cowardly or feeble or excessively deferential to the president's agenda. But one thing you can't call them is selfishly obsessed with their own political purity. That would be the antichoicers--the Catholic bishops, Bart Stupak, Ben Nelson. They were the big evil babies who were willing to let millions suffer and 45,000 people die every year unless they got to deprive women of their reproductive rights.
The way I see it, the Democratic Party and the Obama administration owe supporters of women's rights a huge payback for cooperating on its signature issue. Some suggestions:
§ Full funding for Title X, the only federal program dedicated to supplying reproductive health services to low-income women and men. Title X started off with a bang under the Nixon administration--back when Republicans like George H.W. "Rubbers" Bush thought family planning was a good idea--but for decades it has been allowed to stagnate. The 2009 budget added $7.5 million to the previous year's $300 million for the program--but that's still less than half the rate of thirty years ago, after adjusting for inflation.
§ Full speed ahead on the Paycheck Fairness Act. Obama got a lot of credit for making the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act the first bill he signed into law as president, but it only restored women's right to sue for pay discrimination to the status quo ante of the Supreme Court's drastic ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear. If women are to get equal pay for equal work--a goal just about everyone professes to share--we need laws with teeth, which the PFA has.
There's more. Read it.