Time for Men to Make a Sacrifice

You know what I don't want to hear right now about the Stupak-Pitts amendment banning abortion coverage from federally subsidised health insurance policies? That it's the price of reform, and pro-choice women should shut up and take one for the team.

"If you want to rebuild the American welfare state," Peter Beinart writes in the Daily Beast, "there is no alternative" than for Democrats to abandon "cultural" issues like gender and racial equality. Hey, Peter, Representative Stupak and your 64 Democratic supporters, Jim Wallis and other anti-choice "progressive" Christians, men: Why don't you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?

For
example, budget hawks in Congress say they'll vote against the bill
because it's too expensive. Maybe you could win them over if you
volunteered to cut out funding for male-exclusive stuff, like prostate
cancer, Viagra, male infertility, vasectomies, growth-hormone shots for
short little boys, long-term care for macho guys who won't wear
motorcycle helmets and, I dunno, psychotherapy for pedophile priests.
Men could always pay in advance for an insurance policy rider, as women
are blithely told they can do if Stupak becomes part of the final bill.

Barack Obama,
too, worries about the deficit. Maybe you could help him out by
sacrificing your denomination's tax exemption. The Catholic church
would be a good place to start, and it wouldn't even be unfair, since the blatant politicking of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on abortion violates the spirit of the ban on electoral meddling by tax-exempt religious institutions.

Why
should anti-choicers be the only people who get to refuse to let their
taxes support something they dislike? You don't want your tax dollars
to pay, even in the most notional way, for women's abortion care, a
legal medical procedure that one in three American women will have in
her lifetime? I don't want to pay for your misogynist fairy tales and
sour-old-man hierarchies.

Women Democrats have taken an awful lot
of hits for the team lately. Many of us didn't vote for Hillary Clinton
in the primary because the goal of electing a woman seemed less
important than the goal of electing the best possible president. Only a
self-hater or a featherhead didn't feel some pain about that. And
although women are hardly alone in this, we've seen some pretty big
hopes set aside in the first year of the Obama administration.

The
Paycheque Fairness Act, which would expand women's protections against
sexism in the workplace, is on the back burner. Meanwhile, the Office
of Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships is not only alive and
well. It's newly staffed with anti-choicers like Alexia Kelley of
Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which, as Frances Kissling
notes in Salon, has compared abortion to torture.

I
know what you're thinking: conservative Democrats like Stupak took
Republican districts to win us both houses of Congress. Thanks a lot,
Howard Dean, whose bright idea it was to recruit them. But those
majorities would not be there, and Obama would not be in the White
House, if not for pro-choice women and men - their votes, talent,
money, organisational capacity and shoe leather.

We knocked ourselves out, and it wasn't so that religious reactionaries like Stupak - who, as Jeff Sharlet writes in Salon, is a member of the Family,
the secretive rightwing Christian-supremacist congressional coven -
would control both parties. Elections have consequences, you say?
Exactly: Obama, the pro-choice, pro-woman candidate, won. Stupak didn't
put him in the White House, and neither did the Catholic bishops or the
white anti-feminist welfare staters of Beinart's imagination.

We did. And we deserve better from Obama than sound bites like "this is a healthcare bill, not an abortion bill". Abortion is healthcare. That's the whole point.

What
makes the Stupak fiasco especially pathetic is the fumbling response
from pro-choicers. Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill would not be in
the Senate today were it not for pro-choice and feminist supporters
like Emily's List. How does she thank us? By telling Joe Scarborough
that Stupak isn't so bad,
that it won't affect "the majority of America" - just low-income women
- and that it's "an example of having to govern with moderates."

So people who'll tip healthcare reform into the trash unless it blocks abortion access are the moderates now! (McCaskill took it back later, but the damage was done.) If I ever give that woman another dime, shoot me.

The
big pro-choice and feminist organisations are up in arms - Now and
Planned Parenthood want to see healthcare reform voted down if Stupak
is retained - but writing in the Daily Beast, Dana Goldstein nicely
captures the bewilderment of leaders caught by surprise. "It's the feeling that you've been rolled," said Eleanor Smeal, of Feminist Majority. Or haven't been paying attention.

Smeal
was onto something, though, when she told Goldstein: "Here we are
playing nice guy again, we didn't want to make a fuss." Consciously or
unconsciously, by not organising in advance to insist on coverage of
abortion, pro-choicers set themselves up to be out-manoeuvred. In fact,
as Sharon Lerner reported
on TheNation.com, Democrats stood by while anti-choicers kept
contraception out of the reform bill's list of basic benefits all
insurers must cover. So much for the "common ground" approach where we
all agree that birth control is the way to lower the abortion rate.

Enough
already. Pro-choicers have been taking one for the team since 1976,
when Congress passed the Hyde amendment, which Jimmy Carter would later
defend with the immortal comment: "There are many things in life that are not fair."
Time for the theocrats and male chauvinists to give something up for
the greater good - to say nothing of the 20 pro-choicers, all men, who
supported Stupak out of sheer careerism.

After all, if it weren't for pro-choicers, there wouldn't be much of a team for them to play on.