Obama Abortion Backtrack Shows He's All Rhetoric, No Fight

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Now that the U.S. Senate has postponed a resolution to the health care reform debacle until the fall, one thing we know will not be included is a provision to reverse the infamous Hyde Amendment. Such a provision would allow federal funds to be used for poor women's abortions, which the Hyde Amendment has banned for more than three decades.

Rich and even middle-class women can always get them from ob-gyn's or private hospitals that provide them. But poor women are denied abortions by a combination of economics and the Christian right. Now, our supposedly pro-choice president is signaling that federal funds for abortion is not the kind of issue over which he's willing to wage a fight:

In an interview with Katie Couric, the president said, "I'm pro-choice, but I also think we have a tradition in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government funded healthcare."

Actually, President Obama is about as pro-choice as he is anti-war, pro-environment, and pro-women's rights, which is to say, not so much or hardly at all when it comes to action versus rhetoric.

Former Catholics for a Free Choice leader Frances Kissling has an interesting take on why Congress should overturn the Hyde Amendment which of course Congress would do if it were more pro-adult female life than pro-zygote life. But since zygotes matter more than women according to the so-called pro-life movement, that'll never happen.

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By Bonnie Erbe