Abortion Advocates Gathering Votes to Defeat Health Care Bill With Stupak Added
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
November 9, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — The vote for the Stupak has produced a debate within the pro-life movement on whether the health care bill could have been defeated without it. But the pro-abortion reaction to adding Stupak is so strong that pro-abortion zealots are threatening to torpedo the health care bill as a result.
The House cast a strongly bipartisan vote in favor of the Stupak amendment to remove the abortion funding found in the health care bill via the public option and affordability credits.
The House then voted for the bill on a narrow 220-215 vote with virtually all Republicans and dozens of Democrats still opposing the bill.
Upset that massive abortion funding has been removed from the bill, Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat who leads the pro-abortion forces, says she has the signatures of more than 40 House members on a letter threatening to defeat the health care bill if Stupak is not removed.
"There’s going to be a firestorm here," DeGette told the Washington Post.
"Women are going to realize that a Democratic-controlled House has passed legislation that would prohibit women paying for abortions with their own funds," she falsely claimed. "We’re not going to let this into law."
The letter to Pelosi reads: "The Stupak-Pitts amendment to H.R. 3962, The Affordable Healthcare for America Act, represents an unprecedented and unacceptable restriction on women’s ability to access the full range of reproductive health services to which they are lawfully entitled. We will not vote for a conference report that contains language that restricts women’s right to choose any further than current law."
Some 41 Democrats have signed on and the letter is still circulating for more signatures.
DeGette told the Post that she believes the Stupak amendment will be removed by house Democratic leaders when the process moves to a conference committee should the Senate pass its bill.
During the debate on the health care bill, Democratic leaders would offer no guarantee to House Minority Leader John Boehner that they would keep the abortion funding ban in the bill.
President Barack Obama did not mention the abortion issue in his comments praising the House for approving the bill, but it is expected that he will work with Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a bid to remove the Stupak amendment.
DeGette told the post that abortion advocates in the House have asked for a meeting with Obama saying they "need him to back us up" after losing the Stupak vote.
"This would be the greatest restriction on a woman’s right to get an abortion with her own money in our lifetime," she said. "The stakes could not be higher."
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida democrat, is also speaking out on behalf of the pro-abortion activists in the House.
“I am confident that when it comes back from the conference committee that that language won’t be there,” Wasserman Schultz said on MSNBC. “And I think we’re all going to be working very hard, particularly the pro-choice members, to make sure that’s the case.”
Their comments come on the heels of those from Planned Parenthood and NOW saying they already oppose the health care bill due to the Stupak provision.
NARAL president Nancy Keenan, joined her fellow abortion advocates today saying she wants the bill defeated if the pro-life funding amendment remains.
She called the vote for the bill with Stupak "extremely disappointing and outrageous," and said the "fight isn’t over."
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