Stupak Is the Last Straw—No More Caving!

Painting the Stupak-Pitts amendment as a necessary evil—a concession women should make for the “greater good” of health care reform—is ridiculous, Katha Pollitt writes. Women have been consistently sidelined by the “theocrats and male chauvinists” throwing their weight around in the Democratic Party. “Why don't you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?” she says, suggesting that instead of women caving on abortion coverage, maybe men could cave on, say, coverage for Viagra or prostate cancer.

Even President Obama is no help, Pollitt writes in the Nation, spouting platitudes like “‘this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill.’ Abortion is health care. That's the whole point.” And the fact that tax-exempt religious organizations are engineering what American taxpayers will or won’t pay for is not lost on Pollitt, who doesn’t like supporting their "misogynist fairy tales and sour-old-man hierarchies.” Pro-choicers are fed up with taking hits for the team, she says, and without them there’s not “much of a team” at all. (More abortion debate stories.)