The Price We Paid - And How to Get Payback

Everybody knows liberals "took one for the team" to ensure that a piece-of-shit health care deform bill passed. Liberals sacrificed the best hope in 60 years for single-payer in order to get something basic established as a foundation for future improvement.

Dennis Kucinich is the face of that liberal sacrifice, becoming a hero for abandoning the perfect to obtain the not-completely-horrific.

But liberal principles are not what took the bullet to the gut on health care reform: abortion rights did.

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.

Read the whole thing for Katha Pollitt’s suggested list for payback.

Yes, the health care reform bill accomplishes great things for women’s health, especially poor women with children, but make no mistake: the price was a nearly fatal blow to abortion rights.

Pollitt interviews noted sociologist Carole Joffe about health care reform:

I call it the good, the bad, and the ugly. The unequivocal good is that 30 million people who currently don't have coverage will gain this basic human right. Regular access to primary care will mean healthier women overall, which will ultimately translate into healthier pregnancies--and hopefully, the rates of maternal mortality and infant mortality, both now at disturbing levels in the US, will improve. Women will gain access to the more effective, more expensive forms of contraception (oral contraception, the newer and safer IUDs), and that will surely reduce the rate of unintended pregnancy in the US, which, again, is shockingly high in comparison to other industrialized countries. As numerous commentators have pointed out, European countries with national health care systems have far lower rates of unintended pregnancies, and thus lower rates of abortion than the US, even though abortions are freely available and typically subsidized.

The bad news is the Nelson abortion restrictions, which require insurers offering such coverage to collect two different checks--one to pay for abortion coverage, the other for everything else. This will prove so cumbersome that ultimately it will not be in companies' interest to cover abortions.

The ugly part is the marginalization of abortion all through the process. President Obama and Democratic Congresswomen repeatedly said, "This is a health care bill, not an abortion bill." I understand why they said it. They felt this was the only way to get the bill through and perhaps they were right. But abortion is health care! One out of three women has an abortion during her reproductive years. One of the best ways to reduce the stigma around abortion is to normalize the procedure within mainstream health care settings. The mantra "this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill" reinforces exactly the opposite message.

SNIP

But the most important thing that needs to be done, in my view, is the hardest: we need to destigmatize abortion. We need to create the conditions where it is not toxic for politicians who support us to actually say the "a-word" and not rely on the euphemism "right to choose." How to do this is not self-evident, or we as a movement would be doing it already. But it has to be done.

One last thought. The violence we are seeing now, with lawmakers from both parties receiving death threats, abusive phone calls at home, vandalism at their homes, and even an anthrax scare in one case, is utterly unacceptable in a civilized society. But all these actions have been going on for years within the abortion provider community--with little public outcry except when there is a murder. Hopefully, as political leaders and others condemn this latest outbreak of violence, or what some would call domestic terrorism, they'll extend their concern to the field of abortion provision as well.

Via Digby, the Guttmacher Institute has done a thorough analysis of the new health care bill's impact on reproductive rights:

For the nation’s consumers and providers of reproductive health care, and for advocates of reproductive health and rights, the health care reform legislation just enacted is something of a mixed bag. The bill’s onerous abortion restrictions have been rightly denounced by reproductive rights supporters. New funding for evidence-based sex education was regrettably paired with the retention of a failed and discredited abstinence-only program. But, taken together, a number of other provisions in this sweeping measure constitute a clear and significant step forward for the reproductive health of America’s women and men.

Read the whole thing.

Digby concludes:

Women's rights aren't a zero sum game and giving up insurance coverage for abortion shouldn't have to be the price for passing these other vitally important programs.

The pro-choice movement needs to study the methods of the NRA. They never let their advocates use them as a bargaining chip for anything. And anyway, at this point, the pro-choice advocates have very little left to bargain with.

These other advances are great news and explain why the pro-choice liberals were caught between a rock and a hard place and ultimately voted as they did. But they should never allow themselves to be blackmailed like that again. If they do, it's all over.

Liberals have to stop apologizing for what we know is right.

Liberals have to stop compromising away our fundamental principles for crumbs from the wing nut table.

Liberals have to stop using pathetic euphemisms like “pro-choice.”

Fuck "pro-choice;" I am foursquare in favor of unrestricted abortion rights.

Yet some advocacy groups, such as NOW and Raising Women's Voices, are aiming higher--pushing to finally roll back Hyde. Given what we've just learned about Congressional backing for public funding, such an effort will clearly be a steep uphill battle. Yet you can see why some of the boldest activists think its time has come. With the other side, led by Stupak, having alienated at least some of the public with its extremism, prochoice advocates hope the pendulum of moderates' sympathy will swing their way.

The real policy setbacks of healthcare reform could also serve as the wake-up call for women that prochoicers need. Because the new law will bring about a major expansion of Medicaid, and also because the economic downturn has driven up the number of uninsured, more and more women will soon be in the position of relying on government-subsidized or -provided health insurance. And thus more and more women will likely have abortion excluded from their medical coverage. Advocates are already thinking about how to best harness their discontent. "We'll be trying to convince women to tell their stories about what it means not to have that coverage," says Uttley of Raising Women's Voices. "We think we have a chance. As long as people think it's someone else who won't get coverage, they won't care. Once they realize it's the family next door, the lady who sits behind them in church, then their hearts can be changed."