Patterico's Pontifications

I find it somewhat amusing that the name of groups often have nothing to do with what they actually mean. “Planned Parenthood” sounds like an antiabortion group trying to help people learn how to raise a family properly. “Center for Reproductive Rights” sounds like a group fighting the Chinese or coerced ZPG plan.

Of course consider how the ACLU has changed from American Civil Liberties Union to American Criminal Liberties Union.

Sabba Hillel (153338) — 11/16/2009 @ 2:10 pm

And to think, everyone always says that the militant abortion rights crew is humorless.

JVW (d32e06) — 11/16/2009 @ 2:13 pm

She has no business having babies at her age.

nk (df76d4) — 11/16/2009 @ 2:18 pm

Either it’s OK for the government to have this kind of power over my healthcare, or it is not OK.

There’s a great argument for limited government, and this commercial seems to understand that. I do not want to be forced to buy health care insurance, or a certain kind of health care insurance that the government was lobbied to require. I, as a man in particular, am much, much less expensive to ensure than a woman. In fact, I can go years without health care if I decide it’s worth the low risk.

Why is it ok to take my rights away, pro-abortionists? Abortion supporters have wanted federal dollars to pay for these procedures for decades. That’s not OK.

Dustin (bb61e3) — 11/16/2009 @ 2:27 pm

No. It isn’t

“I remember the day in 1997 when I listened to my doctor tell me that I had a very large ovarian cyst, also, that I was likely to have a miscarriage. She said it was good that my body seemed to be taking care of things on its own, because the cyst could rupture and hemorrhage and they couldn’t operate if I was pregnant because it was a Catholic hospital.
My doctor wasn’t mean about it, she just couldn’t give me this operation that she’d told me about a minute previous I needed to avert a threat to my life.
I was lucky that I miscarried.

openleft.com/diary/16013/this-should-be-a-choice

bored again (d80b5a) — 11/16/2009 @ 2:44 pm

Yes, the federal government should ensure that Catholics offer abortions. This is truly the most pressing issue. It’s not enough that it’s legal…

Of course, bored’s comment doesn’t relate to the legislation. But if the federal government is going to subsidize health care, in any way, it’s a legit point that what it’s paying for, directly or indirectly, is now a political issue. A government that can force Catholics to perform abortions is one hell of a powerful government.

Dustin (bb61e3) — 11/16/2009 @ 3:09 pm

Jokes and misdirection can’t change one simple fact:

A clear majority of voters oppose taxpayer-funded abortions other than when both of two tests are met:
1. woman cannot afford own abortion (i.e., means testing)
2. rape, incest, threat to life of mother or grave/ monstrous deformity.

One can quibble a bit about the edges OF those tests, but the “jokes” seem to assume a non-existent right for even NON-poor women with entirely HEALTHY pregnancies to get an abortion on the taxpayers’ dime. Not happening.

Mitch (890cbf) — 11/16/2009 @ 3:11 pm

When the government through edict forces people into acts contravening their religious teachings and practices (if that isn’t a First Amendment violation, nothing is) putting their souls at risk, would it not be moral to use all resources available to change that government?
If I’m going to Hell, why shouldn’t I take a few non-believers with me?

AD - RtR/OS! (785778) — 11/16/2009 @ 3:17 pm

Man, the fetus-hater crowd really knows how to make a powerful pro-life argument. That ad makes me happy I’m not a sullen pro-abortion loser.

RE: Health care deform-All I know is that if the GOP has any brains, they’ll club the Democrats over the head with the Stupak amendment. I smell a wedge issue the Republicans can finally use to their advantage.

KingShamus (fb8597) — 11/16/2009 @ 3:19 pm

I suppose this is what bored again thinks is perfect progressive policy on abortion.

JVW (d32e06) — 11/16/2009 @ 3:19 pm

Just shows how enlightened the Euros are; compassionate and respectful of the beliefs of others, too.

AD - RtR/OS! (785778) — 11/16/2009 @ 3:22 pm

It’s gotta suck when your animating force for civics is the demand to terminate your own children.

I honestly pity these people.

Techie (482700) — 11/16/2009 @ 3:26 pm

JVW, that’s sad. Those people are not free.

And that’s where Obamacare is headed. They will tell doctors what they can do and what they can’t. They will make choices for pure political reasons.

If you’re in a country where you can’t even find someone to terminate your child (for convenience, of course), then maybe you should leave that blessed country instead of insisting the government force the argument.

Is that 1 billion abortions statistic reliable? Saddest thing I’ve ever read.

Dustin (bb61e3) — 11/16/2009 @ 3:27 pm

Dustin, I think the one billion abortions over a 25-year period is quite credible. When you consider the “One Child” policy in China was enforced during this period, and when you consider that something like half of all pregnancies in Russia end in abortion, I don’t think 40 million abortions per year worldwide is an oulandish estimate.

JVW (d32e06) — 11/16/2009 @ 3:44 pm

JVW, you do know that the same provision is in the House bill, right ? I tried to find it at the link for OpenCongress but couldn’t find it now. By the way, at OpenCongress only 23 % support the House bill.

Mike K (2cf494) — 11/16/2009 @ 4:07 pm

Yeah, Mike K, I am absolutely stunned by the degree to which the Dems think they can strip Stupak out of the final bill and still get it through both chambers of Congress. I find it inconceivable that progressives would allow their obeisance to the abortion lobby scuttle the best chance they will likely ever have to pass universal health insurance. I keep wondering if they mean to string NARAL and the rest of them along until the very end before once again cutting a deal with pro-life Dems to get the bill passed, or if they will actually fail to get the bill because they lose the votes of either 50 House abortion rights supporters or 50 abortion opponents.

Who knows, maybe Nancy believes they really can strip out Stupak and still hold on to a bare minimum of Dems for passage. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and what role Obama takes both in public and behind the scenes.

JVW (d32e06) — 11/16/2009 @ 4:17 pm

I don’t think 40 million abortions per year worldwide is an oulandish estimate.

Comment by JVW — 11/16/2009 @ 3:44 pm

I’d heard a figure of 60 million worldwide, for several years, about 10 years ago, but am certain it’s in the tens of millions. We have about 1.5 million per year here in the US alone and we don’t have the highest abortion rate in the world.

I think this video is dishonest and David Axelrod is scum for harping on his meme that “the president will not see the staus quo changed.” OF COURSE the status quo is going to change. Not only will billions of federal dollars be spent over many years to fund the killing of unborn children whereas these funds aren’t spent today, but many insurance plans who have an exception for abortion coverage now won’t have it. (I work for a Catholic church and our insurance plan excludes elective abortion now; my money will go toward paying for abortion if the abortion exception isn’t made, and this is absolutely unacceptable to millions of people like me.

Not to mention the pro-life doctors and nurses who WILL go to jail and Catholic hospitals that WILL close because abortion is a “super-right” that supersedes all other rights, even the right to conscience.

Status quo. That’s the LAST thing they want. Liars.

no one you know (1ebbb1) — 11/16/2009 @ 4:23 pm

The tag line on the ad is don’t let Congress take away coverage millions of Americans already have.

Am I missing something? The Stupak Amendment only prohibits government funding of abortions, something which is currently prohibited. What is being taken away?

Clarification, not hysteria, please.

daleyrocks (718861) — 11/16/2009 @ 4:25 pm

Troll again provides an unverified anecdote with an unnamed hospital and an alleged Catholic policy that would have forbidden surgery on a pregnant woman to save her life if the fetus be endangered.

It would have taken the troll only a few seconds to find out that Catholic policy says no such thing.

However, if medical treatment or surgical operation, necessary to save a mother’s life, is applied to her organism (though the child’s death would, or at least might, follow as a regretted but unavoidable consequence), it should not be maintained that the fetal life is thereby directly attacked. Moralists agree that we are not always prohibited from doing what is lawful in itself, though evil consequences may follow which we do not desire. The good effects of our acts are then directly intended, and the regretted evil consequences are reluctantly permitted to follow because we cannot avoid them.

Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (339050) — 11/16/2009 @ 4:25 pm

Bradley, I can still remember arguments about that in grammar school with the nuns but it was always the mother’s option. You have to keep harking back to Churchill saying “The truth is so precious it must have a bodyguard of lies.” I don’t think he had this in mind, though. I gave you another idiot reporter comment on another thread just now.

Mike K (2cf494) — 11/16/2009 @ 5:21 pm

Bradley, it’s to see someone other than me feed the troll. It would be shocking if a Catholic hospital in today’s USA would refuse to save the life of a mother.

bored would have made a comment related to Stupak or even reality … if he could.

Dustin (bb61e3) — 11/16/2009 @ 5:21 pm

Am I missing something? The Stupak Amendment only prohibits government funding of abortions, something which is currently prohibited. What is being taken away?

The Stupak amendment prevents private insurance policies on the exchange from covering abortion as part of the standard policy. So it goes quite a bit further than the standard Hyde amendment.

jpe (d7521d) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:05 pm

Dustin,
Glad to help expose the lie. I was raised a Catholic. Even though I no longer believe in any religion, I still believe in telling the truth. Troll again obviously doesn’t.

Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:05 pm

My comment included a link. Go ask the woman who wrote it.
And the term used was “a risk” How much of one? And who should decide when that risk is or is worth taking, a woman and her doctor?

Or a church?

bored again (d80b5a) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:14 pm

bored again’s bigotry has been noted before.

SPQR (26be8b) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:16 pm

Troll again, if you checked your links for accuracy, we wouldn’t have to do it for you. But that would require some concern for accuracy on your part.

Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:22 pm

People what don’t have $600 or so saved up for this or that sort of emergency probably have no business having babies. I think the polite phrase is “have-nots.” But that’s not really the angle I approach this from. The angle I approach this from is more from the angle of if we’re gonna have a third world dirty socialist health care scheme, it’s not any more moral or dignified for not funding abortion. If we’re bent on adapting neo-fascist health policies in our benighted little country then whether our squalid dirty socialist government is in the abortion business or not is a matter of supreme indifference I think.

happyfeet (b919e7) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:29 pm

errr… I meant to say ‘It’s nice to see someone other than me feed the troll’. I guess that’s obvious, but I probably need to stop feeding that little bugger.

Dustin (bb61e3) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:30 pm

I meant adopting didn’t I? Yes. Yes I did.

happyfeet (b919e7) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:34 pm

So if they managed to pass the thing and strip off Stupak, does that make paying taxes immoral?

At that point, taking taxes by force from citizens who believe it’s immoral, the US graduates to an actively repressive government. But since they’ll have access to our bank accounts, it gets pretty hard to even resist.

jodetoad (059c35) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:39 pm

Dustin, yes, I knew your meaning. It’s far easier to lie than to fact-check the lies, but it needs to be done.

And I am inspired by our good host*, who I admire for his devotion to facts beyond my capacity to express.

*And co-bloggers.

Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:49 pm

bored again….did the link say if the cyst was life threatening, or just bad….

But, what caught my eye was the end of the link…

There’s nothing equivalently risky that men can legally be forced to do, or are even likely to be asked to do, aside from being on the front lines of a war zone.

If a woman’s right to decide that she just can’t handle this ridiculous level of risk at a given time, or that her body simply can’t take anymore, or that she can’t outlast the depression it may trigger, is regarded as irrelevant, then no one really has any inalienable rights (via) at all.

If you’re a Democrat who doesn’t get that all restrictions on abortion are human rights violations, we aren’t on the same team.

Before I got to this point, my first thought about the link was that women can, and normally do, CHOOSE to get pregnant. They choose to have sex, and choose not to protect themselves. Yes, sometimes the protections fail, and sometimes they don’t choose to have sex. What would that be: ONE IN A MILLION TIMES????

So, if it is a choice, and she makes it all that bad as it is in her link, why do it???

Of course, there came the moral equivalency at the end, that this can’t/doesn’t happen to men with any similarity (except war, of course, which men don’t generally want women to fight, and is generally a CHOICE), and finally that unlimited and unrestricted abortion is a HUMAN RIGHT…

Sorry, you’ve lost me on this fight….

BTW….her joke was funny….she focused only on a child with a one in a million fatal brain abnormality….what about the MILLIONS OF CHILDREN ABORTED who are completely healthy?????

reff (277f8c) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:55 pm

jpe,

As I read it, the Stupak Amendment says exactly the same thing as the Hyde Amendment. The difference is that now there will be “private” insurance policies from the government exchange that have some federal funding, so those policies are subject to the Amendment. True private policies aren’t subject to the Stupak Amendment, but government exchange policies are subject to the Amendment because they are paid for with some federal funds. Thus, if a person goes out and buys their own policy on the private market, they can buy a policy that covers abortions.

I think the real problem (and abortion advocates know it) is that most people are going to be pushed into the government exchange market. They don’t care about the private market because they know it won’t be around that long.

DRJ (dee47d) — 11/16/2009 @ 6:58 pm

Ya know, ABC refused to run Pro-Life ads the last Presidential election cycle.

Just sayin’…

John Hitchcock (3fd153) — 11/16/2009 @ 8:40 pm

True private policies aren’t subject to the Stupak Amendment

Will there be such a beast anymore? I think the point of the exchange is to compel all insurance plans onto it. There’s only a limited exception for grandfathered plans, and everything else is subject to Stupak. (that’s how it was under HR 3200, at least)

jpe (08c1dd) — 11/17/2009 @ 6:25 am

Let me clarify the above: when I say “compel onto the exchange,” I don’t mean by out-competing private plans (or out-quasi-competing, or out-subsidizing, or what have you), thereby forcing plans eventually onto the exchange. I mean they are literally compelled by threat of government sanction onto the exchange. If a new plan is created, it must by law be on the exchange where it will subject to Stupak.

And I don’t think the plans get subsidized by the state on the exchange; they’re just heavily regulated private plans, so no public money would be involved. (that’s my understanding, and could be wrong. I’d love to be corrected just so I know for sure how it works)

jpe (08c1dd) — 11/17/2009 @ 6:29 am

With Kim Gandy being one of the most frequent visitors to La Casa Blanca, we can safely assume that Barcky will not be erring on the side of life. He managed to create quite the anti-life record prior to being anointed.

JD (e4e95a) — 11/17/2009 @ 6:35 am

jpe whether they get subsidized through th
e exchange or by way of the individual seems to be a distinction without a difference. And your phrasing of compel to the exchange was quite apt.

JD (e4e95a) — 11/17/2009 @ 6:44 am

Some of the people get subsidized through the exchange via credits, but I don’t think anyone else does. So the upshot is that people will be purchasing private insurance (albeit highly regulated insurance) with private funds and won’t be able to get coverage for abortion.

So if the Stupak amendment prohibits private insurers from offering abortion coverage out of private funds, then it’s a pretty big departure from Hyde amendment.

jpe (08c1dd) — 11/17/2009 @ 6:51 am

It always comes down to whose ox is being gored, doesn’t it?

When this health care thing started conservatives were warning that in short order private insurance would go away and the gov’t would run it all. The libs said, no no no, you can keep your private plan.

Now they think their precious “right” to kill their children is at risk, so they say that we’ll all be forced into the Stupak limitations as all policies get swallowed up into “the exchange”.

What great logic! We should not only let them take over our health care, but we should pay for their abortions and be grateful for the privilege because it’s the only fair thing to do.

Gesundheit (47b0b8) — 11/17/2009 @ 7:07 am

Highly regulated insurance is redundantly redundant.

JD (e4e95a) — 11/17/2009 @ 7:10 am

Speaking of redundant let me reiteratively repeat again how the little president man’s dehumanizing dirty socialist third world health care is not made more better or more worser by including or not including abortions. It’s maximally awful either way. Cause of what it corrupts and how much it corrupts.

happyfeet (b919e7) — 11/17/2009 @ 7:21 am

Recently, Ace showed a video of Rush Limbaugh guest-hosting Pat Sajak’s show. Rush was attacked for his pro-life views by two people guaranteed never to get pregnant — a post-menopausal lesbian and a gentleman with severe testosterone deficiency but beautifully cut hair.

I wonder whom of either “cornholed again” resembles most.

nk (df76d4) — 11/17/2009 @ 7:25 am

Stupak, in the end, was nothing other than cover for pro-life Dems so they could pass that monstrosity out of the House. It was a ploy. It is clear that there is no intention to allow that language to remain. They want us talking about abortion rather than socializing the healthcare system.

JD (331ad2) — 11/17/2009 @ 7:32 am

It always comes down to whose ox is being gored, doesn’t it?

When this health care thing started conservatives were warning that in short order private insurance would go away and the gov’t would run it all. The libs said, no no no, you can keep your private plan.

Now they think their precious “right” to kill their children is at risk, so they say that we’ll all be forced into the Stupak limitations as all policies get swallowed up into “the exchange”.

What great logic! We should not only let them take over our health care, but we should pay for their abortions and be grateful for the privilege because it’s the only fair thing to do.

Why should the feds even be involved?

There would be no need for the Stupak amendment if health care reform were left to the states.

Michael Ejercito (6a1582) — 11/17/2009 @ 7:37 am

I think JD has it right.

happyfeet (71f55e) — 11/17/2009 @ 11:21 am

“There would be no need for the Stupak amendment if health care reform were left to the states.”

This is the only response anyone will ever need. The Democrats are giving the government power over our health. They are giving it power over everything from nursing homes to dental floss. They should let the states deal with this, and let people decide which approach they want. Our economy is too screwed up as it is to force Romneycare on everybody.

Dustin (bb61e3) — 11/17/2009 @ 11:33 am

I think JD has it right.

Comment by happyfeet

Not only is that the funniest joke happyfeet has ever made, it’s also, as usual for both parties wrong.

timb (449046) — 11/17/2009 @ 11:41 am

You are an angry hatey creepy thingie. Get help.

JD (59593b) — 11/17/2009 @ 11:49 am

So, I clicked thru to creepy thingie’s link, and it does not refute my opinion stated above. SHOCKA that the small pathetic arrogant pedantic dishonest pr*ck would do so.

JD (59593b) — 11/17/2009 @ 11:54 am

They want us talking about abortion rather than socializing the healthcare system.

this is true Mr. timb. The dirty socialists and our feckless little president man will like nothing better than to blame their FAIL on abortion and such and not have to acknowledge it as a rejection of their dirty socialist hatred of all that is good about our little country.

happyfeet (71f55e) — 11/17/2009 @ 12:05 pm

I just clicked on that link again, timb, and all you showed is that Stupak still supports his amendment, which does not really refute my opinion, as stated above. That Axelrod, Barcky, Pelosi, and Reid are all trying to remove the language from the Senate bill pretty much confirms my point. So, this would be marked in the fail column for you.

JD (9769aa) — 11/17/2009 @ 5:31 pm

Thanks for posting our “No Joke” video, Patterico! Looks like you started a good conversation about healthcare here.

Janna
Center for Reproductive Rights

Janna (7c0431) — 11/18/2009 @ 12:39 pm

If you locked your keys in your car outside of planned parenthood, would you go in there and ask them for a coat hanger?

Failed Abortion (011d55) — 12/9/2009 @ 4:52 pm

11/16/2009

Abortion: It’s No Joke

54 Responses to “Abortion: It’s No Joke”

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