So Much for Common Ground
Via Steve Benen, a story in the U.S. News and World Report about how Obama’s “common ground” on reducing abortions by means of expanded access to birth control, sex education, and prenatal care is being rejected by conservatives:
But more conservative religious groups working with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships say they would be forced to oppose such a plan—even though they support the abortion reduction part—because they oppose federal dollars for contraception and comprehensive sex education. This camp, which includes such formidable organizations as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention, is pressuring the White House to decouple the two parts of the plan into separate bills. One bill would focus entirely on preventing unwanted pregnancy, while the other would focus on supporting pregnant women.
The White House declined a request for comment. Advocates for both plans say the administration has offered no hint about how it will come down on the matter. But with the White House expected to announce its plan on abortion and related issues this summer, advocates on both sides are strenuously lobbying for their plan, arguing that it offers the only true hope for common ground on very thorny issues.
“We welcome the opportunity to seek common ground with this administration . . . and to work on behalf of pregnant women and unborn children,” says Deirdre McQuade, a spokesperson for the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, which is pressuring the White House to decouple pregnancy prevention from supporting pregnant women. “But issues of pregnancy prevention are much more divisive and would only slow down much-needed assistance to pregnant women.”
There’s also one encouraging sign of progressives learning how to not get played:
But supporters of the all-in-one approach say that passing a support-only plan is unrealistic in Democratic-controlled Washington. “There would be a strong reluctance in the pro-choice community to trust that if Congress moved support-only, that a prevention-only package would also pass,” says Laser. “There’s also a fear that support-only would be defined as the new common ground. For the pro-choice side, the most important part of common ground is pregnancy prevention.”
Rosa DeLauro is the principal sponsor of a “more-pro-choice” alternative to the expected White House plan, the “Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act.” The scare quotes are for the fact that the bill doesn’t expand Federal funding for contraception, which – after a decade at shoveling cash to fundamentalists to preach abstinence-only to young adults in public schools – seems like it should be relatively non-controversial (or at the very least, eminently-defendable as a matter of equal treatment to both pro-choice and right-to-life groups).