NY Times Majoring in Obfuscation

Update: David Harsanyi of the Denver Post says the same thing today, and says it better (except he doesn't acknowledge the philosophical implications of abortion- that it's murder- as much as I do).

The NY Times Editorial staff is misleading and wrong to a great degree in this editorial about paying for abortion.

Apparently, "women's reproductive rights" (to kill babies) were hampered by the pro-life Democrats stance on the new health care bill. To read this article is to think abortion ceased to be legal (would that it were so!). That did not happen. The language in the bill that passed the house prevents any tax subsidy whatsoever of any insurance plan that covers abortion.

The Times would have you believe that this is a restriction on "rights." After all, the taxpayers wouldn't really be paying for the abortions anyways because individual taxpayers would have premiums and co-pays that would cover the real cost. If this were really true, my question becomes: "then why do you need the government at all to pass any meaningful legislation? Why can't private insurance policies cover these kinds of things?"

The fact is that taxpayers would be on the hook for paying for other people's choice in murder. There's no way around the logic here; those people need the government and its taxpayers on the hook for the money. Thus, pro-life democrats were wise to take the abortion provision out of the bill (brief aside: some republicans have argued that better political tactics would have kept the pro-abortion provision in the bill so it would be easily beat in the Senate. I can't speak to the benefits of political tactics here as I'm not well-versed in Congressional political tactics).

And even if the government won't pay for other people's choice in murder via insurance plans, that does not restrict anyone's ability to do it of their own accord. To use the Time's logic, if they're paying for it anyways, why don't they just pay for it without the use of the any insurance at all. Nobody's rights or even wrongful liberties were restricted at all by this bill's passage.

And to cap it off, I do hope the bill is still defeated in the end.