Pro-life Dems and ObamaCare

From Professor Hadley Arkes, writing over at The Catholic Thing, on ObamaCare and abortion:

... A recent Rasmussen poll found that only 13 percent of the public thought that medical insurance funded or subsidized by the national government should cover abortion. Forty-eight percent were opposed. But it was even more revealing that many people who are pro-choice have been unwilling to pay for abortions, as a public responsibility. And so, in Rasmussen’s survey, 67 percent of the public were opposed to requiring people to pay for abortions with their taxes. After all, if abortion is a “private choice,” why should it be regarded as a “public good,” supported by funds drawn by law from people who regard the surgery as repugnant?

But the sentiments of the public here will be no more decisive for the Congressional leadership than the opposition that has already set in against the scheme to have the government take over the direction and control of medical care. What the media have not understood is that the removal of abortion could doom the whole bill. For even they seem not to have grasped the truth that dare not speak its name: that the paramount, defining issue for the Democrats now – the issue that gives scale and place to everything else – is that commitment to abortion, for any reason, at any time. For people on the Left, that right to abortion has become the “first freedom,” taking the place of freedom of speech and religion. If abortion were explicitly barred from a vast new program of medical care, that would be taken as another, telling sign that the public has refused to accept the legitimacy of abortion as just another form of surgery. For the National Organization of Women, and the Left at the core of the Democratic Party, that kind of judgment is just not to be brooked. If that is the cost of national heath care, they would rather not have it than suffer this moral reproach running to the core of their lives. ...

Read it here.