Good news: The Catholic Church supports health care reform! Seems like they support a robust public option! The Catholic Church has been in favor of socialized medicine in the United States going back to Harry S. Truman. You know, with Catholic charities and Catholic hospitals, the Church provides around 1/6th of all the medical services in this country! And they would be totally on board with health care reform, but...
Bad news: Even though all the proposed health care bills strongly prohibit any federal funds being used for abortion, there is the remote possibility that one day, theoretically, after seismic shift in political belief on the issue, it's conceivably possible that maybe Congress could change the law, and so, the Catholic Church just cannot bring itself to support any law that might allow for the possibility that poor women might be able to exercise the same legal right that Catholic school girls enjoy every single day.
Let's let asshat Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sum it up it in the asshatiest way possible:
"We want health care reform very, very much, but we cannot do that over children's dead bodies, to put it most bluntly," he says. "There is a fundamental issue here about whether taking life should be treated the same way as supporting and healing life."Indeed, as we all learned in catechism, Jesus prefers that thousands of people die today for lack of basic health care than to make it possible for even one fetus to be theoretically aborted maybe in the future.
