More on the Vote.

From Gather, more info on those who voted against HCR. I'll post the other Dems who voted yes on Stupak and no on HCR when I get their info.

(23 Dems Yes on Stupak, No on HCR)

November 08, 2009 05:44 AM EST

views: 175 | rating: 10/10 (3 votes) | comments: 9

Time to put those FREE long distance cell

phone plans to work?

(Yes on Stupak, No on HCR)

The real traitors tonight (Yes on Stupak, No on HCR) Sat Nov 07, 2009 at 09:22:55 PM PST

We had a total of 64 Democrats that voted "Yes" to the Stupak amendment, which added an unnecessary and excessive anti-abortion provision to the House healthcare bill that was passed tonight.

However, there were a total of 23 Democrats that voted Yes on the Stupak amendment, and then followed that up with a "No" vote on the final healthcare bill vote.

These 23 Democrats intentionally voted for the Stupak amendment to actively impair the Democrats' healthcare bill, something far worse than a simple "No" vote on the bill.

Jason Altmire (PA-4) 202-225-2565
Bobby Bright (AL-2) 202-225-2901
John Barrow (GA-12) 202-225-2823
John Boccieri (OH-16) 202-225-3876
Dan Boren (OK-2) 202-225-2701
Ben Chandler (KY-6) 202-225-4706
Travis Childers (MS-1) 202-225-4306
Artur Davis (AL-7) 202-225-2665
Lincoln Davis (TN-4) 202-225-6831
Bart Gordon (TN-6) 202-225-4231
Parker Griffith (AL-5) 202-225-4801
Tim Holden (PA-17) 202-225-5546
Jim Marshall (GA-8) 202-225-6531
Jim Matheson (UT-2) 202-225-3011
Mike McIntyre (NC-7) 202-225-2731
Charlie Melancon (LA-3) 202-225-4031
Collin Peterson (MN-7) 202-225-2165
Mike Ross (AR-4) 202-225-3772
Heath Shuler (NC-11) 202-225-6401
Ike Skelton (MO-4) 202-225-2876
John Tanner (TN-8) 202-225-4714
Gene Taylor (MS-4) 202-225-5772
Harry Teague (NM-2) 202-225-2365

New Tenor: After Stupak's Assault on Women, Time to Overturn Hyde.

Any woman who is interested in bodily autonomy and reproductive rights is reeling after last night's approval by Republicans and 46 Democrats of the Stupak amendment to health care reform. You will hear repeated comments that a little compromise is worth it to get health care reform through the house and senate. But this is not a little compromise. This is a complete capitulation to conservative ideology.

There are two lessons here: 1) that 85% of women currently covered by private insurance for abortion services are threatened; and primarily poor or disadvantaged women are going to lose reproductive services under this bill, a step forward and one great step backwards for those who believe in women's rights is no real victory; and 2) that the hard push by the left to "compromise" on faith-based, family, reproductive issues has cost women desperately and is a result of long-term appeasement.

I'm so pissed off by this compromise, this willingness of the left to simply go along with the right's frame of women's rights as an issue to be dictated by the Catholic church and conservative republicans that I'm not able to think straight.

Francis Kissling, a long time head of Catholics for Choice and advocate for women's rights, has an article at RHRealityCheck this morning that proves her experience in thinking straight in times like these. Kissling writes:

Sorting through feelings as well as strategies in the face of the enormous defeat that the passage of a health care reform bill that so severely and punishingly restricts access to abortion will take time and hard political decisions. One wants to punish those who voted for the Stupak amendment and especially Stupak as much as they have punished women. At some point in time one has to put women first and above all else for no else will.

But the immediate take away is the cold hard fact that our biggest and most costly defeat since 1973 was the enactment of the Hyde Amendment and our lack of a total, uncompromising commitment to overturning it. If nothing else happens as a result of this defeat, complete and total dedication to overturning Hyde must be the centerpiece, indeed the single objective of our movement. It is not clear if the effect of the Stupak Amendment will be that the door will close on ever restoring federal funds for abortion, but every effort to make sure that does not happen must be made. We must convince enough people that the only immorality is using poor women as a way of expressing one’s moral outrage. Either we all have the right to choose or none of us has it.

President Obama has always supported overturning Hyde and we now need to insist that having achieved his political objective with strong support from the women’s movement, he must take up the true moral cause – giving women with no or low resources the same right of conscience as those with sufficient money to pay for their own abortions have always had.

One commenter writes:

The Stupac-Pitts Amendment is not common ground. It was an ultimatum, "Accept this or we will not vote to pass the bill." There is no "common ground" in a provision that prevents the most disenfranchised members of our population, low-income women, from accessing abortion care. There is no "common ground" in restricting these women from buying a private insurance plan that covers abortion.

Common ground would involve pro-choice legislation. Correct me if I am wrong, but I see nothing of the pro-choice position in this healthcare bill.

The Hyde Amendment on its own would have been common ground, but Stupac-Pitts is nothing short of pandering to the Republicans for the sake of passing the bill.

It is clear what happened last night. Women were pawned because the Democrats took a position of compromise on health care that was so far right that they had nothing left to negotiate but women. Poor women, women most vulnerable. And all women suffer from the furthering of an ideology that determines they are incapable of deciding when to have children. That their bodies belong to society, to traditional ideas of family roles, to men.

This is not solely a compromise for the sake of health care reform. This is a horrendous step backwards for equal rights and it is the result of 30 years of allowing the right to make this a religion issue and not a human rights issue. We were meek and mild, we were modest in our acceptance of abortion restrictions, we kept taking compromise. And now we will pay, as women, for not asserting our rights.

Women's Rights in the US Today: Morning After Pill.

So the only way health care could be passed in this country now was for Democrats to capitulate to Republicans' and Conservatives' desire to keep women's sex lives under control?

Yeah, yeah, they call it a campaign to save the unborn: It's all about the baby, right?

Democrats are just as complicit in this sell-out of women's privacy and reproductive rights as the rest. Since 1973, the campaign to keep women's rights legal has been one apology for being female after another. We have allowed abortion to be seen as shameful, a secular affront to God and "natural" law, we have allowed women's rights to be framed as moral standards. Our states have eeked in one access-denying law after another like parental notification and late term restrictions.

Now we see personhood legislation come up around the country to declare a zygote a person, with rights and protections that make a woman a baby-producer, only important as a carrier of a potential child, no longer entitled to her own autonomy and sanctity. Because that is the role we have let ourselves be painted into.

We have sanctioned ourselves. We have said we love babies instead of we love ourselves. We have let the church and anti-choice activists frame our bodies into vessels with limited purposes. We have shied away from determining our own governance. We have let ourselves be shamed for being independent.

How do we undo thirty years of apologizing for being women, of shyly asking for our independence, of apologizing for our desires for education, careers, and the ability to decide when we have children? How can medical advances give the ailing new hearts and mend bones and yet, we are left to bashfully ask for permission to manage our period?

If reducing abortion is the objective, we have lost our point. If the baby is the focus, women are still secondary considerations. If women are still afraid to say, "I am a feminist," "I have had an abortion," "I don't want children," or "I think it's none of your business," we are still on a path that will allow the USCCB, male conservatives and their apologizing, dutiful wives, corporations, pharmaceuticals, and any last example of a patriarchal, male-knows-best, structure to tell us our role in society. Self-determination did not go out the window last night. We never fully let it in.

The religious right is not dead. We are losing the right to abortion and bodily autonomy. The prominent women's organizations have bought into compromise of women's rights, along with the president and our Democratic constituents. It might as well be the '70s again.

This realization, driven home to me last night after over a year of hope that we finally had a strong political backing in our government with the new president, is a bitter pill.