Ned Resnikoff

The Stupak amendment is a travesty. An absolute, unmitigated assault on gender equality. Once health care passes the Senate, removing that pus-filled canker sore in conference committee is going to be the health care battle, right alongside keeping the public option intact.

Alright, I’ve staked my position. I’m not going to try and minimize how terrible it is. Nor am I going to bite my lower lip and say, “I feel your pain,” to justify what I’m going to say next. Because the truth is, I’ve got no fucking clue, no matter how hard I might try. Congress will never attack my sovereignty over my own body the way they did with the women of America last night. And that’s why I’m reluctant to even write this post, knowing that I’m asking—begging, really—left-leaning women to make a choice I’ll never have to. What I’m about to ask for is a really shitty thing to have to ask of anyone, and there’s pretty much no way around that.

But please, please don’t treat last night’s health care victory as hollow. And don’t say that the bill omits “women’s right to medical care.” It omits a crucial part of women’s right to medical care. But the bill is still a net positive. Obviously, the federal government should provide access to both cancer treatment and abortions—but I’d rather have just the former and not the latter than neither. So would you.

And that’s the only option Nancy Pelosi had, really. The bill passed 220-215. Five votes. I’m confident that without the Stupak amendment, it would have failed entirely. And the fact of the matter is, it still could fail. If nothing passes the Senate, we’re fucked. We all walk away completely empty-handed.

So please, for the love of god, let’s win that fight. Let’s not treat it as irrelevant, or shot we have at victory—a better shot than ever before in US history—as a Pyrrhic one. We’ve all got a moral responsibility to try and get whatever we can, for the people who we can help.

I know how that sounds. It’s easy as shit for me to say, because it’s not my rights and my body that’s being violated.

I’m saying it anyway, though—because I’m convinced that without a fully unified front, there won’t be substantial health care reform of any kind. Not only would that be a crushing defeat on its own merits, but it means that the next time federally funded abortion comes up, the fight’s going to be even harder. I’ll blame Stupak for that, and the horde of other misogynistic, far-right fucks who write and vote for legislative atrocities like this. But you know who else I’m going to blame? Ann Friedman, and whoever else uses their soapbox to suggest that this battle for universal health care is over, and we lost.

UPDATE: I’ve been reflecting on what I wrote above, and while I still stand by every word of it, it occurs to me that the argument itself might not be wholly relevant anyway. I’m fairly confident there won’t be a counterpart to the Stupak amendment in the Senate bill, and if that’s the case I’m even more confident that it won’t be in the final legislation. So probably—god help me, hopefully—America won’t have to choose between a bill with this excrement in it and no bill at all.