About two weeks ago, I wrote about Congressman Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan. Over the last few months, Stupak gained national attention as the leader of a group of pro-life Democrats who supported healthcare reform but were concerned about language in the bill that may have permitted federal funds to be used for abortions. Ultimately, Stupak and several other members of the House of Representatives voted for the healthcare bill when they convinced President Obama to sign an “Executive Order” verifying that no federal dollars would be used for abortions. The bill, with those crucial votes, passed and is now law.
Today, Congressman Stupak announced that he would not seek re-election. When I heard the announcement, I felt sad.
Now, I know that in my earlier blog I said I had no pity for Stupak who received a number of death threats after his vote. I argued that when he called abortion doctors “murderers” and other things he ran the risk of inflaming some less than stable people. Ultimately, he became the target of the hatred as well.
My sadness comes from the fact that Congressman Stupak’s actions of a few months ago took balls. That’s because he had to have known that voting for the healthcare bill and getting others to vote for it would be his political death knell.
Stupak feels strongly that federal dollars should not be used for abortions. So, when the House and Senate passed their versions of the healthcare bill and the right to life lobbyists said that both bills still might allow federal dollars to be used for abortion, Stupak met with the President. At Stupak’s urging, the President signed the Executive Order, but the anti-abortion crowd said it wasn’t enough to protect their concerns because the Executive Order was not law. Still, Stupak organized this action and his comfort with it led him to ultimately vote for the healthcare bill.
When Stupak voted for the bill, he knew he was done for. He knew that the anti-abortion groups would call him a traitor, which they did. He knew that he could no longer rely on their political support. Without their support, he was basically dead meat in his district in Michigan. That’s why he made his announcement today.
Stupak could have taken the easy way out. He could have held firm and withheld his vote on healthcare and feigned outrage that federal dollars would be used for abortion. But he saw the bigger picture and, at the risk of pissing off a key interest group, he accepted the Executive Order, basically trusting Obama’s word.
For that he has paid a big price.
I totally disagree with him on the issue of abortion, but I have to quietly applaud that he was true to his principles. He remained against abortion and for healthcare reform – and it precipitated the end of his congressional career. You don’t see that very often these days.
Abortion - Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information 
April 9, 2010 at 4:19 pm
The facts are 1)that Stupak as an ex-trooper, never quite was able to shed the black-and-white worldview necessary for success in law enforcement and adapt to the shades of gray so necessary to tolerate in politics, and 2) he didn’t realize the majority of his supporters are ill-equipped to understand the grave social signficance of half the children in America having to make their own breakfast: http://web.mac.com/charlesgregory/ABORTICENTRISM/My_Internet_post.html
You might feel a little guilty about having dumped on a man who didn’t know he was going down, but that’s not your problem. The real problem is the other pols like him who are still in positions to do the will of a group with a distinctive mental health problem.
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April 10, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Charles,
well said!
GB
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April 10, 2010 at 6:43 pm
There was another guy, I go way back, who sacrificed his political career to support baby killing. His name was Michaels, from New York. His was the vote that made NY one of the first baby-killing states.
So far, no one has sacrificed his political career to protect the innocents — one of the reason we slice up, tear apart, poison, and starve ten million of us each year around here.
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April 11, 2010 at 9:42 am
Thank you, George!
John Dunkle, one would think that you, having read the account of the children coming out of the Baby Store (cut and paste my name if you haven’t), would put some balance into your views on both abortion and the need to care for born children– but you haven’t. Which confirms the basic tenet of aborticentrism, that so-called “pro-lifers” are so focused on abortion that they can’t devote their resources to caring for human life beyond what is convenient or necessary for them.
It’s like they want to be Holden Caulfield in that field of rye, except they let all the born children rush right past them while they scan the field’s edge for the next fetus.
I used to be a so-called “pro-lifer!” Of course it was long before Women’s Lib. Sherry Finkbine, the Miss Sherry of “Romper Room,” had gone off to Sweden to have an abortion, because she was worried that the Thalidomide antidepressant she had been taking was going to result in her baby arriving looking like a baby seal (my description, not hers). It was a cause celebre at the time, when even the birth control pill was not socially accepted. I spent a few hours writing editorials in my head about her vicious sinfulness and how God would smite her.
That all went out the window ten years later when I found out the next eighteen years of my life had just been re-scheduled for me. As I learned how to be a good parent (largely by doing all the wrong things first), I ran across literature that taught me how important is for us to care for all children all their lives. For you, I would recommend FBI agent Robert Ressler’s book, “Whoever Fights Monsters.” He developed the serial killer profile, and he can identify children who are at greatest risk to become one.
But if you’re gripped by aborticentrism, you won’t look into it. Aborticentrism posits that the so-called “pro-lifer’s” scant psychological resources have to be dedicated to hating and overcoming abortion, and to risk expending them by exposure to contrary information is too threatening to one’s emotional well-being.
However, if you do read it, I’d appreciate your comments.
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April 14, 2010 at 6:41 am
Hi again Charles. I’m just discovering you by going down Pat’s excellent blog. Your post here, though, kind of mixes me up. What about this: when the law allows us to kill people who’ve been alive for twelve months, as it now allows us for those who’ve been alive for twelve weeks, I will protest infanticide the same way I am now protesting feticide — weakly and ineffectually.
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April 14, 2010 at 5:29 pm
John, remember the passage in Catch-22 where Yossarian tells the lascivious old Italian man that “it’s better to die on our feet than live on our knees,” and the old man, of whom Yossie disapproves wholeheartedly, says, “No; it’s better to live on our feet than die on our knees.”
You and I represent two different views of the so-called “pro-life” movement. You say just making some woman keep a fetus alive is enough (and the nurture and comfort you have personally offered those fetuses amply demonstrates the actual limit of your involvement); I say, it’s not enough; if I am morally compelled to enforce a pregnancy, I have a moral commitment to the resulting child– and my brag about what I’ve done between 1987 and last month (when I stopped) shows what so-called “pro-lifers” could do, if they recognized their moral obligation.
The problem is, of course, that in order to duck the inconvenient matter of moral obligation, so-called “pro-lifers” have very, very successfully trotted out the bloody shirt– calling abortion murder– and managed to make the public forget about the millions of slow murders that happen to children every day– and I know, because I have dealt with them. And you don’t, because you haven’t.
The reason that so-called “pro-lifers” can’t deal with real human life and really needy children is that the underlying problem they have to grapple with consumes too much of their energy to have any left over for such risky work. So, I don’t condemn you; but I do wish you could step back and reassess why you are so focused on fetal life and not on child development. You really do need “murder” to keep going, you know…
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April 14, 2010 at 6:17 pm
Pat, help me out here. What the heck is Charles talking about.
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April 15, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Honestly, John, half the time I’m not sure what Charles is talking about myself!!!
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April 15, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Aborticentrism is at the conceptual point where string theory was forty years ago. Eventually it’ll be broadly understood.
Okay, John let’s start with a very basic point: A woman is told by her doctor that if she does not have an abortion, she will likely die. She persists in carrying to term and does not die. She does not then walk away from the baby.
A woman whom I knew had a baby with a genetic skin disease, in which the skin constantly peels, is very liable to infection and causes immense anguish to the child. She was told by her doctor that there is a 30% chance that her next child will also be born with the disease. She got pregnant, had another child with the same condition. She did not walk away from that child either.
A so-called “pro-lifer” refuses to listen to any woman’s reason for not wanting to be pregnant and compels her to have a baby. In over 90% of the cases, he walks away.
So, let’s start from this point: What do you see as the difference between those women and that pro-lifer?
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April 15, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Not much. The all refused to kill someone.
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April 16, 2010 at 6:03 am
John, you seem to lack the ability to step back and look at broader perspectives when addressing an issue of concern to you.
If Wilbur Wright or his brother had been afflicted by this, the French would be known as the inventors of the airplane.
As it is, you are clearly not interested in bridging the abyss between your group and “pro-choicers,” and I’m not into missionary work, so your inquiry about the nature of aborticentrism cannot be pursued.
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