Monday 22 March 2010

Pro-choice Payback Time

Katha Pollitt has an excellent point (emphasis mine).
If healthcare reform becomes law, you can thank prochoicers. 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.

She goes on to list some proposed or stalled legislation and programs in areas like pay equity, maternal health, reproductive health for poor people, and so on that the Obama administration could get to work on to pay back the prochoice forces who saved his butt.

If I were living in the Excited States, I'd be emailing Nancy Fucking Pelosi -- first female Speaker of the House -- hourly.

And, oh, boo-hoo, Big Evil Baby Stupak has been deemed a turncoat by the fetus fetishists and they are not going to give him the coveted *cough* Defender of Life award.

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