Life Links 11/11/09

Liberals are making a lot of inaccurate and incredibly stupid claims about the Stupak amendment.

Carlton Veazey from the Religious Coaltion for Reproductive Choice claims the Stupak amendment is "an encroachment on the separation of religion and state and an affront to a basic constitutional principle."

Senator Tom Harkin thinks it’s a slippery slope which could lead to the federal government not allowing people with federal housing loans to have abortions.

In a guest post at the RH Reality Check, Robin Marty thinks the Stupak amendment will prevent women who’ve experienced miscarriages from having their dead children removed.


Apparently, the signers of Diane DeGette’s letter promising to oppose health care reform if it includes the Stupak amendment don't want their names to become public. Bawk...bawk....


Politico is featuring an arena on the question of abortion funding in health care reform legislation. Bradley Smith makes a good point when he writes,

Ultimately, the biggest problem with nationalizing health care (let's not kid ourselves, that's what these bills do, and that's the objective) is that it pits Americans against one another. The pro-choicers have just learned a bitter lesson (well, actually, they received a lesson, but I don't think they learned it), which is that they may not get to control the benefit packages. This will be true everywhere, though. Under nationalized care, you want my grandmother to die (or at least we can say that you will benefit if my grandmother dies, and desires tend to follow incentives), because your costs go up if she's kept alive with expensive care. That other guy wants your baby to die (or be aborted - will Catholic Bishops learn the true lesson of their triumph this week when they have to decide on the final bill?) rather than live with birth abnormalities that require expensive health care. The reality of human nature, noted by Adam Smith more than 200 years ago, is that we take a prick on our own finger much more seriously than the deaths of thousands halfway across the world. The reality of government health care is that people will want theirs from the common pot, and they will vote to get it, whatever it does to their neighbors.