Life Links 12/8/09

The Detroit Free Press reports that the U.S. Senate could vote on the Nelson amendment today.


NARAL is airing deceptive ads in Michigan attacking Bart Stupak.

Stupak has a press release responding to their ad.


Amanda Marcotte for some reason can’t understand why prolifers like it when people (like Sarah Palin) choose life. She writes,

But what Ben Smith fails to note in his article describing this rather silly Sarah-and-Trig-Palin-worship is the deep irony of it. Despite the fact that the anti-choice movement is organized around the desire to deprive women of choice and force them to bear children against their will, to celebrate Sarah and Trig Palin is to celebrate choice.

Wrong! We don’t “celebrate choice.” We celebrate it when someone makes the right choice and doesn’t have an abortion. Only fools who think every choice has the same moral value celebrate choice.

Prolifers recognize that Sarah Palin could have aborted Trig. We understand that abortion is legal in this country and that many people abort their unborn children when they find out their child has Down Syndrome. There’s no contradiction between recognizing this reality and being glad Palin choose life and working for another reality in which it is illegal to intentionally kill unborn human beings.

For example, in some societies female genital mutilation is widely practiced and those who practice it aren‘t prosecuted. If someone opposed to female genital mutilation is glad a father decides against mutilating his daughter genital that doesn’t mean they’re contradicting themselves if they call for laws against female genital mutilation.


On a Newsweek blog, Sarah Kliff writes about how the Senate debate on abortion may be inconsequential.

That means, what will matter most is not today's Senate debate, but rather where the Nelson/Stupak language ends up in the reconciliation process. And that depends on how many supporters majority leader Harry Reid has when he heads to the negotiating table. The situation will unfold one of two ways, both of which depend on whether Reid can sway one (or more) centrist Republicans:

If Reid can get Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins to vote for health care reform, then he no longer needs Nelson’s vote. In this situation, Nelson's filibuster threat becomes irrelevant and his amendment gets dropped. Moreover, dropping the Nelson/Stupak language would probably be fine by the two centrist Maine Senators since both generally support access to abortion issues. Chances are Reid would only need one Republican vote to pull this off, since Bob Casey (the other Democrat sponsor of the Nelson Amendment) has said he’ll support Nelson but won’t necessarily filibuster the bill if it does not pass.