... At this writing, the version of the Stupak/Pitts amendment submitted by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NB) in the Senate has been tabled, and it is possible that the Stupak-Pitts amendment may get stripped from the final bill in a conference committee to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the bill. But Marlene Gerber Fried, Director of the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program at Hampshire College, in Amherst, MA, nevertheless considers such an outcome a hollow victory, many years in the making. She observes that "Beating Stupak will mean that millions of women still won't be covered. It just won't be millions more."

"We are still living with the legacy of an abortion politic," she said in a telephone interview last week, "that did not put the interests of poor women up front. The idea that a constitutional right, requires access to that right is," she concluded, "just not part of liberal thinking."

It turned out that antiabortion legislators in both parties were not going to go along with public funds (no matter how small the amounts relative to the enormous health care bill) going to private insurers who provide abortion coverage. This issue loomed so large that a spokesman for the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB) told the New York Times, "The concerns are kind of intractable."

Rev. Carlton Veazey, President of RCRC came out swinging in a recent "action alert" to supporters. "The House-passed Stupak-Pitts amendment," he declared, "is disrespectful of women and an affront to our nation's promise of freedom of religion and separation of church and state. The House of Representatives bowed to the pressure of the USCCB and agreed to impose the theology of this one religious tradition on all of us."

From Rightwing to Prochoice: The Shifting Goalposts of `Abortion Neutrality',
by Frederick Clarkson
December 8, 2009