Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias at the Center for American Progress attacks Ben Nelson for his opposition to taxpayer funding of abortion. Yglesias seems to belong to the Jon Chait school of liberal blogging, which apparently holds that nastiness and name-calling are the proper means for discussing complex moral and political issues. Here’s the money paragraph in Yglesias’s latest post on abortion subsidies in health care:
And part of the insanity of it is that the actual impact on the number of abortions in America is going to be tiny. Middle-class women will be able to pay for abortions out of pocket, and the “Hyde Amendment” status quo already screws poor women. But it’s a nice symbolic dig at pro-choice America, and a further means of stigmatizing reproductive health services as somehow not real health care. And Nelson, Bart Stupack, and various bishops love the idea of holding the whole package hostage to this point, since I guess the dead kids with trauma injuries will go to heaven anyway or something.
Charming, right, how Yglesias shifts between euphemisms (“reproductive health services”) and ugliness?
But it’s telling that Yglesias seems to think the only value to curbing taxpayer funding of abortion insurance is “symbolic.” Yglesias ignores another notion that most Americans understand pretty easily: conscience.
Pro-lifers find every elective abortion an immoral decision, and we would prevent each one if we could. As a Catholic, I believe I have a responsibility to, within my powers, protect the innocent and vulnerable. But that’s not specifically what’s at stake in the health-care bill.
The real question here is whether the government should force me to subsidize others’ abortions. That’s worse, morally, than the government simply failing to protect unborn people — it’s the government implicating me in the abortion of one of my fellow humans. Put another way, the government is compelling me to act against my conscience.
Does Yglesias not understand this, or is his “symbolic” line just another way to be dismissive and obnoxious to those who believe differently from him?
