If you’re a progressive like me, and you’re upset by the Stupak amendment, which bars federally subsidized insurance from covering abortions, consider this: What if we had a single-payer health-care system and someone like Sarah Palin were running the country?

The irony, of course, is that if there is a financial benefit to the insurance companies to include it in their plans, the government will actually be making them do something else that’s bad for profitability, although I imagine it pales compared to the constraints on pre-existing conditions (for which they are compensated at least to some extent by the mandate that people take out insurance).

If that’s the case, question: is the Stupak amendment more, or less law?

Or, to put that in the terms you originally offered in calling me favorable to social engineering, is the addition of the Stupak amendment more social engineering, less social engineering, or neutral?

Well, fair enough. Then we’re in a position where the Congress is trying to engineer people’s decisions because the decisions they might make otherwise offends them.

Which is more or less the definition of law.

If so, cool. Let’s just be honest about it.

As for the amendment, as with all votes, it was done for a variety of reasons. However, my understanding is that Pelosi needed something that the Conference of Catholic Bishops agreed with and which, in general, a large number of her hold-outs, without whom she didn’t have the votes, wanted in the bill before they’d commit to voting for it.

If the Exchanges had gone through, or will go through in the final Bill, with abortion a legal offering from those plans, then it will be a government-established organisation that increases availability and accessibility of abortion. Now, it’s probably not a huge deal either way — although most private insurance plans offer abortion as a covered procedure, it seems that most abortion are done out-of-plan (heard that somewhere else, but haven’t tracked it down myself) — but it’s not that hard to understand why a bunch of Representatives don’t want to be associated with that, because it wouldn’t be a maintenance of status quo because of the increased availability of health insurance. They could take the position that the Hyde Amendment position needed changing to reflect that.

The anti-abortion majority they were talking of is a legislative majority. Criminalising abortion would be unconstitutional, so I don’t think that “anti-abortion” — a term used regularly on MSNBC today, FYI, although abortion rights activists sometimes prefer “anti-choice” — when referring to the House means “in favour of criminalising abortion” so much as ensuring that any legislation is either neutral on the subject or else impedes abortion access or availability in a legal fashion.

The House could certainly propose a constitutional amendment, or they could generally favor justices that favor appealing Roe v. Wade. They recoil in horror, as a body en masse, from doing either. If you believed abortion is murder, which is another rough definition for pro-life, I can’t see how you could define that without including at least those two measures.

As far as your definition, it’s still just as fungible.

“ensuring that any legislation is either neutral on the subject or else impedes abortion access or availability in a legal fashion.”

Impedes how much? Through which mechanisms? You will find VASTLY different vote counts for every singular answer to either of those questions. The Hyde amendment certainly meets your definition. So why wasn’t that enough?

Of course, this is all a bit moot anyway, because…

The amendment passed by a mile. It was known before the vote that the amendment or something like it was needed, so I don’t see that the “we have to get it out this evening” thing makes any sense, although what they say will of course be as considered as how they vote, because they are running for election at least 50% of the time.

There are two ways to read the situation.

1. All the aye votes in the amendment were voting for it because they honestly believed in it as a matter of principle, or

2. The amendment passed because those that fit category #1, combined with those that do not but otherwise decided to vote aya for the sake of political and procedural considerations, granted its passage.

Now, if your contention was that this was a matter of the body voting their principles, that’d certainly be a first. If not, that begs the question of what political considerations were in play. Which is answered, already.

As you say, and as I said, this amendment wouldn’t have passed in a vacuum, as a stand-alone (feel free to disagree with me on that point if you like). Meaning a lot of pro-choice people voted for it, or people for whom the abortion question was not the deciding factor in their vote. I’m not saying they were hood-winked (you are certainly right, they have no one to blame but themselves), I’m saying it was a last minute cave due to the time-intensive pressures of the situation and a flash fear that they would get sucked into the tar baby of the abortion issue if they didn’t just get it off their fucking desks immediately (although, as we both agree, fat chance now, that). Most observers of this process, and hell a fair chunk of the people who voted for the damn thing, side with my assertion. You disagree?

Anyway, this is a bit of a tangent.