Picture this: You've recently been through exhausting rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, you've been puking your guts up and your doctor warns you this is a particularly malignant cancer.

Then you find out through some miracle (or bizarre irony) that you're pregnant.

Your doctor warns you the chemo and radiation has put the fetus at risk. She also says the pregnancy could make it harder to effectively treat the cancer. You have a hard decision ahead of you.

Hah hah, only kidding! That decision's already been made for you:

Women's health and rights advocacy groups responded immediately to yesterday's announcement that President Obama would exclude abortion coverage from the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (the temporary high-risk insurance pools created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to transition us into the new health care plan). Obama has decided that women in these pools simply don't need insurance coverage of abortion care even though there is nothing in the new law that dictates this.From the ACLU press release on this:

Even using their own private funds, individuals would not be able to buy policies that cover abortion in these pools. The only exemptions would reportedly be for women who have been raped, who are the victims of incest or who will likely die if they carry the pregnancy to term.

What is perhaps most perplexing about this is that this plan was created to offer temporary insurance coverage to those who cannot afford coverage due to particulary serious health conditions. Women with serious health conditions may be some of the most affected by a pregnancy - the pregnancy may not cause her death but is a woman's life of so little consequence that it matters not to President Obama if a pregnancy bears an immense burden on her already ill body? As NARAL Pro-Choice America's Nancy Keenan puts it, "This policy means that women who are part of these pools because they have significant health problems, such as diabetes or cancer, will not be able to access abortion care, even if their health is at further risk."

Planned Parenthood's press release calls the rule "harmful to women":

“The very women who need to purchase private health insurance in the new high-risk pools are likely to be more vulnerable to medically complicated pregnancies. It is truly harmful to these women that the administration may impose limits on how they use their own private dollars, limiting their health care options at a time when they need them most. This decision has no basis in the law and flies in the face of the intent of the high-risk pools that were meant to meet the medical needs of some of the most vulnerable women in this country."

The Center for Reproductive Rights notes:

"Contrary to assertions by the White House, there's no current legal basis for the policy. The executive order issued by the President on abortion only addressed rules for segregating funds for abortion coverage in the healthcare exchanges and limits on community health centers. The Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan policy similarly furnishes no legal basis for exclusions in the new high risk pools."The proposal would not even permit policyholders to use their own private dollars to purchase coverage, as the Nelson compromise allows, and instead applies a Stupak-type ban like the one rejected by Congress. Healthcare reform was a tightly bargained piece of legislation - and with this, the White House is threatening to renege on a fundamental part of its bargain with American women and families who truly need coverage. Excluding abortion coverage from the high-risk insurance pools was not part of the negotiations during healthcare reform, and nothing in the bill compels this result."

[...] NARAL Pro-Choice America has started a letter writing campaign to urge President Obama not to exclude abortion coverage from the high-risk pools.

In a breathtakingly tight argument, Chris Matthews corners Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin, who has banned Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., from receiving Holy Communion due to his views on abortion.

Because here's the moral hypocrisy at the heart of the Church's abortion position: If it's really and truly murder, you're talking about prosecuting mothers, sisters, lovers and friends for having them. Tweety is quite aggressive with the bishop, demanding to know exactly what legal penalties he thinks should be legislated.

I mean, we won't even touch the concept of one religion imposing its moral position on everyone else. We don't have to. Because if you're saying abortion is murder, you may not create a separate class of penalties under the law. You can't argue that women "didn't know what they were doing." You can't say they were "confused" or "coerced" if there's no evidence they were, anymore than you can say that about any other murder for hire. Either she paid someone to murder her child - or she didn't.

So she has to be tried for murder. The churches can't have it both ways. They can't advise forgiveness and legal exemption for one specific class of murders.

And there's no way the majority of Americans would ever support sending their relatives, neighbors and friends to prison for it.

This is really what Tweety was getting at, and it was damned brilliant. Go, Tweety!

Apparently the Catholic Church, just like the other Beltway lobbyists, now writes our legislation.

The drama had built for months, pitting a group of Democrats against the Catholic Church. Priests and bishops were calling members to lobby for stricter language to limit abortion coverage, members and aides said last week.

But the final decision played out over a few furious hours Friday night as the fate of the broader bill still hung in the balance and stirred up long-dormant tensions within the Democratic Party over reproductive rights.

The beneficiary of this impasse was Stupak, an outspoken abortion-rights opponent whom the leadership had tried to circumvent, in order to pick up the votes he claimed to represent. After months of stalemate, the speaker was forced to accept language Stupak first drafted over the summer that would bar any insurance company that participates in the exchange — including the government option — from offering insurance plans that would cover abortions.

“Normally, at the end of the day, you’re arguing over fine-tuning,” said an aide whose boss was involved in the negotiations. “But this is a sizable change to current policy. So everyone was kind of stunned.”

For more than a decade, the Hyde amendment has prohibited the federal government from paying for abortions through any existing government program. The law needs to be reauthorized each year as part of the appropriations process, but the two sides had come to something of a détente.

The health care fight, however, disrupted that balance, and a big bloc of anti-abortion Democrats were threatening to derail the entire bill unless party leaders agreed to stronger restrictions the church could accept. Since mid-September, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer had been working closely with Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-Ind.) to craft language that would thread what proved to be an impossible needle.

Ellsworth, in consultation with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was trying to amend legislation passed out of the Energy and Commerce Committee to make sure insurance companies that receive federal funds under the programs created by the bill don’t use any of that money to pay for abortions.

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