Camille Paglia praises Nancy Pelosi for displaying what a lot of people would call balls if they had any. Pelosi, argues Paglia, is "sets a new standard for U.S. women politicians and is certainly well beyond anything the posturing but ineffectual Hillary Clinton has ever achieved."

And this:

a basic feminist shibboleth like abortion rights became just another card for Pelosi to deal and swap.

....this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can't my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we're hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors' offices. They'll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.

....why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession?

To repeat myself, not only do they know that socialism doesn't work, they realize that's the whole idea. Not a bug, but a feature. If it doesn't work (which it won't), it will require more government to fix it. Socializing health care will go a long way towards creating a self-replicating, perpetual motion government machine. Getting it started is so important that sacrificing a shibboleth like abortion here and there is a no-brainer.

Besides, with the government's foot firmly in the door, abortion can later be added, by a new bill, amended regulations, or even judicial fiat.

An opportunity for intervention by the courts would be made especially likely if David Frum turns out to be correct in his contention that the bill would ultimately ban all abortions.

These exchanges mingle public and private dollars on complex sliding scales of subsidy. That almost certainly will mean no abortion coverage for any exchange-sold policy, whether the individual purchaser herself receives a subsidy or not.

More government = less choice, in every sense of that word "choice."

Here's what one of Frum's commenters said:

The window will open when everyone thinks that the door is closed and when nobody's looking the law will quietly change and abortionists will be able to kill babies on Uncle Sam's dime. Guaranteed!

A libertarianish commenter raised an interesting but (IMO) unavailing economic argument:

I don't see why tax dollars should be paying for someone's mistakes. If they want an abortion let them pay for it themselves.

Setting the morality of abortion aside, the average pregnancy and birth incurs about $12,000 in medical expenses, for low-birthweight babies the average cost is higher, and for very low-birthweight babies the cost may be astronomical (not to mention that the child may have problems that continue into adulthood). If a policy covers pregnancy, on purely economic terms, wouldn't the insurance company heave a sigh of relief any time a woman had an abortion (at a cost of perhaps $350)?

Also, birth control is cheap relative to pregnancy and birth. Isn't it in the economic interest of insurance companies to pay for birth control?

It also seems to me by your criteria, it would be arguable that pregnancy and birth should not be covered by insurance.

Like it or not, we'll all be in the same pool. As an individualist, I don't like being in the same pool with -- much less having my health care decisions managed by -- people who see my breathing as a threat to the planet, but I guess that's why I have this blog. I can complain to my heart's content, and my heart is never contented.

Of course, now that I live in Ann Arbor, perhaps I should write my Congressman, John Dingell. He has spent most of his legislative career fighting for government health care, though, and as his congressional website points out, so did his father:

At the beginning of every session of Congress, Congressman Dingell introduces the national health insurance bill his father sponsored when he was a Member.

And really.... How persuasive is any opinion to those who disagree with it? On the other hand, how persuasive is an opinion to those who agree with it? Those who agree agree, and those who disagree disagree.

But that still leaves emotional satisfaction and possible entertainment value. Ultimately this means that writing to my Congressman would be a bigger waste of time than writing this blog post.

So why not combine both? The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that if this whole process is in fact a waste of time, the time that is wasted should be wasted in a proper manner!

Besides, people pray, don't they? I realize that to an atheist, prayers are a waste of time, but even if God does not exist, prayer nevertheless offers a form of emotional release and possibly satisfaction. And if we assume the state has replaced God, then writing to those who rule the state is probably less of a waste of time than prayer, because unlike God, the state's existence is known and not open to dispute.

What is and what is not a waste of time is relative.

(Letter to Congressman Dingell appears below.)