Barticles

“U.S. out of my uterus,” reads a sendup of liberal orthodoxy on reproductive freedom. “But first,” it concludes, “buy me stuff for my uterus.” Like a lot of good humor, the joke is not far from the truth.

Progressives groups in Virginia were outraged recently when Gov. Bob McDonnell amended legislation authorizing an insurance exchange to prohibit policies offered through the exchange from covering abortion. The amendment “interferes in private medical and economic decisions,” complained Progress Virginia. NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia also condemned the measure, which it said would “restrict private economic interactions in order to advance an extreme anti-choice agenda.” Planned Parenthood objected, as did many Democratic legislators.

On the other coast, however, it’s a completely different story. Or rather, precisely the same story in reverse.

Until last week, lawmakers in Washington state had been debating a piece of legislation called the Reproductive Parity Act. That measure, killed in a Senate committee, would not have forbidden insurance policies offered through the state exchange to cover abortion. It would have required them to.

How did ostensibly pro-choice groups feel about the bill? Planned Parenthood endorsed it. So did NARAL. The measure had the support of Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee and cleared the Democrat-controlled House principally on party lines. It probably would have cleared the Senate, too, had it gotten out of committee.

But wait a sec. If forbidding abortion coverage “interferes in private medical and economic decisions,” then requiring such coverage does exactly the same. In each case, politicians are using the coercive power of the state to impose their economic preferences on others. So why were ostensibly pro-choice groups trying to get the Parity Act passed?

Because they are not really pro-choice. This hardly qualifies as a new insight — but thanks to Obamacare, these days it sticks out like a porcupine in a petting zoo.

Both Planned Parenthood and NARAL supported passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 — and when the Supreme Court upheld it two years later, they both cheered. The only thing they didn’t like about the landmark law — aside, perhaps, from the fact that it did not go far enough — was a logjam-breaking deal in which the president agreed to sign an executive order preventing federal funds from subsidizing abortions.

As NARAL President Nancy Keenan noted in a letter to The New York Times, “House Republican leaders’ desire to further restrict abortion coverage in health care reform … smacks of hypocrisy. Interfering in families’ private medical decisions and in insurance companies’ business decisions doesn’t sound at all like the smaller, less intrusive government those politicians pledged during the campaign.”

True enough. But, of course, the Affordable Care Act includes many mandates — most salient among them the individual insurance mandate, an unprecedented expansion of federal power that forces every U.S. resident to buy coverage whether he or she wants it or not. Short of conscription, you can’t get much more intrusive than that.

Under the ACA, insurance companies also have to provide coverage for 10 different categories of care, including preventive care. That is the hook on which the Obama administration hung another mandate — the one requiring coverage of contraception. Pro-choice groups loudly, intensely — and sometimes weirdly — fought for enactment of that mandate as well. Their argument seemed to be that the right to choose contraception included the right to have it paid for by someone else, even if that someone had strenuous religious objections.

This is like saying the right to keep and bear arms includes the right to a free Smith & Wesson. But pro-choice groups stuck to their guns, insisting that the government should force companies and institutions that buy insurance to buy contraception coverage as part of it.

Yet once you grant the state the power to compel coverage of a given treatment, then you necessarily grant it the power to forbid coverage of a given treatment as well. It’s a tad rich for pro-choice groups to complain that McDonnell’s measure “interferes in private medical and economic decisions,” when that is the entire purpose of the Affordable Care Act — or to grumble that McDonnell wants to “restrict private economic interactions in order to advance an extreme anti-choice agenda” after they have expended so much effort seeking to restrict private economic interactions in order to advance a pro-choice agenda.

Political winds shift. The good guys will not always hold office. The only way to keep the bad guys from using government power for nefarious ends, therefore, is to deny government much power in the first place. Once again, pro-choice groups are learning the hard lesson that, as Thomas Jefferson is said to have said — but in fact did not — a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.