An article by Kathleen Seelye in today’s New York Times titled “In Congress, a Predicament for Abortion Supporters,” can now be added to the growing list of media analyses that fail to accurately portray the implications of the Stupak amendment should it become law.

In fact, the article misrepresents issues that were far more accurately covered in the Times own editorial on this issue a week ago.

Seelye gets the issues wrong from the get-go by framing it as a fight about federal subsidies.

This is wrong. As NPR pointed out this weekend, this is not really about federal subsidies and abortion. It is about a far larger and wider-reaching issue: insurance coverage of abortion per se. Including the purchase of insurance policies with private dollars…in essence your fundamental right to choose your own insurance coverage. NPR correctly noted:

The ultimate impact of the House abortion amendment could be to change abortion from being a procedure routinely covered by most private insurance plans to a procedure routinely excluded – even in cases of medical emergency. [italics added].

For example, Seelye’s article states the following:

The House measure would block insurance companies from selling abortion coverage to anyone who receives a federal subsidy when they buy insurance through the exchanges, or marketplaces, that would be set up for individuals and small businesses. It would also ban abortion coverage for anyone who gets her insurance through a government-run insurance plan.

Most Americans get their insurance through their employers, and it typically covers abortions, so they would not be affected by the legislation’s abortion provision, for now. But because the bill envisions eventually expanding the insurance exchange to include larger employers, the number of women barred from getting insurance for abortion coverage could gradually grow.

This seriously mistates the immediate effects of the Stupak amendment on women’s rights to insurance coverage for legal procedures in the United States.

Every expert on this issue and virtually every Congressperson–barring those who are part of the “old boy’s got-religion club” out there trying to “sell” the amendment as being “benign”–agrees that it goes far beyond those who receive federal subsidies and will immediately effect a large pool of self-insured people as well as those who are working in or for small businesses.

Indeed, the Stupak amendment constitutes an effective ban on abortion coverage in the entire insurance exchange because it is applied to entire plans, not individuals. As such, it also affects those who do not receive any federal government subsidies and anyone who uses their own money to buy insurance. Moreover, in discussing the effects on individuals and eventually larger businesses, it omits the more immediate effects of banning insurance coverage offered by small business as these enter the exchange to save on insurance rates. More people in the United States are employed by small businesses than by large companies, so the immediate effects on both individuals and businesses of the ban on insurance coverage for abortion care is immediate and wide-ranging.

By contrast, the Times editorial had it right when it explained:

The restrictions would fall on women eligible to buy coverage on new health insurance exchanges. They are a sharp departure from current practice, an infringement of a woman’s right to get a legal medical procedure and an unjustified intrusion by Congress into decisions best made by patients and doctors.

The anti-abortion Democrats behind this coup insisted that they were simply adhering to the so-called Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal dollars to pay for almost all abortions in a number of government programs. In fact, they reached far beyond Hyde and made it largely impossible to use a policyholder’s own dollars to pay for abortion coverage.

If insurers want to attract subsidized customers, who will be the great majority on the exchange, they will have to offer them plans that don’t cover abortions. It is theoretically possible that insurers could offer plans aimed only at nonsubsidized customers, but it is highly uncertain that they will find it worthwhile to do so.

In that case, some women who have coverage for abortion services through policies bought by small employers could actually lose that coverage if their employer decides to transfer its workers to the exchange. Ultimately, if larger employers are permitted to make use of the exchange, ever larger numbers of women might lose abortion coverage that they now have.

The Seelye article also misuses a Guttmacher Institute statistic on the extent of insurance coverage for abortion.

It states:

For now, the number of those who rely on insurance to pay for an abortion seems relatively small.

The Guttmacher Institute says that of the 1.2 million abortions among American women each year, about 13 percent — 156,000 — are directly billed to their insurers. Most women pay out of pocket, at least initially; an unknown number are reimbursed by their insurers after the fact.

But Guttmacher itself points out that the 13 percent figure is misleading. Guttmacher states:

Our study included all women who obtained abortions in 2001, including women on Medicaid and those who are uninsured. If one looked only at privately insured women, the percentage of procedures billed directly to insurance companies would be substantially higher than 13%. [emphasis added].

Perhaps even more importantly, the 13% statistic does not include women who pay for an abortion up front and then seek reimbursement from their insurance provider [emphasis added]. This is common when a medical provider does not participate in a patient’s insurance plan, as is often the case with small, specialized providers, including abortion providers.

The article also fails to address the growing anger and backlash on this issues among women voters throughout the country.

As Rachel Maddow said on Meet the Press, if this isn’t fixed, women are going to sit on their hands in the 2010 elections. There also is mounting backlash against the Catholic Bishops and other “faith-based groups” who’ve sought to impose their own ideologies on women using legal means.

Early warning signs are evident right now in the Massachusetts Senate special election. The candidates there are trying to get on the right side of this issue, to garner women voters support.

We are already seeing backlash against the Bishops for hijacking the health care bill for their ideological purposes. These concerns have been amplified as it becomes clear that the Bishops have a serious financial stake in removing both reproductive health care of various kinds (sterilization, abortion, contraception, fertility treatments) as well as “end-of-life” care from the playing field on which Catholic hospitals and institutions have to compete with secular health care insitutionts for clients and patients. By removing this competition, the Catholic hospitals can corner a larger and larger share of the trillions of dollars to be spent on health care in the coming years. See Wendy Norris’ article on this issue for Rewire.

The only way they can do this is to remove women’s rights to make fundamental decisions about their reproductive and sexual lives, and make US law consistent with fundamentalist Catholic and Evangelical doctrine, public health be damned, so to speak.