Opinion Pieces Comment On Stupak Amendment, Health Reform

Main Category: Abortion
Also Included In: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance
Article Date: 19 Nov 2009 - 5:00 PDT

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Several newspapers recently published opinion pieces regarding Rep. Bart Stupak's (D-Mich.) amendment to the House health care reform bill (HR 3962). The amendment would prohibit abortion coverage in private and public health plans in the proposed health exchange that receive federal subsidies. Summaries appear below.

• Stupak, Detroit Free Press: In a commentary responding to a recent Free Press editorial criticizing his amendment, Stupak writes that the amendment "simply keeps" current federal policy regarding abortion coverage "consistent." Stupak writes that he has "long been an advocate of health care reform" and has "also always been pro-life," adding, "I made my concerns with the abortion provisions in this bill clear in July," but abortion-rights supporters in the House "chose to ignore those concerns until they realized that they would not pass the reform in the House without the support of pro-life Democrats" (Stupak, Detroit Free Press, 11/18).
  
  
• Mark Mellman, The Hill: "Americans oppose using abortion as a means of derailing health care reform and oppose using health care reform as a means of restricting abortion," Mellman, president of The Mellman Group, writes. The Stupak amendment would "take away coverage for abortion that tens of millions of women already have," he continues, adding that the amendment "not only violates the public will but also does fundamental violence to Democrats' explicit promise that if you like what you have, you will be able to keep it" (Mellman, The Hill, 11/17).
  
  
• Ruth Marcus, Washington Post: Although "firmly pro-choice" and "firmly opposed" to the Stupak amendment, columnist Marcus writes that current health reform proposals "entangle the government in insurance in a different way than it has been previously, and therefore call for a new, nuanced approach" to the abortion issue. Her column lays out "three fallacies" -- that the Stupak amendment is "necessary to maintain the status quo, in which no federal money is used for abortion," that "your money is fungible but mine isn't," and that the Stupak amendment is "such an intolerable intrusion on the rights of women to choose that it cannot be allowed to stand." She concludes that the Stupak amendment "is not worth killing health reform over," adding that the "remote risk" of limiting access to abortion services for women who receive federal subsidies "isn't worth the greater danger: losing the opportunity to get reform now" (Marcus, Washington Post, 11/18).

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