PAPILLO AND THE PILL: THE LEFT OVERREACHES
March 13th, 2006 by Peter
It was a battlefield carefully chosen by Connecticut’s pro-abortion establishment. But they did not count on a profile in courage, Victim Advocate James Papillo, offering public testimony exposing their effort to force Catholic hospitals to provide the “Plan B” pill for the pro-abortion attack on religious freedom that it is. Pro-abortion activists are now discovering to their dismay that they have inadvertently energized the state’s pro-life movement:
Still, the intensity of the recent Connecticut debate over the availability of Plan B took even some longtime veterans of the abortion wars by surprise.
Leslie Gabel-Brett, executive director of the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, told lawmakers there would be little opposition to the hospital access bill because “it seemed so fair.”
“I didn’t think it would erupt into this huge controversy,” she said.
Was it the Left’s gradual awareness that it picked the wrong fight that led the Courant not to post today’s anti-Papillo editorial online? Either way, it didn’t stop Connecticut blogger Don Pesci from noting the errors in the Courant’s logic.
Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Sullivan has claimed that Dr. Papillo has backed off his testimony. Not quite:
But Papillo didn’t seem at all contrite. He said he has “no regrets” and that he was just doing his job to protect all crime victims.
If the political winds continue to howl around this issue, Papillo could find that his $97,850-a-year state job has become an early storm victim.
Journal Inquirer columnist Chris Powell notes that the pill bill has no rationale:
Despite the indignation affected by its advocates, there is no necessity for the legislation. None of Connecticut’s four Catholic hospitals — in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, and Waterbury — is more than a few minutes from a non-sectarian hospital that happily provides contraceptive drugs.
And he shows why the argument made in the Englehart cartoon in Friday’s Courant and elsewhere–that the state should cease to provide money to Catholic hospitals because of those hospitals’ opposition to this bill–was so off-base:
But this argument is bogus. For state government’s reimbursements to hospitals for treating the poor are hugely inadequate, always totaling much less than the cost actually incurred… So it would be a thrill to see the Catholic hospitals, at the direction of their bishops, respond to the legislation on emergency contraception by clarifying the whole situation — by withdrawing from those reimbursement programs or even closing (if only temporarily) and thus shifting the social welfare burden entirely to the non-sectarian hospitals, which would be instantly bankrupted.
