Stupak Like a Fox

National abortion-rights advocacy groups were outraged when the House passed the Stupak amendment to the health-care bill. The amendment—named for its sponsor, Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak—would bar patients who receive government affordability credits from buying health insurance that covers elective abortions, even if they pay for the abortion component with their own money. It seemed as if the reproductive-rights establishment had been blindsided by Speaker Nancy Pelosi's last-minute deal to placate the conservative Democrats in Congress and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

SPONSORED BY:
placeAd2(commercialNode,'88x315',false,'');
Stupak Like a Fox
Abortion-rights activists were not caught unaware on the anti-abortion-funding amendment to the House health-care bill, and they are likely to stop it in the Senate.

Harry Hamburg / AP
Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), author of the controversial abortion amendment.
By Lindsay Beyerstein Newsweek Web Exclusive
Nov 19, 2009
Share:
Facebook
Digg
Tweet
LinkedIn
newsweek:http://www.newsweek.com/id/223504
Buzz up!





Tools:
8 Post Your Comment
Print
Email
NWK.widget.EmailArticle.init();


SPONSORED BY
placeAd2('printthis','88x31',false,'');

Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
Your Email Address
Recipient's Email Address
Separate multiple addresses with commas
SPONSORED BY

National abortion-rights advocacy groups were outraged when the House passed the Stupak amendment to the health-care bill. The amendment—named for its sponsor, Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak—would bar patients who receive government affordability credits from buying health insurance that covers elective abortions, even if they pay for the abortion component with their own money. It seemed as if the reproductive-rights establishment had been blindsided by Speaker Nancy Pelosi's last-minute deal to placate the conservative Democrats in Congress and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). (Article continued below...)
Advertisement
Your video will begin in seconds
_companionAds.push(new CompanionAd("player-EAS0NB0A", false));
Adjust volume for sound

The reality is much more complicated. Abortion-rights groups were actually watching and lobbying against stringent anti-abortion restrictions in the health-care bill throughout the process. And, while their strategy failed in the House, the introduction of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's health-care bill on Wednesday without Stupak-like language indicates that their predictions that they would be more effective in the Senate are being vindicated.
placeAd2(commercialNode,'bigbox',false,'')

National pro-choice groups had been watching the issue of abortion funding closely since this spring. This summer, they reluctantly supported a compromise deal between pro-choice and pro-life Democrats that they hoped would defuse the issue of abortion and allow reform to proceed.
For national abortion-rights groups, the issue of abortion funding was a sword of Damocles hanging over them throughout the health-care reform process. Leaders of national pro-choice groups say that they were well aware that something like the Stupak amendment could find its way into the House bill. The House Democratic Caucus has a reputation for being more liberal than its Senate counterpart on key health-reform issues like the public option, so a grassroots member of, say, NARAL, might have been taken by surprise. But it's a myth that there's a pro-abortion–rights majority in the House. Among insiders, it was no secret that if Stupak got his up or down vote, the amendment would prevail.
This summer, abortion-rights activists helped broker a compromise to keep the Stupak language out of the bill. Stupak tried and failed to introduce his language in the Energy and Commerce Committee. In an attempt to put forward an alternative more palatable to both pro-choice and pro-life members, Democratic Rep. Lois Capps, a former public-health nurse, introduced the so-called Capps compromise, which passed. At the time, even the USCCB hinted that it might be amenable to a Capps-type deal in which there was no "direct federal funding” of abortion.
The compromise was modeled on the Hyde amendment, a 1976 law that bans federal funding for abortions through the annual Health and Human Services appropriations bill. The Capps amendment would have prohibited direct federal subsidies for abortion coverage, but it would have allowed women receiving government subsidies to buy policies that covered elective abortions, provided the money to pay for that coverage came out of the individual's share of the premium. It is expected that about 80 percent of the initial participants in the new government health exchanges will receive at least some federal subsidy, but most of those people will still pay most of their premiums out-of-pocket.