All About Stupak-Pitts (And Oklahoma)

On this episode of Reality Cast, it’s a whole lot of
discussion and dissection of the Stupak-Pitts amendment to the House health
care reform bill. I’ll be looking
at its impact and why it happened in two separate segments. Also, Megan Carpentier will be on to
talk about the Oklahoma law requiring women who have abortions to put their
private information on line.

I’d like to highlight a video posted on Rewire
with an article by David Neipert.

Belmont
*

Eight professors have filed suit with the EEOC, and the EEOC
determined that it was indeed gender discrimination. Good for the professors of Belmont!

**********

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably
heard the terrible news.

Stupak
1 *

That’s right; the pigheaded religious fanatic that’s Bart
Stupak that’s been on and on about how the health care bill needs to be
rewritten so that women can’t get coverage for abortion got his way. He got an amendment attached to the
House health care reform bill that makes it illegal for insurance companies to
provide abortion coverage to any woman who has subsidized care, even if they
pay for it with non-federal money.
A lot of anti-choicers are trying to play this off as if it was the same
old thing they’ve always done, which is bad enough, which is stopping federal
funding for abortion. But that’s a
lie, as Diane Archer explained on Grit TV.

Stupak
2 *

What absolutely needs to be understood is that in no way,
shape, or form is this an attempt to actually reduce the number of
abortions. How do I know
that? Because abortion coverage
wasn’t the only thing that anti-choicers blocked. There were many attempts early on to mandate that health
insurance companies cover contraception, but no version of the bill has that
language left in it. Anti-choicers
made a fuss about abortion, and were able to quietly make sure that as many
women possible are forced to have them.
Because, and say it with me now, this is about punishing sex, and has
nothing to do with life.

As Ezra Klein noted in the Washington Post, this is also and
mainly a class issue. The anti-sex
agenda doesn’t really make sense until you look at it from this
perspective. Most anti-sex folks
are fine with sex for themselves, it’s just those other people they don’t like
having sex. And other generally
means poor people. The women that
will be most affected by this ban on abortion and the lack of contraception
coverage are women who need subsidies to buy insurance, because they can’t
afford this themselves. I guess
the idea of poor people having sex just really makes some people mad, you
know? Estimates suggest that 10
million women are at risk of forced childbirth for the sin of being working
class and having sex.

Which probably goes a long way to explaining why many
ostensibly pro-choice Democrats voted for this amendment. But part of it was that religious
fanatics like Stupak were belligerent in their demands and said they would not
vote for the health care bill if it was neutral on abortion. A lot of the media made it sound like
the Democrats were facing a loss of 40 votes on this, but as James Clyburn
explained on MSNBC, that’s not so.

Stupak
3 *

That said, those 10 votes were probably a
make-it-or-break-it number for passing this bill. But it’s hard to say, honestly. What we do know is this isn’t over yet. The Senate has to reconcile their bill
with this bill, and the pro-choice case is much stronger in the Senate.
Representative Schultz went on MSNBC to explain.

Stupak
4 *

Certainly, one reason this whole reason blew up like this is
that it seemed, until the last minute, like Nancy Pelosi would be able to keep
a lid on this anti-woman nonsense.
As Terry O’Neill explains, even those of us who were aware of the
anti-choice sentiment in Congress didn’t think it would be this bad.

Stupak
5 *

Well, the veil has been lifted and now we see how deep the
anti-woman sentiment has gotten in Congress and in the mostly-male political
circles of the federal government.
So hopefully we won’t be caught by surprise again. In the next segment on the Stupak-Pitts
amendment, after the interview, I’ll look at some of the machinations behind
the scenes that allowed this amendment to pass.

**********

insert interview

**********

Now that the Stupak-Pitts amendment has passed, it’s time to
ask some serious questions about how this happened. The most obvious answer is that Capitol Hill is still
dominated by a bunch of middle-aged men that will never be pregnant themselves,
and so think that anyone who does worry about it is being silly. But the answer is really more
complicated than that.

Let’s start with the man who pushed forward this
unconscionable legislation, Bart Stupak.
Stupak is a Democrat from Michigan, and in interviews, he comes across
as a tone-deaf sexist who particularly resents that he has to live under Nancy
Pelosi’s leadership. It turns out
that Stupak is a member of the notorious C Street Family, an elitist
fundamentalist Christian cult that many congressmen belong to. We’ve had Jeff Sharlet on this podcast
before to talk about the Family, and he went on Rachel Maddow to explain
further.

Stupak
6 *

As Jeff noted in the book "The Family", this cultish group
is big on the idea that women are inferior to men. Women in the house have to wait on the men, for instance,
and even their clothes are constricted, and they’re mostly excluded from power. So, unsurprisingly, the Family makes a
big deal out of sperm power, and hate on the idea that mere women could
interrupt what sperm causes.

Indeed, the most amazing part of this entire health care
reform process is how it’s drawn out so much hostility from so many male
members of Congress towards women.
For instance, there was the completely out of control behavior of many
congressional Republicans when female Democrats got up to speak about health
care reform and women. Think
Progress posted a compilation.

Stupak
7 *
Stupak
8 *

Really, at this point, it’s hard to avoid the sense that the
shouters simply can’t stand the idea of women speaking up for health care
reform or speaking up for women’s needs.
A lot of the women speaking weren’t even talking about abortion. But of course, this is never really
about abortion, is it? It’s about
controlling women, and you got a full earful of that right there. But even I was astonished at how
blatant it was.

The other big players in this were the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops, who basically dictated the content of this amendment. It’s no big news that the Catholic
Bishops are obsessed with sexuality in general, and female sexuality
especially, but it’s more than a little startling how much Congress is simply
allowing religious groups to pretty much write legislation, in direct violation
of the First Amendment.

But there’s more than mere misogyny at hand. As Wendy Norris wrote at RH Reality
Check, the Catholic Bishops are also protecting the Vatican’s lucrative
investment in the health care industry.
Catholic hospitals that don’t provide abortion are at a disadvantage
compared to those that do, and so pushing abortion out of the health care
package available to women means that these hospitals don’t have to compete as
much. Of course, hospital provided
abortions are often done in emergency situations where the fetus is already
dead, but when you’re hating on sexual women, that’s a minor distinction not
worth bothering over.

Luckily, the fact that this is basically about a bunch of
men deciding to flex their powers to make life miserable for women didn’t pass
the attention of everyone in the mainstream media. Dr. Nancy Snyderman was
blunt, saying what a lot of us are thinking.

Stupak
9 *

This fight isn’t over yet, people. We still have the Senate on hand to get this out of the
bill.

*********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, still trying to defend
murder of abortion providers edition.
This time it’s Ann Coulter, comparing the reaction to the Fort Hood
shooter to the reaction to Dr. Tiller’s murder.

coulter
*

Except that the shooter in the Dr. Tiller case has admitted
that he did it as a terrorist act and he has associations with anti-choice
terrorist groups like Army of God.
And the shooter in the Fort Hood case’s motivations were still in
question. The cases are not
comparable, since no one was saying that all Christians are responsible for Dr.
Tiller’s murder, but that’s certainly Ann Coulter’s implication about Muslims
here.

Search: