McClatchy: Stupak Amendment written because Catholic Bishops wanted a tougher law

Via McClatchy:

The drama had built for months, pitting a group of Democrats against the Catholic Church. Priests and bishops were calling members to lobby for stricter language to limit abortion coverage, members and aides said last week.

But the final decision played out over a few furious hours Friday night as the fate of the broader bill still hung in the balance and stirred up long-dormant tensions within the Democratic Party over reproductive rights.

The beneficiary of this impasse was Stupak, an outspoken abortion-rights opponent whom the leadership had tried to circumvent, in order to pick up the votes he claimed to represent. After months of stalemate, the speaker was forced to accept language Stupak first drafted over the summer that would bar any insurance company that participates in the exchange — including the government option — from offering insurance plans that would cover abortions.

“Normally, at the end of the day, you’re arguing over fine-tuning,” said an aide whose boss was involved in the negotiations. “But this is a sizable change to current policy. So everyone was kind of stunned.”

For more than a decade, the Hyde amendment has prohibited the federal government from paying for abortions through any existing government program. The law needs to be reauthorized each year as part of the appropriations process, but the two sides had come to something of a détente.

The health care fight, however, disrupted that balance, and a big bloc of anti-abortion Democrats were threatening to derail the entire bill unless party leaders agreed to stronger restrictions the church could accept. Since mid-September, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer had been working closely with Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-Ind.) to craft language that would thread what proved to be an impossible needle.

Ellsworth, in consultation with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was trying to amend legislation passed out of the Energy and Commerce Committee to make sure insurance companies that receive federal funds under the programs created by the bill don’t use any of that money to pay for abortions.
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