Stupak-Pitt Abortion Amendment Rejected in Senate Health Care Bill: Who's Really Pro-Life?

The U.S. Senate this week has rejected the health care bill's abortion amendment, which would have added pro-life abortion restrictions. Senators rejected the House's Stupak-Pitt abortion amendment. Since I'm generally a flaming liberal socialist, even to the left wing of President Obama and Nancy Pelosi and the entire memberships of La Raza and ACORN, this should call for personal celebration.

Not. My support had been behind the Stupak-Pitt abortion amendment, and it would have represented a positive compromise.

So, maybe I'm not so politically liberal after all. But as we consider the health care bill's abortion amendment, this is my plea to progressive feminist pro-choice women and your sensitive "do get it" male supporters: May we explore this abortion amendment for just a bit, before you throw shoes and fists at me?

First, the health care bill's rejected abortion amendment would not have banned legal abortion. That may come down the road with the newly conservative Supreme Court, but that wasn't the point of the Stupak-Pitt proposal. The health care abortion amendment simply aimed to assert that people who oppose abortion should not have to pay for somebody else to receive a taxpayer-funded abortion.

That being said, I still feel some guilty Neanderthal "don't get it" male remorse at my views. It seems that women should be the ones to exclusively decide on abortion, that we men shouldn't even have a voice. These aren't our own bodies.

At the same time, I must admit, that with the thought of a fetus possessing hands and fingers and legs and nerves and brain matter, that abortion seems quite gruesome. The expression "a woman's right to choose" bothers me to that extent. Is abortion really a civil right?

Abortion, for me, is the most confusing subject in political and social discourse. This causes me to take umbrage with the "shouters" on either side. But since the opinions already expressed in this piece will offend the pro-choice side, I'll close by offending the pro-life side as well.

To so-called pro-lifers: As you continue to fight against abortion, many of you seem like such hypocrites! Here's why:

(1) You so totally oppose abortion, that you even oppose stem cell research, which to any reasonable person is not abortion. Ridiculous. How many lives will be lost because of such tunnel vision?

(2) You fight so hard to prevent abortions, but once the babies are born, you fight just as hard to cut your taxes so that you won't have to pay to support the babies who are born into poverty. You oppose funds for health clinics, or Birth-to-5 preschool programs, or food stamps. It's like you're saying, "Little baby, we made sure you were born, but now you're on your own."

(3) While you insist that women bear their children rather than abort, you fail to realize that many women subsequently must work to support those children. You oppose legal provisions to boost the minimum wage, or to promote equal pay for equal work. Discrimination against working mothers who keep their babies seems just fine with you.

(4) Last but certainly not least, you oppose abortion but you support America's brutal system of capital punishment, which is the most severe in the industrialized world. You oppose abortions, but you support electric chairs and gas chambers and legal injections. Then you still call yourselves "pro-life." Please, explain. Please.

If I were in Congress, my support would have gone to the Stupak-Pitt proposal for the health care bill's abortion restrictions amendment. My support, in exchange, would have pursued some give-and-take on these other concerns that also are pro-life.

SOURCES

Personal experience.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/HealthCare/senators-defeat-abortion-amendment-health-care-bill/story?id=9279079