Too Much Ms. Nice Abortion Rights Advocate?
Dana Goldstein reviews some Monday morning quarterbacking of the abortion in heath care issue:
“Maybe we should have” created a more threatening pro-choice coalition earlier on, said [Eleanor] Smeal. She continued, “Here we are playing nice guy again, we didn’t want to make a fuss, we agreed to a compromise that was already over-generous. And then, bango! These guys go in there like gangbusters. Pelosi was held up, like by bandits. Now the women are saying, ‘That’s it, it’s enough.’”
It’s hard to know for sure, but I’m inclined to agree with this second-guessing. A persistent liberal failure in terms of legislative tactics seems to me to be the repeated belief that if you try to make a compromise proposal, that the compromise will be adopted and then you’ll get half a loaf. The reality of the way the legislative bargaining process works, it seems to me, is that you make a proposal and then a bloc of moderate legislators demands concessions. Whatever you propose, you then have to make concessions since the moderates wouldn’t be moderate if they didn’t make the liberals make concessions. So you might as well have had the bill start with a sweeping expansion of abortion rights—require that all Exchange plans offer a full suite of reproductive health services. Then you start bargaining.
Would that have worked? I don’t know. But the public option example strikes me as encouraging. It looks like if there’s a public option in the final bill, it’ll be a shadow of its original self. But had the proposal started with something like the “level playing field” public option then there’d be nothing left.
44 Responses to “Too Much Ms. Nice Abortion Rights Advocate?”
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November 10th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Who knew C Street was Red & Blue?
November 10th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
And if it had started with “single-payer health care,” there might be a robust public option. And yes, obviously the same applies to the abortion question, as well as the upcoming fight over undocumented residents. Apparently the liberal negotiating manual directs liberals to ‘lead with your bottom line.’ Who knew?
November 10th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Not only would it have been a good bargaining position, it is the right thing to do. Abortion is a legal medical procedure that is safer and cheaper than carrying a pregnancy to term. There is no reason for it not to be covered, especially if pregnancy related costs are covered. Coverage for Prenatal care is far more cost effective than covering the complications of a high risk pregnancy that results from poor prenatal behavior.
November 10th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Prenatal care coverage is a separate issue from covering abortion, btw.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
If the President wasn’t a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs OR if there was a single Democratic Senator who hadn’t been bribed all to hell, then one of them might have actually introduced the original Public Option into the senate.
But given Matt’s unending defense of Max Baucaus, it’s really hard to take this post seriously as something other than one of Matt’s many attempts to convince people that everything is the fault of the progressives, and nothing is the fault of him or his neo-liberal allies.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Mike, yeah. Lets pretend Liberals didn’t try doing exactly what you’e advocating and Matt Y and Ezra K and Rahm Emmanuel didn’t throw an 8-month hissy fit.
Because the reality in your head is so much better than the reality the rest of us have actually had to live in.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Or we could call anti-choice people crazy motherfuckers who don’t know the difference amongst a zygote, an embryo, a fetus, and an actual human being. What’s more, they don’t know what abortion entails.
They don’t know shit, and they need to shut the fuck up about it.
Obama needs to give a “you’re a bunch of idiots; abortion is legal and staying that way” speech. Stupak controls 40 representatives, despite being a corrupt moron. He needs to be sidelined; he needs to control less than one vote.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Huh? Obviously this applies to those who prevented single-payer (or perhaps a slightly moderated version that could have been presented under another name) from being presented as the main bill, from which negotiations could proceed. Baucus himself has said that should have happened. It doesn’t matter that the left wing continues to advocate for single-payer; they always will, and good for them. This is a criticism of the leadership. WTF else could I possibly be saying?
November 10th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
The problem with the compromise that the pro-choice groups offered wasn’t that it was too generous, it’s that it was never agreed to by the pro-life side. They weren’t involved in crafting it and they hated it from the start. So it really never was a “compromise” in the sense of two parties working together to find a livable solution, it was only a “compromise” in the sense that it was pro-choice groups giving up more than they wanted to.
Just because something isn’t want you want, doesn’t mean it’s something your opponent will settle for.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
It’s weird to read an advocacy organization admitting that it “didn’t want to make a fuss.” What the hell is this, Mary Poppins feminism? “Ellen, put these things away. You
know how the cause infuriates Mr. Banks.”
November 10th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I realize that in liberal fantasyland you could make the U.S. in to Sweden circa 1980 (before they started diminishing their social welfare state) if only you screamed loud enough, but the reality is that trying to do things like having the federal government openly pay for abortions would result in 60-40 losses for the party that proposed it and would ultimately be much worse for abortion rights. Obama isn’t that stupid, even if Pelosi is.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
You know yglesias just because my opening position is “we can have the deal as long as you sleep with me” does not mean we will settle on you giving me a handjob. Just because your opening offer is one designed to frame the area of agreement, does not mean that now all of a sudden you pulled the area of agreement toward your side.
At some point the people whining about this just need to accept that they have a minority position on the issue. The supreme court has clearly stated that the state may be biased in favor of the pro-life side. And apparently we keep on electing congress’s filled with politicians who think the state should be on the pro life side, period, no compromise. If this is a sore point with the other side they need to elect more committed pro choice politicians. Otherwise people need to stfu and not try to derail reform that will end up saving thousands upon thousands of lives because a minority can’t get their way…
November 10th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Re: There is no reason for it not to be covered
Except that it’s an elective procedure (if you want to argue about medically indicated abortions I will happily agree with you then). Health plans almost never cover elective procedures. Anyone think liposuction or breast augmentation should be a mandated benefit? I fail to see any difference there. Good grief, at least some pro-Choice really should be better described as pro-abortion.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
JonF, it’s not a mandated benefit in any version of the bill. You’re making that up. In fact, in all versions of the bill, AT LEAST ONE PLAN IN EVERY EXCHANGE IS REQUIRED TO NOT OFFER ABORTION BENEFITS.
Sancho, nobody’s asking that it get federal funding. You’re making that up.
The Capps Amendment is based on the Hyde Amendment. It maintains the status quo of isolating abortion payments to non-federal sources.
The Stupak Amendment is based on Kentucky laws that ban abortion coverage period. It maintains the Kentucky policy of forcing poor people to give birth.
As Obama said, this isn’t an abortion bill. The Capps compromise is a compromise. The Stupak amendment is an abortion benefit ban.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
AZ, you know, you might have a point if being pro-life was the majority position. Given that “pro-life” polls about as well as “legalize marijuana”, you just sound like an idiot when you tell us all to ‘accept’ this or that.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Perhaps, while those on the left are “accepting” things, we should just accept that we don’t have a home in the Democratic party. If they want to be the party of centrism, let them try to win elections with the 20% of the population that is actually centrist.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Except that it’s an elective procedure… Health plans almost never cover elective procedures.
Except of course when they do, which is every damn day. You really don’t know what you’re talking about, and you need to research the concept of “elective procedure.”
November 10th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Except that [abortion is] an elective procedure . . .
If abortion is an elective procedure then so is childbirth. You can elect one or the other. Should coverage for childbirth also be banned from all participating plans?
And if it had started with “single-payer health care,” there might be a robust public option.
Actually, if this happened, I think there might be single-payer health care. The left would have had something to get excited about. People in the center would have actually had the prospect of a real benefit. How much more freaked out could those on the right have been? I think if single payer had been on the table, we would have gotten the whole ball of wax. That’s the real reason it was never on the table.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Soullite
Except I didn’t say that the “pro life” side is the overwhelming majority. I said that the majority of elected congress critters think that the state should be pro life in the sense that it favors birth over abortion. The majority position is that the State should support life while not outlawing abortion. There is a difference between being pro-choice, and pro abortion. What did Mr. Clinton say? Safe, legal, and rare?
What you have is a coalition of of pro life people who want to outlaw abortion, and pro choice people who think abortion should be legal, but that it is a horrible, horrible thing that the state should do nothing to support. You also have a minority of people that think abortion is good or at least as good as giving birth. <—these people need to either elect a majority that thinks like them or stfu.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Miles, when you give someone $100 to pay for x, and an included benefit in x is y, then you are paying for y.
If I buy you a car aren’t I also buying you the wheels, seats, etc.? Where am I wrong here?
Also, if there isn’t a subsidy here, then why do pro-choice people care? The amendment would just be clarifying.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Look, we should have started with something to the left of Truman here. We should have started with single payer + brutal cost controls + coverage for ponies and dental care. Instead we started with something to the right of the 93 Republican plan (which was itself to the right of Clinton’s plan, which was to the right of Nixon’s, which was to the right of Truman’s), and then let it get cut down further.
This process has flushed out the ultimate bad faith with which Washington — and the supposedly supportive Democratic Party particularly — treats progressive ideas. Let’s be honest here, it’s completely validated everything that Jane Hamsher and her allies have been saying from the very beginning.
The Stupak proposal in particular is a SUBSTANTIVE RETREAT from existing abortion rights. Frankly, that retreat is absolutely not worth the absolutely weak tea of this healthcare bill, and if it makes it into the final legislation I will contact my representatives to ask them to vote against it. It’s not worth it.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
If the democrats had taken your advice, NS, it would have meant thirty years in the wilderness for the Democratic party. It wouldn’t matter that it was just a negotiating tactic. There were probably better ways to handle things that Pelosi et al did, but your suggestion is certainly not one of them.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Sancho,
The difference is that nobody is mandating that you buy a car.
Here’s the problem:
1) Govt forces you to buy insurance
2) Govt gives you subsidies to make that insurance affordable
3) Govt conditions those subsidies on giving up access to abortion services.
So a middle class woman who thinks she might need an abortion at any point in her future would have to accept vastly more expensive care for EVERYTHING ELSE. Putting “conditions” on subsidies to a MANDATORY expense is effectively the same as banning those things.
It’s especially bad b/c this structure primarily applies to people in the individual market — a substantial proportion of whom are small businesswomen. This effectively puts a major personal and economic drag on women who want to set up their own businesses, become contractors, etc… effectively shutting them out of one of the major avenues of wealth creation.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Any proposal that extreme would have been cut down into something reasonable. Start “reasonable” and it gets cut down to “ineffective.”
November 10th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Matt raises a fundamental question about how decisions are made in Washington DC and comes down on the side of go-for-broke – a position that seems to bely his usual temperate consideration.
I’m not an expert on game theory or heuristics but at some point your demand has to be within the realm of the real. If two people are haggling over the price of a bag of carrots, the buyer will, at some point, walk away from the negotiation if the price is reaches Monty Python ridiculousness.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
I also find the confidence that Democrats would suffer horrendous losses in this counterfactual to be really amazing. The truth is that nobody knows — maybe it would have failed, but at least the landscape would have reflected real progressive input. And maybe it would have been killed by Democrats but at least those Dems would have had to make their positions public and known. More likely, there would be a similar adjustment down, but it would come from a more generous baseline.
The healthcare bill that’s going to pass is not going to help most people. It will “solve” uninsurance merely by imposing a new, direct cost on people who already can’t afford coverage (and to the extent that the cost is subsidized, it will come with onerous conditions), and the sole public guarantee of coverage comes with heavy legal restrictions. It might reduce costs (we’ll see), but it won’t do much for affordability. The most attractive part is the consumer protections, but those have always been considered the rock bottom consensus — even Boehner was ok with those. And while they are just, they’ll probably actually INCREASE costs. And all of this is before the Lieberman/Baucus/Nelson wing of the Senate gets its hands on it.
The value of this bill just declines more and more with every new vote. And meanwhile actively malicious elements like the Stupak Amt keep getting added to it. It will be embarrassing if they don’t pass health reform now, but it will be far more so if they pass an expensive failure.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Digby has been pushing this point for some time. NARAL is absolutely useless. Remember how they supported Chafee in the last election, even though his party is 100% anti-choice? It’s time for Smeal et al to wake up and smell the coffee.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
You’re assuming that you would have to opt out of the subsidy entirely if you used your own money to buy supplemental abortion coverage. That’s not my impression of what’s in the bill. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the situation I’m thinking of is the equivalent of the government mandating that you buy a car and giving you 20k to do it with, but expressly excluding, say, airbags, from the subsidy. You could still have airbags installed in the car, but it would have to come out of your own income.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
The anti-choice folks are fighting smart campaigns to roll back Roe vs Wade. They’ve gotten awful things like the Hyde Amendment to be “codified” without it even being codified. The hope for the Home Run (a Supreme Court decision that overturns RvW), but fight an incrimental war of small battle after small batter that rolls back rights, cuts off funding, makes things more difficult. They play the game of “nice” and “reasonable”, even when they’re not being nice nor reasonable. They pick their slots to slip in posion pills either to kill of other legislation, or in this case when it’s something the Dems want so much they won’t kill it off and instead will swallow the bitter pill.
There’s a part of me who wishes the Home Run would come so that we’d finally see a massive uprising of women and pro-choice voters rise up and single issue the GOP and anti-choices out of office. But I think we’ve seen with Gay Rights that it’s incredibly hard to gain back rights… especially when the other side is batshit crazy on the issue.
We are losing this issue. Badly. Stupak is just one of many battles we’ve lost. We can talk about it being the worst. It isn’t. The worst ones are all still coming. We’ll have laws that women can’t get abortions without the father’s approval. We’ll have parental notification is the overwhelming majority of states. And we’ll have RvW overturned completely if Obama isn’t a two term president and not only appoints pro choice replacements for out aging “liberal” justices, but also is lucky enough to replace several of the wingnuts who currently make up the *majority* of the court. Given the age of them, and the likelihood of either Obama going down in 2012 or the GOPer winning in 2016… RvW will go down, or at least be radically altered so that choice is meaningless in this country.
I don’t think there’s a lot we can do to turn it around. There’s little that’s going to turn momentum on this one around. :/
John
November 10th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Sancho makes a good point, a woman’s health and life are just like an airbag. And why should a poor woman be able to get an abortion (or survive a car crash) anyway?
November 10th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Let’s face it, if guys could get pregnant, abortion would not just be uncontroversial, it would be tax-deductible.
“You also have a minority of people that think abortion is good or at least as good as giving birth. <—these people need to either elect a majority that thinks like them or stfu.”
Incidentally, (very) roughly between a quarter and a third of women in the U.S. have had abortions.
I don’t know anyone who thinks having an abortion is “good” or “at least as good as giving birth. I can’t think of any medical procedures that is in any sense pleasurable, and it just goes downhill from there. Instead, what’s “good” (in the sense that root canals or open-heart surgery is “good”) is for women not to be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, not be forced to give birth to infants they cannot care for. (To say nothing of: not be forced to bear their rapist’s offspring, or to be forced to die or suffer harm as a result of pregnancy, or to forced to give birth to an child that is doomed to die within minutes or even months of being born, often knowing little but suffering, and other such horrors.)
November 10th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Digby has been pushing this point for some time. NARAL is absolutely useless.
Digby misses the reality that NARAL requires abortion to be perceived as under constant threat in order to raise funds, just as anti-abortion groups require it to remain legal.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Re: Govt conditions those subsidies on giving up access to abortion services. So a middle class woman who thinks she might need an abortion at any point in her future would have to accept vastly more expensive care for EVERYTHING ELSE.
What ARE you talking about? All the hypothetical woman does is pay for the abortion out of pocket. Same as if she gets Lasik, Botux, or some other elective procedure.
Re: Instead, what’s “good” (in the sense that root canals or open-heart surgery is “good”) is for women not to be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, not be forced to give birth to infants they cannot care for.
I’ve heard a lot of handwringing about what happens to women who need abortion for medical reasons. Does the Stupak amendment ban coverage for those too? I doubt it (the Hyde amendment did not, in fact even rape/incest abortions can be federally funded) Still no one has been able provide factual information on this question– just a lot of pearl-clutching drama queening on the topic. So before hysteria is allowed to run rempant let’s get the facts straight. Are medicaly indicated abortions excluded from coverage or no? Facts please, no opinions.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Re: JonF, it’s not a mandated benefit in any version of the bill. You’re making that up.
Where did I say that abortion was a mandated version in the House bill (which only exists in one version as of now)? Please read what I wrote. And put your big folks’ panties on and deal with it all. If this is the cost of universal healthcare is excluding elective abortions (and other non-medicallty necessary procedures) from coverage then I just can’t see what the big deal is. Abortion remains legal and people can pay out of pocket, just as if they want Lasik or a Botux treatment. I’ve know women who did that– and they were not rich.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Just to nitpick: part of the problem is that we don’t have enough Mr. Abortion Rights Advocate.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
He’s still available, ladies! Hurry, now!
November 10th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Re: There’s little that’s going to turn momentum on this one around.
What you call ‘momentum’, I call divine intervention. And the fact that today’s young people are idealists at heart, rebelling against the arid sterility and cruelty of the culture of death, just as their predecessors in 1848, 1789, 1959, 1968, 1979 and 1989 rebelled against the tyrannies of their time.
Re: Are medicaly indicated abortions excluded from coverage or no? Facts please, no opinions
The answer, of course, is that such abortions are NOT excluded from coverage, when the mother’s life is at stake. Because Stupak and Co. are sensible people, unlike the NARAL yahoos of the world who would like to turn America into a modern day Carthage.
Dan S.,
How tiresome. The fact is, as much as you people try to hide it, that you are apologists for mass homicide of innocent and defenseless human beings, and you people ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:44 am
Hector,
AFAIK, the ammendment allows federally subsidized funding of abortion coverage only when a woman’s life is at stake. What happens if continuation of pregnancy results in severe and permenant illness? What happens if the woman has a history of post-partum depression (AFAIK, the ammendment specifically forbids abortions for mental health reasons) and she ends up pregnant and kills herself and her baby after giving birth — in which case the baby is dead anyway?
I hope if such things do come to pass, Stupak and everyone who voted for his ammendment gets sued for practicing medicine without a license and has to pay damages.
*
Anyway, here is the real problem — “Whatever you propose, you then have to make concessions since the moderates wouldn’t be moderate if they didn’t make the liberals make concessions” — that sentance seems to be true. It’s one thing to be a moderate and find your views tend to be somewhere between those of liberals and conservatives. It’s another thing when you put the cart before the horse and demand concessions from liberals because you are a moderate and that’s what moderates do.
The problem is that so many Dems in Congress are “moderates” of the cart-before-the-horse sort as is “even the liberal media” and so many American people.
AZ’s original point doesn’t hold precisely because there are so many cart-before-the-horse moderates involved in our public discourse and crafting of laws. If I were to be interested in such a “moderate” woman, if I were to proposition her for a hand-job, she’d give me a peck on the cheek even if she wanted to give me a hand-job because she would need to make a “compromise” … but if I were to proposition her for two days of hawt sex, she would immediately give me a hand-job because that would be the “compromise”.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:52 am
Hector,
If abortion is murder, i.e. fetuses are to be counted as human life for legal purposes, then would it be neglegent homocide if a woman, who is known to miscarry, miscarries? After all, she could have avoided a fetus dying by not getting pregnant and isn’t there an absolute requirement under the law to make sure to avoid killing, when possible?
Of course, since spontaneous abortions (the medical term) are actually quite common, that means pretty much every woman, by getting pregnant, is putting a fetus in the way of possibly deadly harm, so no woman should get pregnant. I see then — it’s the pill all around and condoms for everyone. After all, that’s the only way to stop the mass killing of the unborn due to the thousands of spontaneous abortions that happen regularly!
BTW — does the Stupak ammendment ban subsidies for “all abortion related care” or is it specific enough to ban actually getting an abortion. If it bans the former (which wouldn’t be suprising given how bills are written), it’ll be a perfect excuse for insurers (receiving public money) to not pay for care related to, e.g., bleeding following spontaneous abortions, e.g. miscarriages.
November 11th, 2009 at 9:31 am
If abortion is murder, the women who have them should be doing hard jail time, right? The people who weasel on this one should be kicked to the curb and back again with hob-nailed boots.
November 11th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Imagine if the debate had started with single-payer ON the table.
November 11th, 2009 at 11:19 am
DAS–It’s vague. Emergency contraception would probably be not be covered, but EC is cheap anyway.
Sancho–Quit paying for Al Qaeda to decapitate people. Money’s fungible, right?
If the Capps Amendment amounts to a subsidy of abortions, then we’ve been subsidizing abortions this whole time by making health benefits that cover them tax-deductible.
Also, Planned Parenthood gets federal Title X funding, which is used for birth control and pap smears. I guess we’re also subsidizing abortions that way.
The point is, Stupak is not an extension of the status quo in any way, shape, or form. In order to argue that Capps funds abortions, you have to also say that we’ve been funding abortions all along; in which case, ceasing that funding would be a breech of the status quo.
Again, Medicaid pays for abortion in many states. The accounting mechanism in Capps is the same mechanism that’s been in place in these states since 1976. If you have a problem with Capps, you must have been shitting bricks for the past 32 years!
November 11th, 2009 at 11:21 am
I agree with this 100%. The thing that baffles me is that it appears as though not a single congressperson agrees with this way of thinking! And what really gets me mad is how people tend to act like abortion rights is such a weird niche thing that only a small percentage of crazy liberals wants. It’s not! Abortion rights are pretty popular! Lots of people support them!
November 11th, 2009 at 11:41 am
“Whatever you propose, you then have to make concessions since the moderates wouldn’t be moderate if they didn’t make the liberals make concessions.”
Its an interesting assymetry. “Moderates” really can’t prove their “moderation” by demanding concessions from conservatives, can they? Perhaps its because they are not realy moderates.