In the wake over the defection of pro-life Democrats from voting against the abortion-funding ObamaCare bill, Democrats for Life of America has ruined its reputation within the pro-life community.
The organization has mounted a vigorous defense of Congressman Bart Stupak and the Democrats who ran as pro-life but shirked their views to support a bill that contains virtually no limits on taxpayer funding of abortions.DFLA began with a criticism of the National Right to Life Committee, accusing the organization of promoting violence. Later it went against the Susan B. Anthony List and joined the effort of Ohio Rep. Steve Driehaus to subject its president to fines and potential jail time for holding him accountable for his pro-ObamaCare vote.
Now DFLA director Kristen Day has accused pro-life groups of not caring about the unborn by making abortion merely a campaign issue, not wanting pro-life Democrats to play a role within the Democratic Party, and claiming they are in league with the abortion industry.
“From a Republican perspective, this is a very good strategy because you don’t want a strong pro-life voice in the Democratic Party; it takes it away as a campaign issue,” she told Christianity Today yesterday.
Day added: “The pro-choice groups are the same way. I think the pro-choice groups and the pro-life Republicans are on the same page: ‘We don’t want these pro-life Democrats in the party.’ “
Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of the Susan B. Anthony List, told the Christian publication that what her group and others want are pro-life Democrats who will consistently vote pro-life and not put their party over politics.
“Assuming that our plans work out well, we will have a very strong team to work with, and a team that understands the consequences of undermining the pro-life position,” she said of SBAL’s efforts to target those “pro-life Democrats” who voted for the pro-abortion bill.
“They’ll see people who lost because they said they were pro-life and then didn’t vote that way,” she said.
Meanwhile, the National Right to Life Committee today released a more generic version of the affidavit it submitted to defend SBA from Driehaus’ criminal complaint.
The new version provides a more general refutation of all claims that the Obama health care law does not contain federal subsidies for abortion and it also discusses one substantive point that was not mentioned in the original version.
It refers to H. Con. Res. 254, a resolution introduced by Stupak and 10 others on March 19, 2010, proposing to amend the Senate-passed health care reform bill to remove objectionable pro-abortion language, and to insert a bill-wide prohibition on subsidies for abortion. [related]
“After Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to allow a vote on this resolution/amendment, Stupak and some others defected and voted for the health care bill anyway,” NRLC’s legislative director Douglas Johnson tells LifeNews.com. “But their introduction of this resolution provides one additional evidence that they recognized that the health care bill needed substantial revisions to prevent subsidies for abortion — revisions which were not accomplished.”
In other words, the Senate bill that became the final version of the ObamaCare law had such objectionable language when it came to abortion funding that Stupak and other pro-life Democrats wanted to amend it to fix the problems. Unable to do so, they voted for the abortion-funding bill anyway — something Democrats for Life recognized in emails to pro-life groups before siding with Stupak and company.
