The Health Care Vote and The Stupak Amendment - Did We Really Ban Taxpayer-Funded Abortion?

The Health Care Vote and The Stupak Amendment - Did We Really Ban Taxpayer-Funded Abortion?

I know that many of you watched the Health Care Reform vote on Saturday night like I did. I began to see the tweets, facebook updates and press releases going out almost immediately after the vote on the Stupak Amendment passed in the House. I was not quite as ready as many other to celebrate a victory.

Of course it made me happy to see that so many Democrats seemed to be taking a stand against our tax dollars going to fund the killing of innocent human children. I am always pumped when the side of life wins out over death. The problem I have is that it really seems like this amendment is just "empty calories", kind of like a cupcake that tastes good now but has no real benefit to us other than taste.

First I would like to point out that there already are millions and millions of taxpayer dollars funding abortion both here in the States and in other countries. Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of child-killing in the country, gets millions of dollars every year from the government. Now I have heard people try and argue that the government money does not directly pay for abortions, but it is still going to the largest abortion provider in America.

In his first week in office, President Obama reversed the Mexico City policy which opened the floodgates of US taxpayer money into other countries to pay for abortions. I don't know how these congressmen and women can sit there and try and tell us not to worry, that federal funds won't go to abortion, when they already do both here in the US and abroad.

Another problem I have with the Stupak Amendment is that it is full of exceptions, which again open the door for taxpayer money to go for abortions. Additionally, I refuse to praise any legislation which dehumanizes children simply because they may have been conceived in rape or incest. They are still human persons. I have talked about this in many other commentaries; we cannot say that killing children is ok in some circumstances because what we are saying then is that some children in the womb are not as fully human as others. A child in the womb is no less human than anyone at any other stage of their life; that is why we are against abortion in the first place. It is not that we are against a procedure; we are against it because that procedure kills a human person.

Another obvious problem with the Stupak Amendment is that it seems that it was just a smokescreen to get pro-life Democrats to vote for the health care bill; without the amendment the bill probably would not have passed. In my opinion, the amendment will probably be stripped away in committee and will never make it into any final version of the bill.

I just refuse to see this as a great victory, but rather more like a pro-life cupcake. While the cupcake looked good and tasted good at the time, it was just empty calories that pacified the masses and in the end did had no nutritional value at all. Let's remain encouraged by the fact that this amendment was even brought to a vote, but still understand it was simply a feel-good treat.

Just my thoughts.

For Christ I stand,

Bryan Kemper - bryankemper@standtrue.com