The Stupak Amendment and the Avoidance of Reality

Since the passage of the health care bill in the House pro-choicers have been bouncing off the  wall over the amendment to the bill filed by Congressman Bart Stupak, forbidding the use of fully or partially federally-funded insurance plans to pay for abortions, exclusive of rape, incest, or life (not health) of the mother.

The Dog, while pro-choice himself  is unsympathetic to the bleatings of those like our sanctimonious dipshit frontrunner and likely Senator Martha Coakley, who are willing to sacrifice the health care needs of millions of Americans upon the altar of her ego.

What Coakley and her supporters ignore is the way abortion plays nationally.  As the Gallup Poll noted in May, the United States is now a narrowly pro-life country.  For a variety of reasons, not least of which being the absence of  the organized pro-choice movement from grassroots politics, Americans are supportive of restricting access to the procedure.

The shifts can be seen in the graph below:

This shift is more pronounced among men:

But women aren’t exempt:

As a candidate for the United States Senate with a (presumably) professional staff there is no way that Coakley cannot know the national dynamics of this issue.  Nor  is there any way she doesn’t know that grassroots pressure forces many Democrats to support the amendment as the least of evils just to get health care through the House.

Finally, she knows that Hobsons Choice in the House or not, the Stupak amendment can be neutered in the Senate. 

As a matter of procedure, the Republican Right has been exploiting these attitudes since the Seventies, knowing the traditional progressive disinclination to dirty their hands with grassroots work.

Just as Paul Wellstone and Barbara Boxer were instrumental in getting the U.S. into the Iraq War, Coakley, if elected, will be  operating as a one-woman Right-wing outreach mechanism outside the Commonwealth, and within the Senate.

I feel like puking.