What a cry has gone up from the pro-abortion commentators on our media over the efforts in our national congress to make the ban on tax funding of abortions a permanent part of our national law. This is the same ban that is passed by conress every year known as the “Hyde Amendment.” It is also the same ban approved by bipartisan vote in the US House of Representatives last year as part of the Healthcare reform known as the “Stupak-Pitts Amendment”. This ban was not accepted by the Senate, however.
What did happen in the face of the Senate’s turning it’s back on the peoples’ preference in this matter was that Representative Stupak asked President Obama to issue an executive order that prohibits tax funding of abortions in the healthcare reform implementation. The President, who has openly acknowledged his support for abortion, did issue that order. Mr Stupak is clearly the Pro-Life hero of 2010. In face of threats to his life and the life and safety of his family from both pro and anti abortion extremists, the animosity of many of his confreres, Democrats and Republicans, he was resolute in his support of human rights.
The media coverage of the healthcare reform effort and Bart Stupak in particular was likewise bipolar. On one major cable channel Stupak was praised for his courage and dedication and was seriously and politely interviewed by one commentator. A couple of hours later another commentator on the same channel repeatedly characterized him as “single handedly bringing down healthcare reform.” This latter claim is far from the facts. I think a case can be made that, in the end, it was the courage of Bart Stupak that singlehandedly got heath reform finally accepted in Congress after decades of campaign promises by Republicans and Democrats to do just that.
Now that the Hyde amendment, the Stupak-Pitts Amendment and the Obama Order have been proposed as a permanent part of our national healthcare regulation, the abortion supporters in the editorial media and the abortion industry in advertising media have really gone off the deep end.
Their first ploy was an alarm that a measure was being pushed by radical element in congress to redefine “rape”. This sounded like some new libertarian members of Congress were proposing to decriminalize rape to get the government out of our private lives. In fact what had set them off was the move to make the Hyde-Stupak-Pitts-Obama ban on tax payer funding of abortion permanent. Unlike the outlandish characterizations made about the Healthcare Reform bills this one seems to have fizzled quickly. In fact there are currently at least two bills proposed in the House (HR3 & HR358) to do this. As is almost always the case the final wording of the bills is not yet know. These fall far short of the thousands of pages that characterized the health bill and so can be read and understood more quickly.
Moving from the “libertarian” alarm to the opposite extreme claiming that the Hyde-Stupak-Obama or the Smith-Lipinsky-Pitts (the bipartisan sponsors of the two current measures listed above) measures would be a big government intrusion into private behavior with the “government involved in every woman’s pregnancy.” In giving this talking point they give the impression that Hyde-Stupak-Obama or Smith-Pitts-Lipinski were bans on abortion. This clearly is not the case.
I suspect they think their efforts to alarm extremes on both ends of the political spectrum will have the effect of defeating the very measure that most Americans want, to not have tax dollars spent in carrying out these human rights violations currently permitted by our courts. Most of us Americans are neither libertarian or socialist as described by these alarms but do support these bipartisan measures. We need to be proactive in being sure that such inaccurate characterizations of them are not given credence or left unchallenged.
I urge you to write, call, Email, Text or Twitter your Congress members. Ask them to participate in making the Hyde-Stupak-Pitts-Obama ban on tax funding of abortion a permanent provision of our law.
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