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Reproductive Rights Showdown Looms in Senate
WASHINGTON — Senators debating health care legislation are headed for a clash over abortion, the issue that threatened to derail the bill in the House.
A member of "Planned Parenthood' women's rights group protests against the "Stupak Amendment" which they say will ban private abortion coverage for millions of American women after lawmakers tagged an amendment restricting abortion access and funding to the health care reform bill. (AFP/File/Mark Ralston) Anticipating the showdown, hundreds of abortion
rights supporters gathered on Capitol Hill Wednesday to call on
senators to keep new abortion restrictions out of the health care bill.
Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., plans to unveil an anti-abortion amendment as
early as Thursday that abortions rights supporters inside the Senate
and out say they can't support.
Nelson says he won't vote for the underlying bill without his strong abortion language. But opponents say his amendment doesn't have the votes to pass. The outcome could be critical in determining the fate of President Barack Obama's signature health overhaul agenda.
At issue is how abortions would be handled in the health care bills. In the House, a bloc of anti-abortion Democrats forced Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to accept restrictions that outraged liberals as the price for passing the Democratic health care bill last month.
The language passed by the House would forbid any health plan that receives federal subsidies from paying for abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother's life. A new government insurance plan couldn't offer abortions, and women would have to purchase separate coverage for abortion services.
Behind the scenes, Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., who opposes abortions but wants to vote for the overall health care bill, has been working to find language that could satisfy both sides.
"Our goal is to maintain essentially Hyde-like protections that prevent federal funds from being used to pay for and subsidize abortion," Casey's communications director Larry Smar said Wednesday, referring to the existing law on abortion, though nothing had been finalized.
Efforts to find such a common ground failed in the House.
Women's rights groups were caught off-guard by the provision that passed the House and are now vowing to keep similar language out of the Senate bill. Hundreds of activists organized by Planned Parenthood and other groups rallied Wednesday, holding signs reading "Listen up senators: Women's health is not negotiable."
Several House Democrats spoke, vowing to oppose final passage of any health bill with the tough abortion restrictions already approved by the House. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., called it "a devil's bargain" that she couldn't accept.
But the House language is just what Nelson wants to include in the Senate bill. He is not satisfied with the language filed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., which would forbid including abortion coverage as a required medical benefit, but would allow a new government insurance plan to cover abortions and let private insurers that receive federal subsidies offer plans that include abortion coverage.
The money to pay for abortions would have to come from premiums paid by beneficiaries themselves, kept strictly separate from federal subsidy dollars. Supporters say that would keep government funds from being used for abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother as allowed under a current law known as the Hyde amendment.
Abortion opponents say Reid's bill circumvents Hyde. For example, they say that any funds a government insurance plan would use to pay for abortion would be federal funds by definition — even if the money comes from premiums paid by beneficiaries.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said after addressing the crowd that she didn't think Nelson had the votes to prevail, though she stopped short of saying she'd oppose the overall legislation if it included Nelson's language. Reid controls 60 votes, the exact number needed to advance legislation in the 100-member Senate, so he has no room for error.
Boxer told activists at the rally that the anti-abortion amendment adopted by the House amounted to "the biggest rollback in a woman's right to choose in three decades."
Associated Press writer Kimberly Hefling contributed to this report.
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23 Comments so far
Show AllWow, I'm impressed by the "progress" Americans are making under the Dems, Ha! :) At this rate maybe you will reinstitute slavery by Obama's second term?
Meanwhile, Is Iran next on the hit list? I guess that is what is putting off your universal healthcare? Better things for your government to do than bring you up to the health/civil-liberty standards of the other democracies.
Yesterday, CNN was playing their Inside Baseball version of armchair warfare by letting the folks play along at home while experts moved flags representing troop placement around on a map. At first they gushed that most of the troops would be sent to Qandahar, and showed another American flag deployed to a hotspot along the Iranian border. Next time I saw it, they were showing the forces concentrated nearer Kabul, along the eastern border instead of the south and west.
And thats about as close to "flags" as these "experts" should be allowed. 30,000 aren't enough to concentrate anywhere. Not one of these nitwits has mentioned yet how much larger Afghanistan is than Iraq.
And they won't all get there at the same time anyway. Jeeezzzzzeeeee!!!!! "experts"!
" bring you up to the health/civil-liberty standards of the other democracies."
That my friend is NOT what this government is proposing, nor is their "health Care" bill going to resemble what you are talking about.
The stupak media plays us all again. Why do they always bust this thing out of moth balls when they want to fog the real issue??
Yeah, gotta keep that cannon fodder coming for the next "necessary" wars.
Too much religion and not enough brains is the formula that works keeping America safe from civilized values.
Thalidomide 1:12 pm-- didn't Nelson M. say that one, "Their brains don't work right?" Something like that? Well, there's this illness that cannibals get from eating the brains of their victims, I think its much like Mad Cow Disease. No doubt other readers here know the precise illness and its etiology. We've got it. Comes from drinking the warm blood and from gorging ourselves on our victims - almost 400 years now, made us "strong" which is to say psychotically brutal and deliberately unconscious about it for a long time. Now, dragging that huge bag of ever-growing repressed material has its price, and now we're sick from it, very very sick from it. What was implied became predictable and is now inevitable. Or as Kosh said it early days on Babylon5, "The avalanche has begun. Too late for the pebbles to vote."
Peece.
It's kuru but what you are referring to in we westerners we call blood lust.
But I don't think blood lust is the problem. It's money lust.
jlocke123 11:50 am you wrote; "At this rate maybe you will reinstitute slavery by Obama's second term?" You've been peeking behind the curtain again, haven't you? Naughty naughty. People will call you names for doing that. Actually, the term is Debt Slavery and we've already got that one pretty well nailed down. You see that wonderful middle class we used to have, well, through a bit of Wall Street legerdemain, about a third are now "upside down" on their homes (owe more than the prop is worth) and of course that number's going to grow, a lot. We are nothing here if not irony deficient. A Black Man as head Overseer is implementing permanent debt slavery for the White Majority because the psychotic predecessor gave Ninja loans and shredded them like cole slaw into the financial instruments. I guess that's what bubbles do, don't they, burst that is?
Shortly when the animals stick in the "Children Inherit Debt" provision into a coming omnibus bill the goose will be done. That will ensnare the children (even adult children) into the permanent slave cycle.
Consider the MIC a device, a funnel, a money funnel created by the Overseer class that is inserted either into the mouth or the anus of the top ¼ of 1% (the Masters) in order to bloat them with the wealth the Slaves produce. This country is a Corporate Feudal Slave Plantation, aka Nation/State; 3% Masters, 17% Overseers, 80% brute labor. With the death of SSI & Medicare (can’t afford because we gave all the money to the richfilth animals and we must balance our budget) we will be joining the ranks of the slave nations with a banner over our heads, a company song on our lips…and RDIF chips inserted into our bodies for public security…
So you can stop peeking behind the curtain, now you know. It's really very very ugly but from your tone, I think maybe you are one of those people from outside the borders of our little Reich - watch what you say, Master's watching you too and he OWNS the RCMP and he picked up Ottowa for loose change...Master loves you and wants you to be his friend too...
As for me, I'm a simple man - the flat earth genocidal blood god of the Habiru said the sluts were trouble 3000 years ago and I'm stickin' with HIM, the big killer in the Sky - Gender Slavery NOW, Gender Slavery Tomorrow, Gender Slavery Forever - keep the bitches "in their place". Now that's how you run a Debt Slavery Camp. Don't worry about the birthrate going up just cause women have no right to refuse any pregnancy. 40% infant mortality before the age of 10 will balance the books and keep the female numbers in check as well (can't have too many useless mouths running around)...it'll be just like in the good old days. Child birth is supposed to be the most dangerous thing a woman ever does. If childbirth doesn't kill a bunch of them what's the point in not giving them doctors?
"Child birth is supposed to be the most dangerous thing a woman ever does."
I can attest to that.
It's the Stupak, STOP IT!
control, control, control...
given our propensity for planetary-, and, therefore, self-toxification, many birth scenarios will probably change as we move into the near future...while I certainly endorse personal choice, nature is already beginning to make other arrangements that don't involve human reproductive choice at all...or successful human impregnation, pregnancy, fetal development, or birth...
whether one argues for or against abortion, the argument, alone, implies the assumption that reproductive processes will remain historically consistent...that is not a wager I would make at this time...
we need to provide an environment conducive to life, or pregnancy may soon become a global crapshoot, and birth, a quick death sentence...
Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...cessation of all industrial and chemical activity...acoustic, agrarian living...
Control, control, control... indeed.
It's not a "reproductive rights showdown." If we were having a discussion about the government's right to regulate reproduction, it would include several of my amendments (Bitch Pork), including the one outlawing the public subsidy of erectile dysfunction drug advertising and a requirement for men who have fathered a child out of wedlock to have a mandatory vasectomy. So that's not what it is about.
It is about controlling women, treating them as less than able to decide their own affairs. It's about forgetting the separation of church and state. If this were about respecting people's consciences, those opposed to abortion not having their tax dollars used for it, then why doesn't that standard apply to other issues like war? Why not? Because it is not the way government functions. Taxation doesn't come with a line item veto for each citizen, and it doesn't in this case either.
I was under the impression the fight was about payment for abortion, not controlling reproduction or if a woman had the right to have an abortion or not. If thats the case, why is a woman less able to decide her own affairs.
Does a woman not have the right to decide to be pregnant herself? If she makes that decision...are you suggesting if she changes her mind others should have to pay for her whims?
Any chance we could get this put in??????
"including the one outlawing the public subsidy of erectile dysfunction drug advertising and a requirement for men who have fathered a child out of wedlock to have a mandatory vasectomy."
At least the one about ED advertising?????
great point, abortion will not be outlawed one tiny bit. Just not funded by taxpayers! I thought feminists could take care of themselves? They need "daddy" gov't after all.
I hope the good folks in the Senate don't cave to the far left and agree with a majority of Ameicans who don't want abortion on demand for any reason paid for by tax dollars.
Either do something that will control the unfettered growth of humans somehow, somewhere or make it a law that every egg in a woman MUST produce another human.
This is a distraction and unfortunately it is working.
I would like to flush Stupak down the toilet.
Theow! says ":Just not funded by taxpayers money", how much tax goes to the MIC to kill? What an inheritance for the next generation. War's good but abortion is bad? Fundamentalists everywhere seem to have a problem with women having rights. Since it is the law of the land that abortion is legal how can we exclude it from healthcare? I don't buy the moral hypocrisy here. The Republicans never wanted the healthcare bill to pass so this is a wedge they are driving to kill anything Obama has set out to do. Obama is not doing so well because his brand Obama was false advertising, and the consumers (voters) are disappointed. Everything Obama does will be opposed by the Republicans because they must define themselves as different.
you know you guys can drop that wedge too?
The timing of O's speech about Afghanistan was so perfect it must have been scheduled weeks before by that expert manipulator President Rahm Emanuel. Here we have a major speech all of us anti-war citizens are breathlessly waiting for, during the very days when the Senate is debating a disasterous health bill and a few days before the Copenhagen event. Anything else they can confuse and distract us with?
But this is about abortion pro or con: 1) If they make abortion financially difficult (or impossible) for unemployed and working-but-poor families, they create another generation dependent on government support to simply survive. 2) The number of abortions has declined in countries that not only give sex education to teenagers but also accept that they're going to have sex and ought to know how to avoid unwanted pregancies.
In other words, this is not just about whether women own their own bodies and direct their own lives, since most of them don't and, given our patriarchal society, never will. It's about economic security and education, and a lot of other political issues that impinge on our private lives.
Obviously, the Stupak ammendment is written to secure more funds to the private health insurance companies. Women who require abortion coverage will pay a premium for it, while companies that currently cover it no longer have to.
Clearly, if this ammendment were about not using federal funds--which is the current policy--it could be narrowly confined to individual women with subsidies and not to entire insurance plans just because someone in it has a subsidy.
It is interesting that the increasingly repulsive corporatist Democratic Party is not doing the obvious thing in re-writing the bill more narrowly. Democrats are looking for just this sort of pay out--or, rather, still more of it.
And, really, why not? Why not a new federal mandate that makes people who currently have coverage discover they need to pay for something themselves?
The whole Bill is predicated on forcing people to buy insurance in more or less the current market whether they can afford it or not. I fail to see how this is anything other than punitive. Rather than medical bankruptcy through bad luck, we'll just schedule healthcare financing bankruptcy for whole segments of the population.
For that matter, why should all US businesses fall to profits in the medical industrial- healthcare financing complex?
The issue is money. People who actually care about abortion are simply not in on this game.