Obama Needs to 'Man Up' on Abortion in Health Care Speech, Critic Says

At least that's the gauntlet thrown down by the Catholic League's Bill Donohue, who taunts the president ahead of Obama's make-or-break health care speech to Congress -- and stretches a few truths about Obama's positions.

"Will President Obama mention abortion tonight? Not a chance," Donohue, a leader of the church's conservative opposition to Obama, declares in a press release. "Abortion is perhaps the most divisive moral issue in America, and because the president wants to force the taxpayers to pay for abortion (it would be covered in the public plan), he is not going to go near it."

"The manly thing to do would be to address it head-on."

Manliness aside, Obama has regularly addressed the abortion issue -- and the question of conscience protections for health workers who do not want to participate in procedures like abortion that violate their beliefs. In his speech at Notre Dame in May (which Donohue and other conservative Catholics opposed), the president promised to work for conscience clauses in legislation (as did the dying Ted Kennedy in his private letter to Pope Benedict XVI in July). And in a meeting with Catholic journalists at the White House in early July, Obama promised "there will be a robust conscience clause in place" when all is said and done.

He reiterated that in a conference call to rally religious progressives in August, when he called out those who claimed health care reform would include "death panels" or fund abortion or force health care workers to participate in abortions or other procedures for "bearing false witness." He called such talk "ludicrous," and "an extraordinary lie."

But back to Donohue's first point -- will Obama even broach these topics?

Some of the president's supporters on the religious left would like to see him be more assertive in putting these issues out of bounds, killing off the end-of-life counseling provisions that gave rise the "death panel" meme, endorsing (again) conscience protections, and vowing (again) that health care reform would not entail any expansion of funding for abortion, and certainly not with taxpayer money.

John Gehring of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a social justice lobby associated with religious progressives, said "it would be helpful for him to again clarify that he does not want to change longstanding policy that prohibits the use of federal taxpayer funds for abortion or reasonable conscience protections for medical providers."

Another lobby of religious progressives, Third Way, is circulating a position paper arguing that the health care proposals as they stand would be likely to reduce rather than increase abortions because most abortions (57 percent) are performed on women living at or near the poverty level. The Third Way argues that by providing the safety net of health insurance, fewer women would fear carrying a pregnancy to term.

The other rationale for Obama to address abortion and related issues is that by restating his positions Obama would be able to reconnect with foes who should be his natural allies in this fight, such as the Catholic bishops, who have a longstanding commitment to universal and affordable quality health care.

The more likely scenario, however, is that Obama will ignore the hot-button issues because no matter what he says, social conservatives and Republicans will find a reason to oppose him.

"I think for the real opponents of health care reform it's less about the facts than about turning the public against the legislation," said Chris Korzen, executive director of Catholics United, also affiliated with religious progressives but distinct from Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good).

"I'm starting to wonder if it's even worth it to spend a lot of time on these fine points when they are kind of irrelevant anyway" because people won't believe what Obama says, Korzen continued. "If I'm the administration, I want to use this [speech] as an opportunity to remind people what health care reform is all about. We've really lost that narrative. Because by focusing on these frivolous claims, it only serves to justify them. The issue is people losing their health insurance, people not having health insurance."

There is good reason to think Korzen has a point.

Abortion opponents like National Right to Life and Americans United for Life certainly seem committed to keeping the heat on the administration with releases titled "Obama dupes news media on government-funded abortion!"

More important, there are signs that religious conservatives are moving beyond the abortion and "death panel" talking points to focus their attacks on the very idea of government-led health care reform.

In her widely circulated Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday, Sarah Palin not only rebooted the "death panel" rumor but she sowed doubt about any government proposal ("a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan") as "a promise Washington can't keep" and one Obama himself can't be trusted with.

And as Dan Gilgoff reports at U.S. News, religious conservatives led by Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention on Wednesday delivered a petition to Capitol Hill that made no mention of abortion and did not frame the debate in moral terms -- as Obama has -- but instead warned of "a spontaneous grass roots eruption of protest against a government takeover of the American health care system," as Land put it. (Land was to be joined by conservative lights like Dennis Prager, Janet Parshall, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt, and were to deliver the petitions to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who famously said that "If we're able to stop Obama on [health care reform], it will be his Waterloo. It will break him...")

Even several prominent Catholic bishops are raising the "socialism" bogeyman, a striking turnabout given the hierarchy's support for health care reform that would necessitate a significant degree of governmental involvement.

Another difficulty for Obama in defusing this issue is that the abortion funding question is so complex that trying to cordon it off, much less explain it in such a superheated atmosphere, would be next to impossible.

Current government plans like Medicaid already fund some abortions, though in relatively rare cases. Whether the current proposals would expand the pool of taxpayer money to pay for abortions is a matter of intense debate, and depends on what you mean by "funded." The chief concern of pro-lifers is that a government "public option" would pay for insurance that would pay for abortions. Obama supporters say that with the public option likely to fall by the wayside, that objection is moot. But there are other objections that expanding health care coverage with subsidies to insurers or other means would effectively expand the number of abortions as well, which to some is tantamount to taxpayer funded abortion.

Beliefnet's Steve Waldman has parsed the complexities and has floated a number of possible solutions, such as giving Americans the options of buying riders for abortion coverage with their own money.

The reality, however, is that there will always be something to object to, whether true or not, or even half-true.

The danger for religious conservatives, and the causes dear to their hearts, is that by shifting their strategy to opposing any government-led health care reform, no matter what the particulars, they could lose any influence over the details of an eventual reform package should it emerge from Congress and reach the president's desk. And their take-no-prisoners approach also gives Obama little motivation to raise the issues Wednesday night, or in the future.

But as Bill Donohue says, "If I am wrong, I will be glad to say so tomorrow."