Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Abortion in a New Battlefield

Chris Matthews, in his inimitable and rather sly manner, is helping to take the abortion battle into a new battlefield, the health care debate. He is rigorously anti-abortion, but lacks the courage to come right out and say so, merely keeps bringing the subject up and providing a platform on which others can make the argument for him.

“All the Democrats have to do,” he declaims, “is come right out and say that the health care bill money will not be used to pay for abortions, but they won’t do that. Why not?”

Actually, at least one of them has said that. Barbara Boxer of California made the unequivocal statement that, “Not one dollar of funding provided by this bill will be used to pay for abortion.”

Digby points out in Hullaballoo the other day that “…the public plan as conceived would be paid for by premiums and therefore abortion wouldn't be 'taxpayer' funded at all.” There is the point, however that the public option would presumably be the plan of choice for people who cannot afford health insurance and are therefore being subsidized by government funds. So if the premiums that are paying for the insurance will be government funds, then government is paying for abortions provided by public option insurance.

My argument is that there is no problem with that in a general sense, because abortion is health care in many cases and damn well should be paid for by health insurance regardless of who is paying the premiums.

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