I’m going to repeat some things that I think need repeating. I’ve seen far too much fuzzy logic on the relationship between the taxpayer and abortion.
The basic premise is that we want to erect as high a wall as possible between each and every abortion and taxpayer involvement. A worthy aim, even if the taxpayer is complicit in other morally dubious acts, especially related to military spending – but I’ll let that pass for now. But if we think there is no subsidization of abortion today, we are kidding ourselves. The famous Guttmacher study showed that 13 percent of abortions are billed to medicaid, about the same as to private insurers – clearly, the Hyde rule can be bypassed quite easily at the state level. This is a direct relationship. More indirectly, the government provides funds to Planned Parenthood, on the understanding that this money does not fund abortion. But again, if you use the fungibility argument that many are using in the current debate, then this practice too is unacceptable. Medicare doesn’t fund abortions of course, but it makes payments to plenty of hospitals that do.
And I have not even mentioned the elephant in the room. Every year, the government spends $250 billion to make employer-sponsored health insurance tax-free. This is an indirect subsidy, but still a subsidy, and a huge one at that. And since private insurance coverage of abortion is widespread, this amounts to the indirect subsidization of abortion on a huge scale. Why do we not hear much about this? Largely, because people don’t understand the economic nature of a subsidy, which is to change the relative price of some good, making it cheaper than it otherwise would be.
This argument holds in other cases too. I’ve heard some people who direct subsidies in the exchange should be replaced by vouchers that can only be used to purchase health insurance. Sorry, but from an economic standpoint, there is no difference here. In each case, you are purchasing an insurance plan with some financial support from the government – whether the government sends the money directly to the insurer of your choice, or directly to you so that you can pay the insurer of your choice makes no difference whatsoever. It does not stop you from purchasing a plan that includes abortion, and from the taxpayer helping you pay for it.
The same argument applies to a strategy much-loved by Republicans – the use of tax credits to allow people to buy insurance in the individual market. This doesn’t work either, as the tax credit is again acting as an indirect subsidy of a plan that includes abortion.
Let me say a word here about the public option. The confusion is even greater on this point. You have silly statements from the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) saying that a public option with abortion amounts to “federal government funding of abortion”. Once again, the public option is funded entirely by private premiums. The only taxpayer involvement comes from subsidies, and here, the logic is exactly the same as with competing private options. If covering abortion is a problem in the public option, then covering abortion is an equal problem in any private option. There is no moral difference. Why does the NRLC not complain about “big business funding of abortion”? I think a problem here stems from the “Joe Lieberman fallacy”, the notion that the public option is somehow a government entitlement like medicare or medicaid. It isn’t. If anything, the subsidies can be considered an entitlement, and these can go to either the public or private options.
Clearly, all roads lead back to the coverage of abortion in private health insurance plans. This is the key issue. Any involvement whatsoever by the government in health care will lead to abortion being subsidized as long as abortion is covered. For sure, some of this subsidization is pretty indirect, but this debate now revolves around ever finer distinctions of how the barrier between taxpayer funds and abortion should be defined. This is not a very fruitful debate. For sure, I support the Stupak amendment and hope it, or something close to it, gets passed. But let’s not kid ourselves that this is stopping government involvement in abortion. Given the degree of moral proximity that is already evident, I cannot see any moral argument against a health care bill without Stupak, unless on grounds of prudence. Nobody has persuaded me that the argument of Cardinal Dulles does not hold. And if it is morally unacceptable, then all of us who pay premiums to private insurers are just as tainted morally.
Ultimately, there is only one real solution – a push to stop abortion coverage in private plans. If that goes, all problems on the taxpayer side go away. And if that stays, all the problems on the taxpayer side stay too.
Why does the NRLC not complain about “big business funding of abortion”?
The NRTLC has a 30 year old policy of hands off private enterprise. Has anyone ever heard of calls to deny communion to a corporate execuitve paying for his workers’ abortions? One single instance?
Of course, the best part of this debate is that the NRTLC has been totally cut out of the negotiations. Anti-abortion Hill leaders are talking exclusively to the USCCB.
I support the Stupak Amendment because I believe it will result in fewer abortions. I really don’t need some Tamuldic debate as to what is taxpayer financing and what is not, particularly when I know none of the players will apply the same test to other issues.
Harry Reid probably put in the bill the strongest pro-life language that could survive the initial Senate vote.
I thought the USCCB news release supporting the Stupak Amendment was interesting in that it used the Hyde Amendment (and the status quo) as a standard by which to measure the acceptability of the way the House bill dealt with abortion. The USCCB was making a political argument rather than a moral argument. The statement even goes so far as to say Stupak “will not affect coverage of abortion in non-subsidized health plans, and will not bar anyone from purchasing a supplemental abortion policy with their own funds.” See, pro-choicers, it’s not so bad!
One would have thought there would at least be some discussion in terms of moral theology of issues like remote material cooperation with evil. But I think a real discussion in those terms would open a tremendous can of worms and require millions of people to give up their current insurance in order to be at all consistent in their demands of how far government ought to go to distance itself from cooperating with abortion.
I learning a lot of things MM. For example, the government subsidizes drunk driving. They collect taxes and use those taxes so that drunks have roads they can use to harm themselves and other people.
Now granted, the advocates of drunk driving haven’t made driving drunk legal, but just wait until they get more power, they’ll sure legalize it. Abortion is already legal, and we can’t allow federal organization of the insurance system on pain of sin according to some folks. Well, until folks can guarentee me that not a single drunk will use our highways to harm himself or someone else, I propose we stop funding the sin inducing highway system. Maybe we can allow a private one for those that can’t resist allowing drunks to drive, but we can’t have a rational highway system (or insurance system) until this issue is resolved.
“The famous Guttmacher study showed that 13 percent of abortions are billed to medicaid…”.
Indeed, I know a young woman who was told how to apply for Medicaid money for an abortion. So Planned Unparenthood may be said to be milking the system. A way to stop it is simply to cut off abortion as a Medicaid service. When she had some sense, Senator Boxer asked “Since when is pregnancy a disease?’.
Since when is pregnancy a disease?’
Or menopause, for that matter. Why should we pay for women to go to the doctor and complain about perfectly natural hot flashes and night sweats?
This is so tired.
You win by attrition.
You have successfully overcome all common sense.
A way to stop it is simply to cut off abortion as a Medicaid service.
I would support that, but the believers in subsidiarity and states rights take the opposite view.
Well said MM. I would only add that while the GOP slams any Dem plan for subsidizing abortion, their alternative, the Health Saving Account, is not only absurd (a tax break for the rich while keeping the current status quo in place) but also amounts to, yes, a tax subsidy for private plans that cover abortion. Their opposition to healthcare reform has nothing to do with abortion and everything to do with protecting plutocracy.
1. I wish you spent as much time lecturing your brethren in your political coalition who have spent the last two weeks hyperventilating about how Stupak takes away rights (by which they mean that they’re not willing to pay for abortions for poor women themselves if the government won’t do it).
2. It may be true that we are tainted by having private insurance that covers abortion. But the government does not compel us to pay for such coverage. HCR without Stupak would, and as such would be a step in the wrong direction. The bishops and others are right to resist.
I don’t know if this makes HCR on net a negative or positive. But as things stand right now, with a bill not yet finalized, it is certainly appropriate to focus our energies on moving the legislation in a pro-life direction.
Yet, you (as always) thing that the thing to do now is wag your finger at pro-lifers.
I also like the feigned exhaustion on the title.
You yourself have said that health care is critical life issue facing us today. And many Catholics seem to think abortion is a somehwat important issue.
Yet you act like you can’t believe this is something people want to discuss.
If the Stupak amendment is as uneventful as you say, why are pro-choice groups going nuts over it, and why are left-leaning Catholics claiming that it was such a wonderful act of generosity for Nancy Pelosi to allow a vote on it?
The “key issue” is that for the first time in decades, we have an opportunity to pass landmark pro-life legislation.
Or we can talk about how hypocritical some of those advocating for it are.
So let me see if I’ve gleaned correctly the reasoning behind the above editorial: because the federal/state government ALREADY engages in subsidizing abortion (through, say, private insurance and Medicaid), it is somehow morally unproblematic (or at any rate unworthy of combating) the government going *still further* by subsiding even *more* abortions, in this case through some sort of public option or quasi-public option?
How does this follow? By reason of a need for consistency? Not hardly. Of course, it can and should be granted that if the current “battle” being waged is at last won for the pro-life cause, it would indeed involve (more) inconsistency in the country’s laws concerning abortion and its funding. However, the very same inconsistency obtains *wherever* a true and coherent pro-life ethic finds itself having to fight by half-measures. Hence our support, say, for parental consent laws or for prohibiting late-term abortions.
Inconsistency in this regard is only problematic for those fighting within the present front who would *not* LIKEWISE (if they could) stop ALL government funding of abortion (however indirect), including that which *already* takes place. Yet surely no *coherent* pro-lifer would ever grant even the /status quo/ as anything close to acceptable.
Notwithstanding the imprudent and problematic “hands off” stance taken by certain so-called “pro-life” organizations as regards private insurance companies, I for one would have it that ALL governmental funding of abortion cease immediately. Unfortunately, however, there is currently no *live*, truly *viable* opportunity to help (directly) bring about the latter state of affairs. Does that therefore indicate we shouldn’t AT LEAST try to stop THIS or THAT aspect of governmental funding for abortion? Clearly, no such “making-the-perfect-the-enemy-of-the-good” is required! Indeed, the Magisterium itself has already made clear that working for such “half-measures” is laudable and important.
To repeat: if there were any desire to “stop with Stupak” (so to speak), such a position would indeed be quite problematic, but as no *consistent* pro-lifer *does* wish to stop with merely piecemeal prohibitions of funding for abortion, from whence does any problematic inconsistency arise?
Also: please be very careful when drawing comparisons between one’s direct or indirect cooperation in something intrinsically unjust (unjust ever and always as a matter of principle) and one’s direct or indirect cooperation in an activity that, because not intrinsically unjust, is at least *in principle* capable — however unlikely as a matter *of fact* — of being given a morally benign interpretation.
Even if one is morally certain, say, that no present war (indeed, no war of the past, say, seventy years) meets the qualifications for a “just” defense (as indicated in the CCC, for instance) or, to give another example, even if one is entirely certain that recourse to capital punishment has no OBJECTIVELY WARRANTED basis within today’s circumstances, *neither* of these negative moral assessments (even when backed by the authority of Pope and/or bishops) could ever be worthy of comparison with what we know by natural law and by faith to be an *intrinsically morally vicious act*. Said unworthiness of comparison follows from the truth (clearly brought forward in /Veritatis Splendor/ as well as /Evangelium Vitae/) that there is an incommensurable difference between activity that is intrinsically and in principle immoral and activity the morality of which is — at least in principle — context-dependent. Apropos of the latter activity, individuals may well disagree concerning precisely that which may be justified by a given-context. This is absolutely not the case with the likes of activities which are in principle immoral – not susceptible of justification by even the strongest of ends desired. Further, said incommensurability obtains *regardless* of how obvious a misuse is being made — by the government, say — of the aforementioned hypothetically-justifying, context-dependent principles.
A distinction without a real difference? Splitting hairs? Not when it comes to moral quandaries regarding support and defense of one’s country and/or *any* sort of cooperation that a citizen /qua/ citizen may be called upon to make. Indeed, it is only within the confines of either an overt or at least creeping situational ethics that such a distinction is seen as anything less than entirely relevant for a host of issues regarding the quality of our cooperation in governmental acts with regard to which we are in even the strongest of disagreements.
There appear to be a number of objections that touch on the same issue. So let me be clear: I think the Stupak amendment is great. Not only is it the most substantial piece of pro-life legislation in decades (despite all the Republican preening over this issue), but it has brought our attention to a great scandal – the connivance of the big private insurance companies in the abortion business and the fact that all of us who pay premiums to these companies are morally tainted. I admit, this was not on my radar before. Now it is. I hope Stupak passes, or something close to it, but even if it doesn’t, this has not been in vain. We know where the real fight must lie, and it is not with the government.
The other point I am trying to make is that it is really hard to argue that something short of Stupak is a deal breaker on moral grounds. Abstracting from abortion, we know this health care bill is pro-life. It would expand health care to millions without it, and would support the preferential option for the poor by granting subsidized insurance. And since the link between abortion and poverty is so strong, one could argue quite reasonably that it could reduce abortion.
Of course, access to subsidized abortion could also increase the incidence of abortion. Crunching the numbers, I don’t think it would be as high as people think, but I’m more interested here in morality, not numbers. Here’s the basic point – given the extent of taxpayer involvement in the current abortion machine, and given the proximity of primate premiums to abortion in the current system, you cannot really argue that the kind of extension being proposed is morally illicit under all circumstances. That is not an argument to say that we should accept a Stupak-free bill without a fuss, but we are clearly not in the intrinsically evila category (putting it another way, the promximity does not rise to formal cooperation with evil). I think Dulles applies.
To address Jeremy’s last point – I contend he makes too big a distinction between instrinsically evil acts and acts that are evil based on circumstances. Evil is evil. If we know for certain that the circumstances for a just war do not apply, then it is evil – extrinsically evil, but still evil, and we cannot choose evil, any kind of evil. People often get to hung up on the class of intrinsically evil acts, which has nothing to do with gravity. For example, masturbation is intrinsically evil. Is this worse that a war that we know to be evil, even if not intrinsically so? Clearly not.
If you’re wondering why there might be confusion — take a look at your posting history. If supporting Stupak were a crime, do you think your posts here would be sufficient evidence to convict?
With the House already having passed a bill with the Stupak amendment, and the Senate debating, now is not the time to argue that we should accept a Stupak-free amendment. We should be pushing as hard as we can (Yes, David N, even if it means the USCCB gets its hands dirty in judging specifics of legislation) to get it passed and signed.
Back to the main point, the entire premise of health care reform is that the current system delivers unjust results, and thus we need the government to get involved. So, when government involvement in abortion is challenged, it won’t do to point out that private insurance often covers abortion. The government solution should be *better.* Better for the unborn as well as the rest of us. And if it can’t be, then the hell with it.
Pro-life supporters of health care reform should welcome this higher standard, and see it as evidence that government involvement in health care truly can deliver more just results. If government can’t do better than markets, then why the hell are we doing this?
As for Cardinal Dulles, let’s look at the quote again:
Now, it is manifestly not the case that funding for abortion could not be removed, because the House has passed a bill with that funding removed. The Senate has to actively put it back in, which argues against it being incidental.
Also, Cardinal Dulles phrased this extraordinarily weakly — “might arguably be licit.” Not, must be supported by faithful Catholics, but “might arguably be licit.”
So saying, “Dulles applies” only establishes that voting for the bill “might arguably be licit.” Which implies that the licitness must be argued, not assumed, and that support is far from required.
I think the Stupak amendment is great. Not only is it the most substantial piece of pro-life legislation in decades (despite all the Republican preening over this issue)…
I agree. It is more than just a positive good. I believe it could lead to the elimination of abortion as a common provision of US health care policies. That is why the abortion rights groups are so strident. It would be the most substanial anti-abortion advance in decades, and under a Democratic Administration and Congress.
…, but it has brought our attention to a great scandal – the connivance of the big private insurance companies in the abortion business and the fact that all of us who pay premiums to these companies are morally tainted. I admit, this was not on my radar before.
It is not news to me. I have been long aware that Pro-Life principles stop when it comes to interference with the all-holy private market.
The other point I am trying to make is that it is really hard to argue that something short of Stupak is a deal breaker on moral grounds.
We now know what the goalposts are: between Stupak (which is great!) and Capps (which does have some merit). The effort now is to get it as close to the Stupak goal post as politically possible.
If government can’t do better than markets, then why the hell are we doing this?
John McG,
Obama (like the Catholic Church) believes that health care is a right, not a privilege. You seem to be forgetting that the purpose of health care reform is to make health insurance more affordable and to come as close to universal coverage as possible. The House and Senate bills were introduced to achieve that end, not as a means for opponents of abortion to see how many restrictions they could slip through.
The standard the USCCB argued for in its statement was the Hyde Amendment. They argued for the status quo. They did not argue for a “higher standard.” If the Stupak Amendment merely maintains the status quo, which the anti-abortion movement abhors, how can it be a great victory for them? I am not sure the bishops’ arguments were entirely honest, and in any case, they were purely political rather than moral. The bishops have no special qualifications that make them an authority on the application of the Hyde Amendment. When they make a moral argument, Catholics are bound to listen. When they make a political argument, they have no special authority.
Like it or not, abortion is a constitutional right in this country. That’s not an irrelevant fact, although for the anti-abortion movement, it may be an “inconvenient truth.” The business at hand is to get health care reform enacted, not to restrict or expand abortion. As I watched the House voting, I was rooting for the Stupak Amendment, not because I believe it is abortion neutral, but because I thought the full bill couldn’t pass the House without it. Now I am rooting for either holding to Stupak, or some kind of compromise, whichever will get health care reform passed.
I fail to believe that it is a matter of Catholic doctrine that we must have Stupak rather than, say, Capps. How to vote as an elected representative in the House or Senate in our secular government and pluralistic society is way too complex a matter to solve with some kind of “theological calculus” that yields only one answer. The job at hand is to get health care reform passed, and if either the pro-abortion or the anti-abortion faction pushes so hard that the bill fails, then that will be a victory for the “culture of death.”
The anti-abortion members of the Senate should craft the best possible amendment that moves in the direction of Stupak and can get 51 votes. Senator Reid has encouraged them to do just this. This puts them in a better position come Conference Committee.
Anyway, today the Senate will have the chance to vote on the House bill with the Stupak Amendment. Every Republican has announced he will oppose the motion.
The following two claims are incoherent:
1. The current health care status quo is a moral disaster that demands immediate action.
2. It’s not a big deal if the government pays for abortion under health care reform, because that is also true of the status quo.
If the status quo is a moral disaster, then it cannot be used as a moral standard?
But what about the bishops referencing the Hyde amendment? Well, President Obama and many members of Congress have pledged to uphold the Hyde amendment, and in referencing that, USCCB is holding them to that.
“You seem to be forgetting that the purpose of health care reform is to make health insurance more affordable and to come as close to universal coverage as possible”
This leaves me speechless. Were that the purpose of the present Democratic-driven efforts! If so, the bill would be a fraction of the length it is at present, would contain provisions allowing sale of policies across state lines and so on.
This bill is all about increasing government involvement in the health care system, which is contrary to what you say the purpose is because there has never been a case in recent history in the United States of increased government involvement in the healthcare system bringing costs of any kind – either the cost of health care or the cost of insurance – down.
“I’m more interested here in morality, not numbers”
Good gracious. This is the exact argument you and liberal Catholics rejected when arguing for support of Obama and the Dem takeover. Abortion reduction. So much for that.
Medicaid pays for abortion? It absolutely doesn’t on the federal level. So some states do it and others don’t, and you think that means it’s not a deal breaker to let the feds start doing it for everyone? Ridiculous.
And why when discussing the public option do you ignore three facts: public option coverage will mabdate an abortion surcharge for everyone in that plan so it isn’t fair to call it merely private, public option abortion comes in a plan run by the federal government so it can’t be merely called a private plan and it pushes federal policy in a huge immeasurable pro-abortion direction, and public option abortion increases it massively putting the lie to Democrats being abortion reducers.
Those are details, but here’s the fundamental problem with what you are saying. You say you support the Stupak amendment just not as a deal breaker. But the simple fact is that there is no Stupak amendment if it is not a deal breaker. You say you are for principled Catholic political support for both health care and in favor of human life. But when the USCCB takes exactly that position you won’t stand with them on their demands. You say you are for pro-life policy by Democrats instead of Republican partisanship. But when pro-life Democrats actually get together and do something real and successful, you abandon Stupak and his coalition in their principled commitments. For goodness sake, if you can’t stand with Bart Stupak and the USCCB in drawing deal making and deal breaking lines, what credibility do you possibly have in saying you want pro-life Democrat policy action? As you say, some things bear repeating: if you won’t stand with the USCCB and Stupak and draw a line at his amendment, then you are no less partisanly pro-Obama and Pelosi than are the Republican Catholics you say should be ignored.
Nobody is addressing an obvious point – the huge tax subsidy for employer-insurance barely any different, from an economic standpoint, from an expenditure subsidy given on the individual insurance market. I fail to understand why people worry about one and not the other – I can only put it down to a fundamental misunderstanding of the economics.
The tax subsidy does not pay for the abortions of the women who are not having abortions because they do not have coverage, but who will have coverage under Obama-Reid-Pelosi care, so that all poor women will have free abortion on demand. The tax subsidy is not an insurance plan run by the federal government with checks cut to abortionists for abortions. The tax subsidy is not the federal government forcing Americans to pay abortion surcharges to the government which it then collects in a federal account for the express purpose of paying for abortions. The tax subsidy is not the federal government determining that abortion is part of health care and basic health care that it will and people must provide, a determination that HHS and the federal government will necessarily and explictly make under Obama-Reid-Pelosi care, and which will drive federal policy in an unprecedented manner towards enshrining abortion in mainstream medicine and sooner than later mandating its existence, provision, and occurrence, making “abortion reduction” preposterous. And the tax subsidy is not giving money to anyone; it is choosing not to take money from everyone–it does not involve any of these federal government explicit acceptances of and thrusts in favor of child killing.
Oh, and tax subsidies don’t mandate that one plan be available in every region of the country that covers abortion, a further positive and unprecedented thrust abortion policy and threat to consceince rights. We will NEVER be able to take away the ENTITLEMENT to free and abortion for all women that this plan creates. And you act like it’s not so different than current policy, so it shouldn’t be a deal breaker, to heck with the USCCB and the pro-life Democrats you said you wanted to promote.
Sorry, Matt, but you do not understand the basic economics. One, a subsidy changes the relative price of the favored activity, making it cheaper. It does not matter if you do it through taxes or spending.
You keep repeating the public option fallacy – the government does not cut checks to anybody. It is entirely funded by premiums. The only “checks cut” (and the bill has the total cost) are to people to help them purchase insurance on the exchange. As I’m tired of saying, the only “entitlement” is to the subsidies, which can be used for either the public or private option. This is not tha hard. Why are so many people so wilfully misrepresenting the public option? Why is Joe Lieberman saying it will is an entitlement that increases the deficit when the opposite is the case? It’s decades of antigoverment nonsense spewed by Reagan and his acolytes that prevents people thinking clearly on this issue.
Back to abortion. The real problem is the prevalence of abortion in private insurance. If it was not covered, there would not be a problem. Why don’t you focus on the ultimate source of the problem – the cosy relationship between the big insurance companies and the abortion lobby? After all, every single person in a private plan is subsidizing abortion somewhere – you are being “forced” to pay through employer-sponsored insurance.
Or even better – the ideal solution would be a single-payer system that did not cover abortion. That would take the venal private insurers out of the system completely. And yet, right-wing Catholics balk at this as it disturbs their free market liberalism. Well, it’s free market liberalism that gives us the insurance-supported abortion industry…
This is very simple. We are in a system now where tens and probably hundreds of thousands of women do not have coverage for abortions and therefore do not get them. The Democrats are proposing a plan that covers every single last one of those women giving them free abortions via insurance. The pro-reform USCCB and the pro-reform pro-life Democrats are taking a stand. And it is too pro-life for you. So it stands to reason that anything is too pro-life for you.
The fact that we currently have mere non-taxing, which is NOT a subsidy and does NOT involve the government giving any money in its hands to abortion insurers, somehow makes it not much worse to change the situation into free abortions for everyone, mostly under the federal government run plan that creates federal policy to include abortion, and that is our government forcing all public payers to submit an abortion surcharge, and is our goverment forcing a private plan in every region to cover abortion…well this is just bizarre for you to say it isn’t a big change and that you’re taking some nuanced and sophisiticated position even though every Catholic this side of Barack Obama disagrees.
For the last time, the tax exemption is a subsidy. It is a government action that deliberately reduces the relative price of health care. Do you need to see the math???
Free abortions? Excuse me? Since when did the stuff paid for by health insurance become free? This is all paid for by private premia, supplemented by subsidies for those below a certain income threshold. Here’s what you don’t seem to understand – the goal is to put the uninsured under exactly the same system as the insured today. And that includes abortion. If we want to put the uninsured into a special plan that includes no abortion, that is fine with me. But how can you be embrace this “extraordinary” solution while not caring about the “ordinary” situation, which is that people who currently have insurance can get abortion coverage, and we are all paying for that? What explains the fetishization of the government role over the private sector role?
I have yet to see a single condemnation on your part of the cozy relationship between private insurance and the abortion industry, which is the very heart of all the problems. No, you talk about government forcing coverage, when it was there all along, willingly provided. You talk about an “abortion surcharge” when every private plan in the country has such a surcharge (because even if your own plan does not cover abortion, other plans covered by your carrier almost certainly do, and isn’t money fungible?).
Do you really think that having the government pay for coverage that includes abortion is not a moral step toward general acceptance of abortion that is not captured by the current health care deduction?
—
Again, imagine if the situation were converses. The Republicans are in power. They want to tackle abortion in some what that we’ll assume would be found Constitutional. Because, as a million Vox Nova posts have taught us, simply restricting abortion is not enough, it includes subsidies to adoption agencies and other services that provide pre-natal care. Some organizations with immoral missions, like say the KKK, have set up adoption agencies to get in on this. Moderate Republican Senators insist on an amendment to the abortion bill so that it explicity does not fund such groups.
Now, what should be the focus of truly pro-life Republicans?
a.) Demonstrating how the bill should be passed even without the amendment, and pointing out that the government already funds the KKK is some roundabout way, and that’s the real problem.
OR
b.) Fighting like hell so that the bill with the amendment gets passed.
What would you think of a right-leaning pro-life Catholic who pledges his assent to Catholic moral teaching who went with choice a?
—
There have been people who have made heroic efforts to put the Stupak amendment in the abortion bill. They have done this in spite of brickbats from the right that engagement with Democratic lawmakers should begin and end with denial of communion.
And with each post like this, you are spitting on their work. You are discouraging them. You are saying that what they have done really doesn’t matter all that much.
—
I can understand a “lesser of two evils” type thinking in the late stages of an election, when we have two imperfect candidates to choose from. But when there is legislation that is still being formed, and there exists a version of this legislation that is morally unproblematic, I don’t understand why one would spend energy arguing that the problematic version is acceptable.
I think that we don’t really disagree on most of the facts, although we each describe them in ways different enough as to make some moral difference.
Ultimately we’re both selecting which angle to look at this from. Like the elephant, we might both be 70% right. But, from my perspective, once we’ve agreed that the thing has tree trunks for legs, it’s just not something we can accept for house training, even if it also has floppy ears like the dachshund we already own.
We seem to agree that putting the uninsured in exactly the same system as you say it, or changing the current system into a government imprimatur system as I say it, will give abortions to every woma-who-is-so-poor-that-she-doesn’t-have-abortions-because-they-aren’t-insured. AND the government will be molding that abortion-is-core-health-care situation into stone to shape all future policy even broader than what one plan covers, AND it will be no longer be even theoretically possible to reform the system away from abortion coverage, AND it will be federal bureaucrats and committees and dollars that cover child killing.
The pro-life DEMOCRATS and the USCCB think this is a hill to die on. Maybe you are more Democratic and Catholic than they are. Fine. Just don’t sneer at Deal Hudson for thinking he is Catholicker than you. You’re both playing the same game.
It seems to me there is a “public” argument about abortion and health-care reform — which is that it should be consistent with the Hyde Amendment — and a “private” argument — that expanding health-care coverage to 30 million or more people shouldn’t result in any more abortions. They seem to be two rather different arguments, to me. The Hyde Amendment only requires that government money not pay for abortions. It seems clear to me that the Capps Amendment would achieve that. In fact, It is not clear to me that government subsidies to women buying insurance with abortion coverage would would not be consistent with the Hyde Amendment. It is not even clear to me that requiring basic insurance to cover abortion, or covering it in the public option, would be inconsistent with the Hyde Amendment.