A Great Pro-Life Victory

Bart Stupak supported Obama against Clinton. Like almost all of morally and socially the most conservative Democrats: Bob Casey, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, et al. General Jim Jones also backed Obama. As did the hardly liberal Republicans Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel, both more or less open supporters. And Christopher Buckley. And the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec. And Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp.

No wonder that Obama was supported by those who, on the same day, voted in California and Florida to re-affirm traditional marriage, Obama’s own view. Who, on the same day, voted in Colorado to end legal discrimination against working-class white men, allegedly the hardest people for Obama to reach. Who, on the same day, voted in Missouri and Ohio not to liberalise gambling. And who voted for Obama from coast to coast while also keeping the black and Catholic churches (especially) going. The most paleocon trade and foreign policies in well over a generation are their just reward, as is the Pregnant Women Support Act, the most significant - at least arguably, the only really significant - pro-life measure since the Hyde Amendment.

That is the Hyde Amendment (banning federal funding of abortion) proposed by a Republican but passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by Jimmy Carter. The Hyde Amendment subject to annual renewal, which it has never failed to receive, regardless of the party composition of Congress. The Hyde Amendment that Stupak had written into the Healthcare Bill, by a whopping 240 votes to 194 in the House, for which he and the rest of the pro-life Democrats have just voted. They would not have done so without that provision. The House vote for this Bill is a pro-life victory of the utmost importance.

Britain acquired universal public healthcare long before abortion. Many European or Commonwealth countries did. Only in Britain has Western Europe anything like the abortion on demand up to and including partial birth that exists in the United States. But everywhere in Western Europe has universal public healthcare, and has had for so long that no one can imagine life without it, a status which, admittedly, it has attained very rapidly indeed everywhere where it has ever been introduced. But now America has gone one better, with a ban on the federal funding of abortion written into what will rapidly become the sacrosanct founding document of the universal public healthcare system, without which, as without the ban on coverage of illegal immigrants, that document would never have been passed.

The most pro-life sections of any given European or Commonwealth society are always among the most stalwart supporters of the public healthcare system. The same will be the case in America very soon, and then for ever thereafter. Social Catholicism and the Evangelical tradition of, in American terms, William Jennings Bryan in action. The sort of thing that the Catholic Enclycists in the North, and the agrarian populists in the South and West, would have done, and would have united to do. Like avoiding wars, in fact.

The only Republican vote for this Bill was that of Anh Cao, who has an otherwise solidly Democratic district in New Orleans, and who is a community activist of the grand old school, as so many erstwhile Jesuit seminarians are. Just as they so often are, and just as he is, totally pro-life.