Is liberal opposition to the successful Stupak amendment in the House, and its equivalent being offered by Sen. Nelson in the Senate, blatantly hypocritical, or am I missing something? (Or, I suppose, both….)
Here is a summary of current anti-abortion law (the Hyde Amendment), the original House health reform bill, the current Senate Finance Committee health reform bill, and House bill as passed with the Stupak amendment.
This summary appears on a liberal site by a critic of all restrictions on abortion, but let us assume that it is entirely accurate. Its summary states as fact what all critics of the Stupak Amendment denounce with horror and outrage:
No taxpayer money could be used to pay for abortion services or for insurance plans that include abortion services beyond those allowed by Hyde, even if those services are paid for entirely with private money.
All critics of the Stupak Amendment that I have seen emphasize what they regard as the outrageousness of prohibiting women from having subsidized access to insurance plans that cover abortion even if they use their own money. Here is a typical example, from NOW, which calls it “the greatest threat to women’s fundamental right to abortion since it was recognized under the Constitution with Roe v. Wade.”
Sponsored by Reps. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.), this amendment will:
- Prevent low- and moderate-income women receiving subsidies to help cover costs from using their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion.
- Prevent women with coverage purchased through the new health insurance exchanges, administered by private insurance companies, from using 100 percent of their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion…. [Emphasis in original]
Despite some claims to the contrary, the Stupak prohibition would not prevent insurance companies from offering plans that cover abortion or women from buying such plans. Indeed, as summarized by the critical American Progress site linked above, what it provides is that
[i]nsurers could only sell plans that include abortion to customers who can pay 100 percent of their premiums without government assistance.
Whether or not this goes beyond current law, as embodied in the Hyde Amendment, I will leave to the lawyers to decide. What interests me here is the conflict between the liberals’ steaming outrage occasioned by a federal limitation on how people can use “their own money” to pay for abortions under a federally subsidized insurance plan and their unanimous, equally outraged opposition to a private, church-related educational institution being allowed to keep some of its own money, in the form of a tax-exemption routinely extended to educational and religious institutions, because of its bad ideas.
That institution, of course, is Bob Jones University, and I have discussed the successful effort to prevent it from keeping its “own money” because its ideas and one of its policies, though not illegal, were held to violate “public policy” in several places, especially here, here, and here, where I noted that Bob Jones
lost its tax exemption, to liberal joy and acclaim, because the Supremes held that not only its First Amendment right to academic freedom but also its First Amendment right to the free expression of its religion was trumped by the IRS’s interpretation of the claims of “public policy.”
You’d think that liberals who are so sensitive to the outrage of the federal government telling some women that they cannot receive federal subsidies to buy federally approved insurance plans that cover abortion would also be sensitive to the almost innumerable other restrictions on what sort of insurance can or must buy that pervade the Democrats’ proposed health care plans.
Or, depending on how you view liberals and hypocrisy, maybe you wouldn’t.
