by Kasie Hunt
Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009
The House’s approval on November 7 of a strict anti-abortion amendment as part of the health care reform bill left abortion-rights supporters feeling blindsided, betrayed, and bitter, and put the Senate and President Obama on the spot. But at several points in the legislative process in the House, the problem — the result of miscommunication and misrepresentations — could have been avoided.
Short of the Democratic votes to pass the health care bill as the House floor showdown neared, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was forced to allow Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., to offer an amendment prohibiting the proposed public health insurance plan from covering abortions and preventing Americans who receive government subsidies from buying a plan that covers abortions. The House passed the amendment 240-194, and 64 of the supporters were anti-abortion Democrats.
“Placing onerous new restrictions on a woman’s right to choose sets a terrible precedent and marks a significant step backward,” Reps. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., the co-chairwomen of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, complained after the vote. During the debate, Slaughter declared, “It means 30 to 40 years of our lives … of things we have fought for. I regret to see that day.”
Democratic leadership offices were unprepared for the swift, angry reaction from abortion-rights groups. The change would write the so-called Hyde amendment — a long-standing ban on federal funding for abortion, particularly in Medicaid, that Congress attaches to yearly appropriations bills — into statute. “Essentially they voted for a middle-class abortion ban,” said Laurie Rubiner, Planned Parenthood’s vice president for public policy.
Although the leaders’ dead-of-night decision on the amendment surprised some, the conflict had been building for a while, and Democratic lawmakers ignored the warning signs, according to some interest-group officials. “It’s not surprising that abortion almost derailed the whole health bill — that’s a red flag we’ve been raising for months,” a progressive religious advocate said. “It wasn’t until they realized this was a 218 [votes] problem that they listened. We couldn’t get anybody’s attention before that.”
Since the summer, Stupak had been threatening to try to take down the health care bill over abortion. During the contentious Energy and Commerce Committee markup in July, Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., refused to cede any ground to Stupak.
When Stupak was summoned to the White House this fall, he says, Obama told him to find a solution — but abortion-rights supporters weren’t organized enough to discuss an agreement with him. “Every time I’d go [talk to leaders], some new person would ask about this idea or that idea,” Stupak said. “Who has the authority here to even negotiate?”
Late on November 6, the night before the House vote, Stupak was prepared to accept less than what his amendment ultimately gave anti-abortion lawmakers. He and other anti-abortion negotiators initially agreed to a provision that would have prohibited the public plan from covering abortions but would not have codified the restrictions on government subsidies.
That compromise didn’t fly with the abortion-rights Democrats, however, who filed into Pelosi’s office later, where an emotional confrontation ensued. “The language was far beyond the current Hyde language, and if you put it into the rule [for floor debate] like that, then we would have all been stuck voting for this rule that contained huge restrictions on choice above current law, and we couldn’t do that,” DeGette said.
Stupak credits the other side’s disorganization for the degree of his victory. “We were united; we spoke with one voice. The other group spoke with many different voices, trying to cut one deal, and I think that’s how we ended up going to the floor with my amendment,” he said. “We were unified in our effort. Choice people were not unified behind the speaker, and we ended up getting more than what we thought we’d get.”
Obama suggested in the wake of the House vote that Stupak’s amendment will be revised. “I laid out a very simple principle, which is, this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill,” the president told ABC News. “There needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we’re not changing the status quo. And that’s the goal.”
House leaders, including Majority WhipJames Clyburn, D-S.C., have signaled their belief that the Stupak amendment is likely to be stripped out in conference committee. To keep up the pressure, DeGette released a letter on November 10 signed by more than 40 members — and counting — in which they say that if the final health care bill contains the House-adopted abortion restrictions, they will oppose it. “We will not vote for a conference report that contains language that restricts women’s right to choose any further than current law,” the lawmakers wrote to Pelosi.
First, the Senate must deal with the abortion issue. The health care bill that the Senate Finance Committee approved in October requires federal funding, including subsidies, to be segregated from insurance dollars used to cover abortions. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., this week said that he wants to go further: He wants the Stupak amendment added to the Senate bill.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., is set to lead the fight against abortion restrictions during the Senate floor debate, which Democratic leaders expect to begin during the week of November 16. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has warned that the Senate is the more “conservative” of the two chambers.
Abortion-rights advocates are hopeful that in this case “conservative” means resistant to change. They hope that the Senate will dial down the House’s emotional treatment of the issue. “The Senate, fortunately, has always been a cooling-off place, and that will certainly prove to be the case in this instance,” Rubiner said.
Read it at NationalJournal.com here.
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