Today I got e-mails from the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL about the new rules the Obama administration issued. As someone wrote, they "went all Bart Stupak".
I used the Planned Parenthood canned letter to the President as a starting point, and added some stuff about how the new rule will likely play out in the real world:
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out," said I.F. Stone. So I assume you lie. You may not like to, but I imagine you do it when you're convinced it's for the Good of the Country.
I'm a doctor. I don't like to lie. But you can bet I'll do it when I'm convinced it's for the good of my patients. Like when they need abortions. Then I'll stretch reality enough to say it's to save the health or life of the pregnant lady. And that won't be nearly as much a lie as I hope it was when, for example, you endorsed Joe Lieberman in 2006. It surely won't be as much of a lie as when Dick Cheney said we know where Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction are.
But I must say, I rather resent recent actions by you and Congress that make me need to lie. You must have known you'd have to tell plenty of lies when you went into politics. I went into medicine partly because I could almost always tell the truth.
Along with countless other women and men, I worked hard to help you pass a health care reform bill that would provide comprehensive coverage for everyone who needs it. Today, I am outraged and extremely disappointed that you have decided to place new burdens on medically vulnerable women seeking abortion coverage, particularly women with pre-existing conditions, who are more likely to be ill and have complicated pregnancies.
By banning abortion coverage from high-risk pools, you are effectively denying some of the most medically vulnerable women in America access to desperately needed coverage. These new restrictions are severely damaging for women.
Please reverse this decision. Find something else to lie about. Preferably something very unimportant. Good policies are almost never based on lies.
The part in italics was written by Planned Parenthood; the impolite parts in plain font are what I wrote.
Here's a link to the letter-writing site:
http://www.ppaction.org/...
As a practical matter, anything worthy of being considered a preexisting condition could be considered at least potentially fatal under the wrong circumstances and with bad enough luck, and any such condition might possibly be exacerbated by pregnancy, if only because many treatments are better postponed until the lady gives birth. Indeed, this may be a line of reasoning that the Obama administration is counting on. They're expecting doctors to tell enough lies (or at least very tall tales) to keep medical care humane in spite of this extra hurdle.
That is probably what will happen. I don't like the idea that members of my profession will have to come close to lying to cover for somebody in Washington's lack of courage. (Actually, the matter isn't likely to come up for me. My patient population is so elderly that most of them can't remember as far back as their last period. That frees me to make noise about this on behalf of my colleagues.)
I suppose a reasonable argument can be made that this path might immunize Democrats from attacks that they're 'pro-abortion'. Perhaps I could stomach a gutless wonder, path of least resistance approach on this issue by the Obama administration if they seemed to using their 'political capital' in courageous ways on other fronts.