Bart Stupak and Ben Nelson have chosen to open a can of worms as each, in the Senate and the House, have pushed to include a ban on private abortion insurance coverage in health care reform efforts. In opposition, some are saying (President Obama included) we should maintain the "status qou" in regards to health coverage of abortion care – a prohibition on the use of federal funds for abortion services. 

But here’s the thing. This "status quo" was never something the majority of health advocates and reproductive rights supporters were comfortable with to begin with (to put it mildly). The "status quo" is the result of the Hyde Amendment, passed by Congress in 1976 which resulted in low income women – those women without health insurance or the means to pay for an abortion out-of-pocket – being denied access to legal, safe abortion. 

Way back when Barack Obama was running for the Presidency (remember that?) his staff actually told Rewire, in our candidate questionnaire, that he opposed the Hyde Amendment:

"He believes that the
federal government should not use its dollars to intrude on a poor woman’s
decision whether to carry to term or to terminate her pregnancy and selectively
withhold benefits because she seeks to exercise her right of reproductive
choice in a manner the government disfavors."

Time may forget but the internet never does. 

Before the Hyde Amendment went into effect, Medicaid paid for one-third of all abortions. After Hyde? Women on Medicaid, women in the miltary, disabled women using disability insurance and women receiving care through the Indian Health Services were effectively shut out of abortion services – legal abortion became a privilege rather than a right for these women. 

While this current fight over the trampling of women’s rights within health care reform legislation has been long and difficult, it has afforded us a perfect opportunity to invest more energy in our fight to overturn the Hyde Amendment. We don’t want to ensure the status quo in regards to public and private coverage of abortion care. We want to ensure equity, parity and justice. 

In fact, Frances Kissling says that the answer to the Stupak Amendment IS to overturn the Hyde Amendment. Kissling writes (of the passage of the Stupak Amendment), 

If nothing else happens as
a result of this defeat, complete and total dedication to overturning Hyde must
be the centerpiece, indeed the single objective of our movement.

And now the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) is leading the charge with a new video featuring Illdoctrine.com’s Jay Smooth and some of your favorite bloggers (including Rewire’s rockin’ writers Sarah Seltzer, Amanda Marcotte and Heather Corinna) on why Congress shouldn’t be able to single out abortion in this health care discussion and why the Hyde Amendment should be overturned. 

Smooth asks, "Why does this one crowd get to pick and choose on this one thing?!" In other words, says CRR, some in Congress have decided abortion shouldn’t be funded by the federal government but guess what? I don’t want our federal funds going to crisis pregnancy centers or abstinence only until marriage programs as HIV  and pregnancy prevention "tools" or an inflated military. 

Watch, enjoy and spread the word: