STIGMATTERS:

The Pro-Choice Crowd Fights Back (Dana Goldstein, 3/23/10, Daily Beast)

The senator’s language, reiterated in an executive order from President Barack Obama that sealed the bill’s final passage in the House, requires women and their employers to write out two monthly checks to insurers, one for abortion coverage and another for all other health services. In a complex accounting requirement that a group of George Washington University researchers predict will eventually discourage insurance companies from providing any abortion coverage at all, the insurers would have to segregate abortion funding from all the new federal subsidy payments they will receive to bring approximately 17 million new customers into the private insurance system. [...]

In a letter to supporters, NARAL President Nancy Keenan said that although the health bill expands access to maternity care and family-planning services, the Nelson language constitutes “an unacceptable bureaucratic stigmatization” that left her “extremely disappointed” and led NARAL to decline to endorse the bill.