Abortion: The Democrats’ bitter pill

We’ve just witnessed a “coup,” said The New York Times in an editorial. Women won the legal right to an abortion nearly four decades ago, yet to get the votes of pro-life Democrats, the House of Representatives amended its health-care legislation last week to ban abortion coverage in any insurance plan subsidized with taxpayer dollars. The amendment was the subject of a fierce lobbying campaign by the Catholic Church, and goes far beyond the existing Hyde Amendment ban on the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions. It will likely force private insurance companies participating in federal plans to drop abortion coverage altogether. What a betrayal by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, said Frances Kissling in Salon.com. Pelosi decided to throw abortion rights overboard to win passage of health-care legislation in the House, and “many Democratic women were shocked.” Who would have thought that by electing a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, we’d take a big step backward on freedoms women had fought so hard to achieve?

Liberals have only themselves to blame for their predicament, said Philip Klein in The American Spectator Online. When you take health care out of private hands and put decisions in the hands of government, you make political intrusion into private decisions inevitable. Yet in opposing government limits on abortion, liberal Democrats found themselves arguing “against government command and control,” as if they suddenly found this notion distasteful. Have they no sense of irony? No—and no common sense, either, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. “If ObamaCare becomes law,’’ every medical decision—from whether an MRI can be used in routine testing to whether cancer patients have access to expensive new drugs—will become subject to politics, moral disputes, and budget concerns.

That argument is both naïve and deceptive, said Ezra Klein in TheWashingtonPost.com, because the federal government is already deeply involved in the health-care system. By exempting employer-sponsored health-care benefits from taxes, the government now enables about 157 million middle-class and wealthy Americans to have all the health care they want—including free or low-cost abortions. The House version of health-care reform won’t affect women with private insurance. Only women who are poor or unemployed and need government subsidies will be denied coverage for abortions. So this dispute isn’t really about choice or about “life.’’ It’s about class.

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