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"Congress was rushing last week to wrap matters up for the year, but it found time to enact the Physicians and Hospitals Harassment and Endangerment Act. Of course, it went by a different name: the federal budget bill.
The legislation's main order of business was to shape $388 billion in spending for the coming year and, in the course, to begin paring down social programs, whose eventual reduction has been the point all along, in addition to making the rich richer, of President Bush's tax cuts. The resulting, unsustainable deficits are meant to force an economizing splurge that, since the military naturally must be spared, will be taken out on domestic spending.
This is the radical right's old defunding-the-government dream by another means.
The early victims are student loans, environmental protection and public education, among others, although Congress easily found the odd millions here and there for hometown pork projects in the districts of favored members.
The budget bill became, as well, an early vehicle for carrying the recent election into legislative action, as Christian conservatives, essential these days for Republican victories, start pocketing their policy spoils. Thus the provision that will prevent any level of government -- local, state, federal -- from requiring hospitals, physicians or other health-care providers to perform abortions or to make abortion referrals.
This was pitched as championing individual conscience, but the real agenda is to set up doctors and hospitals to be harried or threatened into shutting down a key part of women's health services.
Most vulnerable at first will be the Medicaid programs in a few states that fund abortions for poor women in some circumstances. But beyond that, individual doctors and hospitals will lose an important protection from antiabortion pressure."
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