Democrat Representative Bart Stupak’s end run around the leadership during the House vote on health care reform stunned me, but it shouldn’t have.

All week long I’d been getting emails from Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) that access to abortion was threatened, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi was and is a supporter of reproductive freedom, and it never occurred to me that she’d have to choose between passing health care reform and compromising women’s right to decide what to about unplanned pregnancy.

Follow up:

But Pelosi did, and the choice she made was to put what some might call “the greater good” ahead of women’s interests. After all, everyone needs health care, and not everyone wants or needs an abortion.

Women gained unfettered access to first term abortion in 1973 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, and conditions were established for the procedure in the next two trimesters. But in 1976, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment banning the use of Medicaid funds to provide abortion except in rare instances, tantamount to making it unavailable to poor women. The Supreme Court upheld the amendment in 1980, and it’s been a hot button issue ever since. Given the Republican appointment of Justices Thomas, Alito, Scalia and Roberts to the Court, supporters of reproductive freedom can no longer count on it as a guarantor.

The Stupak-Pitts amendment that passed the House of Representatives last week would mean that insurers who took any money through government leveling of insurance costs through exchanges would be unable to insure abortions. Under the new health care program, that could affect families of four with incomes of up to $88,000, a more affluent group than Hyde covers. It’s easy to see why Planned Parenthood and NARAL are so upset; what Roe permitted is steadily being chipped away.

But this time, there is vigorous opposition in the House. Reps. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Diana DeGette (D-CO) have vowed not to vote for the health care conference bill if the Stupak amendment is not struck, and they’re not alone.

There are, I know, people for whom interrupting a pregnancy is tantamount to murder or at least manslaughter. I’m not one of them, but I can respect that point of view. I wish they respected the point of view that says God is fully present even when there are no good choices, only tough ones, and that we are not to judge another. In any case, that’s religion, and we’re talking about government.

For fundamentalists of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, religion is primarily about purity, but that purity often seems denying of life and humanity, especially when those lives are women’s. Abortion’s religious opponents seem obsessed that federal dollars, to which we all contribute, must not fund abortions and thus taint their souls. But, strangely, there seems no concomitant outrage that those same dollars are killing both soldiers and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan or lining the pockets of Wall Street bankers.

I’ve really had it with the keeners who wail about the souls of the unborn while ignoring the needs of the living: Of girls whose bodies and psyches are insufficiently mature to give birth. Of women whose pregnancy keeps them at the whim of an abusive spouse. Of children who will be born drug dependent or to mothers who are incapable of nurture at their birth. Of children whose emotional needs make them prey to authority figures, often religious leaders. Of children with developmental issues whose parents may lack resources to help them. Of whole families for whom the birth of another child will mean serious deprivation. You’d think the Right-to-Lifers would promote social problems to deal with the consequences of unplanned pregnancy, but, aside from adoption, they seem oblivious.

There are exceptions like Sojourners’ Jim Wallis, who supports social justice at the same time he opposes abortion, and I suppose I should not have surprised that his Faith Table had been working in favor of Stupak’s amendment. He’s one of the religious voices that has the president’s ear, and I wonder if any of Obama’s religious advisors are pro-choice.

Stupak’s Michigan district has a large Roman Catholic population, so my first thought was that his opposition to abortion was religious. It may be, but his religion is not mainline Catholic. When in Washington, he lived (and maybe still lives) in the former convent at 133 C Street, SE, that is home and church to The Family. You know, the one that gave tax-free refuge to adulterers like former Congressman and now South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Senator John Ensign, and former Representative Chip Pickering—all Republicans. Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Pitts, Stupak’s co-sponsor, is also a C Street guy and a Republican. And there’s at least one more Democrat living there, Rep. Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania.

Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, says that The Family embraces some strange heroes—Hitler, Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden, for example. The principle espoused by Doug Coe, its leader, is that Jesus was all about power (not love) and that if a person has power, it’s because God intended it. If you’re not a reader of the New Testament, let’s just say you won’t find Coe’s assertion there. But could it be that C Street has come to terms with Obama’s legitimacy more quickly than the rest of the religious right?

C Street’s critics are careful to stop short of calling what Stupak and Pitts did a result of a Family conspiracy, and I will as well. However, you have to think that it must be handy for such an organization to have a representative or two among the majority party, whatever that party may be.

President Obama was adamant from the beginning that he wanted bipartisan support. He sees the Democratic Party as having a bigger tent than the Republicans. It’s a nice sentiment, but it may be deadly given our polarized politics.

In the United States, abortion may never again be an unheralded doctor-patient medical option as it is in many parts of the world. The battle lines are drawn, and, unfortunately, they bisect the bodies of half the population.

But what if this debate is about more than abortion? What if abortion is only the stalking horse for a more aggressive agenda within the Democratic Party?

Before you write off abortion’s supporters as a group of single-issue harpies, I suggest you brush up on The Family. And if your tastes are more literary, there’s always Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which she wrote in part as a visiting scholar in Alabama during the Reagan years.

Neither book induces a sound sleep, and even if you are personally opposed to abortion, I hope you’ll think twice about the consequences before you support denying the possibility to others.