Not surprising...

There is a whole mess of misogynistic crap overflowing the discourse on health care reform in this country.

Pre-natal, maternity, and abortion health care are all in one way or another demonized by misogynistic assholes of one type or another. it is all a good material for the corporations.

So when will all the people who defend party support for shitheads like Stupak explain what he and his fellow troglodytes bring to the caucus to justify that support? Apart from trying to blow up the party's #1 legislative priority, that is.

Stupak was prominently connected to 'the House on C Street' -- though he insists 'that he just rents a room, but does not know what goes on there. Stupak refuses to "discuss what goes on there, because I'm not there. ... Are there other activities going on there? Yes. But what goes on and things like that, I don't know. I have my room there."'

Apparently Stupak has been consistently anti-choice, unlike Tony (Toby?) Hall, the Democratic Congressman who moved severely to the right after his involvement with 'C Street.'

The real economy is sufficiently interconnected that everything pays for everything. That our tax dollars fund poppy production in Afghanistan is almost too easy an example. Your Caribbean hotel stay probably helps fund Chinese immigrant smugglers and your Pizza delivery order includes funds that prop up the current regime in Venezuala.

Get over it!

Why are these clowns threatening to hold up HCR due to funding for a legitimate and 100% LEGAL health procedure?!

@Paul Dirks: You state it very succinctly and clearly. The interdependence of all forms of funding cannot be ignored. As a taxpayer, I am funding whatever policies and actions are undertaken by the government. The solution is not to withheld funding, as I have "tried" by withholding taxes, unsuccessfully. The solution is to change what is funded and how policy is set. Don't want to fund abortion? Provide family planning for all, male and female, with easy access to a variety of tools for such planning. Fund education for people of all ages with reproductive health information. Provide easy and affordable access to pre-natal, maternity and neo-natal healthcare. Educate and inform people on the idea of unity and brotherhood/sisterhood. We are one human family, living on a single planet, from which we all must sustain life. It is pretty simple. Study nature and see how systems operate within the whole. Whether God/Intelligent Design/The Big Bang created the universe in 7 days or 7 billion years, we have what we have and the better we understand it and learn to use what we learn, the more joy and happiness we experience. People who fail to recognize our interdependence will continue to suffer pain, anxiety and frustration and express it as anger and hatred. It is up to each of us to make the changes within ourselves to experience a better life. Unless we are willing to change ourselves, we cannot hope to change another.

I am committed to Oneness through Justice and Transformation
peace,
st john

Whats laughable is the fact that it is apparently perfectly acceptable to scuttle the bill because of funding abortions one way or another. That is considered such an important issue facing our country that virtually nobody points out how minor an issue that really is in the grand arch of history.

Scuttling the bill because it doesn't actually do anything but force people to buy insurance? Completely unnacceptable.

Couldn't one plausibly make the argument that passing much needed health coverage reform could potentially help decrease abortions by giving access to affordable health care(including pre-natal care, etc.) to people who might not otherwise have it?

Just a thought.

Well said, st. john.

Sullivan's article also indirectly highlights why so few boycotts ever actually work, because one way or another, the money you spend goes to things you don't like or with which you don't agree. A FOF member would have to do a hell of a lot of homework to determine whether or not their money is "funding abortions." Going grocery shopping? Even if you know that the market you use doesn't offer a healthcare package that covers abortions, what about each and every product you buy IN the store? Any foodstuff you buy that provides healthcare insurance to their employees (even SOME of their employees, like top-tier management), if you buy it, you're helping them make a profit that, in turn, is used to pay into an insurance company that provides funds for abortions. Going to the movies? Even if your local theater is a mom-and-pop store who belong to a Evangelical anti-choice church, what about the companiy that made the movie? Or the studio that released it? The companies that produced or packaged the concessions you're eating or drinking? Are you "off the grid?" Do you know what your utility companies are doing with the money you pay them for your water or heat or electricity? I'd bet most internet providers will cover some family planning in their insurance packages...

The public option, as designed, is paid for with premiums, not taxes. So to argue that "we're paying for abortions" is not only as stupid as most of the uber-right's arguments, it ignores the fact that many of them help pay for abortions every single damn day.

Sometimes we have to stand on principle!

It is manifestly unfair and unjust to use federal tax dollars to fund activities that individuals believe are immoral!

Therefore, as a principled stand, I insist that federal tax dollars not be used for:
- The immoral war on Iraq
- The immoral expansion of our military
- The immoral building of highways and schools

As highly principled individuals, I suggest you add to this list of immoral expenditures opposed!

All of this is, of course, in an effort to show that republicans believe in and promote consistency in word and action.

I wish some enterprising democrat would research the republican health care reform plan, Boehner said they would soon be unveiling it - but that was July, does anyone know of it's contents?
Just a thought!

I grew up in Stupak's district, and my mom lived [and died] there last year. My mom voted for the guy - I know - I helped Mom fill out the ballot in the nursing home. {legally]. Over 25% of Stupak's district is over 65; it is a poor, rural, cold district with declining population, heavily depends on federal money, and has an economy based on logging, some tourism, and mining.

So in the big scheme of things. Bart. Fine if you are anti-choice. Your political / personal choice. But having spent a hell of lot more time in you district last year than you did, I can tell you - your district NEEDS health care reform, AND you need to worry about more pressing needs of your district.

The solution is to have abortion coverage as an optional rider for anyone getting a subsidy. Can't imagine would it would cost much.

Oh, wait, the actuarily sound premium would probably be a negative number as, frankly, the cost of an abortion is far outweighed by the cost of maternity care.

And let's think about all the abortion doctors and patients who use PUBLIC ROADS on their way to abortions, and use PUBLICLY FUNDED ELECTRIC GRIDS to power their evil abortion tools and then drink PUBLICLY SUBSIDIZED WATER to celebrate.

These people are loonies.

In physics/quantum, it is referred to as entanglement. It is not possible to disentangle all the elements that compose any entity/system. This is the core concept of all systems: they are integrated for a reason. If you understand basic science, you know that there is no way to isolate, completely, any single element of the whole. It is also called synergy. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You may argue otherwise, but you would be wasting time and energy (which is also impossible; they cannot be wasted, only transformed/transmuted). In this instance, conservatism is a positive quality.

peace,
st john

For all the static Clinton caught over his health care reform efforts you have to credit him with handling abortion the right way. He insisted that his HCR would cover abortion and that was the end of it. The battle moved on to other areas. The conservatives have succeeded in making the Obama administration blink on this issue. The Obama administration is taking great pains to claim that HCR will not cover abortion. Conservatives therefore push the fungibility argument because Obama has conceded their larger point. The Clinton approach denied that the larger point had merit. Abortion alone is not sufficient to sink HCR. This was a poor place to cave to conservatives; both from a policy standpoint and strategically.

Think how much money could be saved by aborting a certain number of "children" every year: neo-natal care, educational resources, medical coverage, etc. Of course, they would not be taxpaters, but we'd probably save more than they would pay in taxes, anyway, given who they would become...liberal socialists.

/snark/

Stupak and his C Street brethren get all the abortions their girlfriends need free from Tom Coburn. Not a taxpayer dime is spent.

I know a young woman who almost died a few months ago from bleeding from a tubal pregnancy. If the fetus was still alive when it was removed, then she had an abortion. Of course, if it hadn't been removed, it would have died when she did, anyway.

I read earlier this year of a country with strict abortion laws where at least one woman did die in such a case because doctors were afraid to operate until they got a waiver thru the legal system. Before the waiver was approved , the woman had died.

But I guess people who don't care that 45,000 people in the U.S. die every year because they don't have medical insurance, wouldn't care about women dying from pregnancy conditions.

Didn't Stupak's kid put a bullet in his own brain a few years back? And it was, of course, easy because of Stupak's phenomenal rating with the NRA. Anyhoo, should he not be a little more focused on issues like adolescent depression rather than crazy abortion freak outs?

The whole premise is flawed. The government won't be PAYING FOR abortions; the government will be SAVING MONEY by providing abortions. Abortions save more than they cost. If you prevent ONE childbirth by paying for NINE abortions, you're still saving money.

The question for right-to-lifers is: HOW MUCH EXTRA are you willing to pay the Tax Man, to cover the EXTRA COSTS of NOT having government provide abortions?

So if a Christian Scientist lives in your town or your state or even your country, and they pay taxes to support a community hospital or a VA hospital, or Medicaid, or Medicare, or Civil Service or, or, or. Then they have been able to dictate that no medical care be given to any patient?

Unfortunately, so many Repos are so stupid that they will fall for the party's BS no matter how idiotic it is.

I wonder what any of these naysayers would do if their daughter, wife, sister ended up in an ER with a pregnancy and a hemorrhage that could in a matter of a few moments end in the death of the woman.
If the bleeding can not be stopped quickly, the option is to remove the uterus and it contents.

The fetus will likely die if the woman dies, as it is also being deprived of oxygen, so you stand there an let the woman die, pointlessly?

That is the way Catholic hospitals used to deal with this short of emergency 50 years ago.

Physicians would walk away and let the woman bleed to death while the nuns sopped up the blood. Then, maybe, after the mother was dead they might try to save the fetus.