Dear Representative Stupak...

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Having listened to you explain how any federal involvement in the aquisition of a private insurance plan that might be used to terminate a pregnancy someday violates the Hyde Amendment I have to say I am disappointed.

You can do way better than that! You C street boys have barely scratched the sophistry-surface.

For instance, a young woman develops a uterine infection. She visits a government clinic of some sort, receives treatment and scarring is held to a minimum. As a result she remains able to conceive. A while later she gets pregnant and decides to terminate the pregnancy.

Since the pregnancy wouldn't have happened without government health care the subsequent abortion wouldn't have happened without government health care. So obviously government health care paid for that abortion!

Oh, wait... here's a better one. A government employee has an abortion with her own money. But where did she get the money, eh? EH? That's right... from the government.

Or what about if some woman in Haiti that our soldiers saved from starvation goes on to have an abortion?

And don't get me started on people driving to abortion clinics in a cash-for-clunkers purchased cars.

And the most egregious government subsidy of abortion is prosecuting people who bomb reproductive health clinics. If the police let people shoot up and bomb clinics with impunity the cost of an abortion would be much higher. So upholding the law is a direct government subsidy of abortion!

[rufus dog]

1. help me out

I understand your analogies, but what twisted logic did Stupek try to use?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

2. He seems to feel that if one penny of a private insurance plan purchase is subsidized, and

if that plan or even a secondary non-subsidized plan from the same insurer might cover an abortion someday that the government is paying for abortions.

(My comments here are not optimally incisive. I studied on Stupak back when DU was full of the "Stupak is just Hyde" apologists and have since forgotten most of what I learned. Hopefully someone will offer a more rigorous explanation.)

Hyde has always meant that the government cannot pay for abortions directly. Stupak wants Hyde to mean the government cannot spend a penny in a way that might someday contribute to a third party (a private insurance company) paying for an abortion even if the nexus is subsidizing the non-reproductive part of the policy.

And if a woman wants to buy supplemental coverage while the government subsidizes her primary coverage isn't the government helping her pay for abortion coverage? Is being offered on a government administered exchange too much of a nexus?

The problem with that logic is that money is fungible and the government is involved in most aspects of life.

Hyde is the equivalent of our food stamp policy that stamps cannot be used for beer, which is all most folks would ask of a policy.

But everyone knows that food stamps *can* subsidize beer and cigarettes. You sometimes see people at the store buying food with food stamps then buying some beer with cash. If their food wasn't subsidized they wouldn't have any money left over for beer and cigarettes. Or prostitutes, or drugs or lottery tickets or contract killings... anything you can name.

That's what Stupak strikes me as... someone arguing against the food stamp program because it might indirectly subsidize some other thing.

For years we have been paying for abortions under the Stupak extreme sort of test in ways that were understood to be okay under Hyde. If the government helped a hospital repave its parking lot and a problem pregnancy is terminated in that hospital as part of a course of charity treatment then how can you say the parking lot money didn't free up funds for that abortion? If they had to pay for their own parking lot they wouldn't have had as much money for charity cases and...

Once we start down that road it never ends.