FOOT FROM MOUTH EXTRACTION

Recently I sent all of you an email congratulating you for your hard work in getting a health reform bill through the U.S. House of Representatives. To provide additional information on the bill’s passage, I grafted my message on top of one from one of the many organizations Next Step has worked with on health care reform.

I should have read it more carefully. As several of you have pointed out, it went on to ask its readers to act to oppose the Stupak Amendment, which many say would further extend the reach of the Hyde Amendment which prohibits the use of federal funds for abortion.

I apologize for this error. In doing so, let me make it very clear that neither Next Step nor I as its representative have taken a public position on abortion as a matter of public policy. We consider the issue divisive and are divided on the issue ourselves.

On the one hand, people with disabilities are especially impacted by abortion because of the number of pregnancies that are terminated when the risk of disability is detected by pre-natal testing. On the other, many people with disabilities consider a woman’s right to choose as fundamental to their right to control their own bodies.

I find myself deeply conflicted on the matter as I attempt to reconcile its moral complexities with real-life experience. But my struggle is beside the point here.

All that being said, I am disturbed but not surprised by those who would use the strong and legitimate beliefs of those who oppose abortion as another of their many attempts to derail health care reform. Again, let me be very clear. I am in no way challenging the right of those who oppose abortion to raise that issue in the context of health care reform.

However, there are those who oppose health care reform because it would limit the obscenely high profits they make under the current dysfunctional system and have negatively manipulated every emotion they can to defeat it. In my opinion, their political behavior is beneath contempt.