It all depends on what the meaning of the word “innocent” is…

Today, the Senate Appropriations Committee adopted an amendment to the FY 2012 State Department and foreign operations appropriations bill that, if signed into law, would block re-imposition of the Global Gag Rule. The amendment was introduced by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), and would prohibit future Presidents from using executive orders to refuse funding to a foreign organization solely because of the legal medical services it provides; the information, counseling, and referrals it offers; or the advocacy it engages in with its own government—using its own non-U.S. funds.

I’ve spent much of the past twenty-four hours dealing with local Democratic Party functionaries who were trying to shout me and a few other folks down over this issue. Instead of wasting time trying to get people like me to say that the yellow liquid being trickled on us all is just rain and not urine, they would be better served trying to figure out how they can convince the vast apolitical majority of Americans to get into the voting booth — you know, the people who don’t follow the politics of Supreme Court justices but care mightily about their pensions — without being able to honestly deploy the “we’ll save Medicare and Medicaid” hole card.

It’s a shocking historical juxtaposition. The pro-democracy movement known as the Arab Spring is in significant part a consequence of rising literacy and declining birth rates in the Mideast. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Right is mounting a direct assault on education and a renewed war on contraception. This ought to tell us something.

At the end of the health care debate, when Obama was desperate to get the final bill passed in the House, he agreed to make a deal with Bart Stupak (D-MI) on the issue of abortion, by offering an executive order that restricted the availability of insurance coverage for reproductive health. The right to abortion for many in need was traded away as a bargaining chip to get that final bill passed.

Last week, as part of the negotiations to get a budget for the rest of fiscal year 2011, President Obama again decided to use abortion rights as a bargaining chip to secure a final deal

Another step towards smaller, less intrusive government, courtesy of the libertarian-minded teabagger-dominated House majority: Internal Revenue Service agents will be required to determine whether your abortion was paid for with tax dollars. Even more horrifying, income tax return filing forms may need to ask if you’d had an abortion and how you paid for it.

Think the it’s-not-rape-unless-there’s-screaming “No Taxpayer Money For Abortion Act” is bad? Check out the GOP’s Orwellian “Protect Life Act.”

I would eagerly read anything written by Linda Greenhouse or Reva Siegel on the subject of abortion (or just about any topic). This dynamic duo brings to Before Roe v. Wade decades of careful study and scholarship.

Greenhouse is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who set the industry standard for Supreme Court coverage in thirty years with the New York Times (as well as author of Becoming Justice Blackmun, about Roe’s author). Siegel, a Yale Law professor, is a – to my mind, the – leading legal academic writing on abortion, from her 1992 Stanford article, Reasoning from the Body, to recent work including the shift from fetal-protective to woman-protective arguments against legal abortion.

I know that candidates are playing to the gender gap, needing a big turnout among women to save their seats. But this is a strange message post-Stupak. Abortion rights are basically on the brink, and a Democratic majority didn’t exactly help that in the current Congress.

In the first trimester, we were introduced to the Stupak Amendment. Now, in the second trimester of healthcare reform, access to abortion gets an even bigger setback.

Written by Rebecca Sive for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.