Religion & Law

A few days ago, Steve S. urged "progressives" to support the health-care bill (I'm assuming we're talking here about the Senate's version), and directed a similar exhortation to "those who would privilege squeaky-clean abortion neutrality over the needs of the poor[.]" 

I'm not sure what is meant by "privileg[ing] squeaky-clean abortion neutrality over the needs of the poor."  Putting aside entirely reasonable doubts one might have about whether the Senate's bill (or the House's) really serves, all things considered, the common good, and the "needs of the poor" in particular, it strikes me, with all due respect to Steve, as unfair to wave off the abortion-related concerns regarding the current healthcare-funding proposals as reflecting merely an excessive attachment to "squeaky-clean abortion neutrality." 

It is, many of us believe, a monstrous injustice that laws not only exclude the most vulnerable among us from the law's protections -- and, to make matters worse, justify this exclusion with reference to human rights.  This monstrous injustice would be made even worse, and further entrenched, some of us believe, by a healthcare-funding bill that subsidized abortion and embraced (not only implicitly) the fiction that abortion is healthcare.  Even if one thought (and a reasonable, informed person certainly need not think) that the bill under consideration actually would, all things considered, help the poor, one would not be merely stubbornly fastidious for thinking that the abortion-related "costs" were just too high.  The concern that many of us have is not with preserving a "squeaky clean neutrality", in terms of money-flow and cooperation-with-evil; it's with avoiding (what can only be regarded as) a clarion-clear declaration by the United States that abortion is "health care" to which everyone has a right and which the citizenry may justly be taxed to provide.