Stupak Amendment & Health Care: Vote Yes!

You are right - Bart Stupak and the Bishops should be applauded. They are standing up for God's gift of life, human freedom and individual conscience. You, however, told your readers to support the health care bill regardless of the whether or not the pro-life amendments passed and made the Bishops out to be nitpickers. I hope you are changing your tune once again on this.

I almost never agree with Michael Sean Winters, particularly with respect to government-controlled healthcare, but I am not about to question his commitment to the pro-life cause. On July 14 of this year, he wrote: ''Many of us pro-life Democrats have given the President the benefit of the doubt on the abortion issue because of his repeated commitment to trying to lower the abortion rate, a commitment he reiterated to Pope Benedict XVI last week. All the good will he has earned among Catholic swing voters, and all the arguments on his behalf progressive Catholics have mounted, all could be swept away if abortion is part of a federal option in health care. Politics is the art of compromise, but on this point, there can be none.'' If the Stupak Amendment fails, I am confident that MSW will keep his word and oppose passage of the bill, because he is right - there can be no compromise on this point for anyone who is genuinely pro-life. 

Thank you MSW for reporting on this and for standing with the Bishops.  David Gibson at Commonweal could take a lesson from you.  He was unable to restrain himself for making the scurrilous accusation that pro-life groups who have worked so hard for the Stupak amendment would actually oppose its passage in hopes that it would sink health care overall if it fails.  "The pro-life pros would forgive" Republicans for voting against the Stupak amendment they have been insisting on all along.  http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=5263#comments  Mr. Gibson doesn't have the integrity of his so-called journalistic credentials to observe that pro-life groups are clamoring loudly today, alongside MSW and the Bishops, to get people to tell their Congressmen to vote for the Stupak amendment, and they are "scoring" the amendment so that a vote against it is in their book a pro-abortion vote. http://blog.aulaction.org/  But principled unity in support of unborn human life was never Mr. Gibson's strong suit.  Some liberals can't stand the fact that pro-lifers might actually help prevent abortion, because if they do it would prove that the people opposing pro-lifers are the Democrats whom the liberals so desparately want to claim are "abortion reducers," and that mainstream pro-lifers have never proposed a no-Roe or nothing strategy so there was no justification to abandon their ship for Obama's abortion juggernaut last year.