SO NOW Representative Mike Capuano says he would not vote for a health insurance bill that lacks abortion coverage. His vote last week for just such a bill was merely intended to push the matter to the Senate, which may well restore abortion coverage. But if that doesn’t happen, he’s voting nay.
Having previously attacked his Senate rival Martha Coakley for refusing to support any bill lacking abortion coverage, Capuano should now have egg on his face. It seems as if his need to shore up his bona fides on abortion rights is greater than his commitment to providing health insurance to 36 million people.
It’s fine for Capuano and Coakley to vow to use all their leverage to get abortion coverage included in the final bill. That might even require threatening to vote against bills without it. But when a final option is presented, and the choice is between extending benefits to 36 million people or giving them nothing, any reasonable senator from Massachusetts would be expected to support it, with or without abortion coverage.
Coakley and Capuano, with their long political experience, have failed to make that essential commitment clear. Businessman Steve Pagliuca, who has not spent a day in elected office, managed to grasp it, stating that if forced to choose “between providing health care to over 30 million people without federal coverage for abortion, or to leave them with no coverage at all, I could not, in good conscience, make the choice to leave them out in the cold.’’
Beyond all the jockeying for position, the Democratic Senate hopefuls are right to point out that excepting abortion from subsidized health insurance deprives lower-income women of a right that many upper-income women take for granted. Hopefully, Coakley, Capuano, Pagliuca, and the fourth Democratic contender, Alan Khazei, can all agree that, if sent to Washington, they would use their muscle to defend abortion coverage. But, in the process, they shouldn’t scuttle the best hope for health care reform in a generation.
