The amendment, offered by anti-choice Reps. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Joe Pitts (R-Penn.), was adopted late tonight by a margin of 240-194.

The Stupak-Pitts amendment makes it virtually impossible for private insurance companies that participate in the new system to offer abortion coverage to women. This would have the effect of denying women the right to use their own personal private funds to purchase an insurance plan with abortion coverage in the new health system — a radical departure from the status quo. Presently, more than 85 percent of private-insurance plans cover abortion services.

“This vote is a reminder to America’s pro-choice majority that, despite our gains in the last two election cycles, anti-choice members of Congress still outnumber our pro-choice allies,” Keenan said. “It is unconscionable that anti-choice lawmakers would use health reform to attack women’s health and privacy, but that’s exactly what happened on the House floor tonight. Even though the bill already included a ban on federal funding for abortion and a requirement that only women’s personal  funds could pay for abortion care, Reps. Stupak and Pitts took their obsession with attacking a woman’s right to choose to a whole new level. We will hold those lawmakers who sided with the extreme Stupak-Pitts amendment accountable for abandoning women and capitulating to the most extreme fringe of the anti-choice movement. In short, the fight is not over. That’s why we will continue to mobilize our activists and work with our allies in Congress to remove this dangerous provision from the health-care bill and stop additional attacks as the process moves to the Senate.”

via House: Yes to Extreme Anti-Choice Politics, No to Women’s Health and Privacy.

Hat Tip: Nikki Whiteley

Added links above that show that both Representatives are members of the secretive organization known as “The Family”.

Also see:

• Meet ‘The Family’ by Anthony Lappé
• All In The Family by Emily Belz and Edward Lee Pitts, WORLD Magazine, August 29, 2009
• Jesus plus nothing: Undercover among America’s secret theocrats by Jeff Sharlet
• The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet

OLIVIER DOULIERY/ABACA PRESS/MCT/NEWSCOM

The Family, which goes by numerous other names such as The Fellowship, is the group behind the National Prayer Breakfast, where President Obama rolled out his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships earlier this year.

AP (April, 2003) : WASHINGTON – Six members of Congress live in a $1.1 million Capitol Hill town house that is subsidized by a secretive religious organization, tax records show.

The lawmakers, all Christians, pay low rent to live in the stately red brick, three-story house on C Street, two blocks from the Capitol. It is maintained by a group alternately known as the “Fellowship” and the “Foundation” and brings together world leaders and elected officials through religion.

The Fellowship hosts receptions, luncheons and prayer meetings on the first two floors of the house, which is registered with the Internal Revenue Service (news – web sites) as a church.

The six lawmakers — Reps. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn.; Bart Stupak, D-Mich.; Jim DeMint, R-S.C.; Mike Doyle, D-Pa.; and Sens. John Ensign, R-Nev. and Sam Brownback, R-Kan. — live in private rooms upstairs.

Rent is $600 a month, DeMint said.

“Our goal is singular — and that is to hope that we can assist them in better understandings of the teachings of Christ, and applying it to their jobs,” said Richard Carver, a member of the Fellowship’s board of directors who served as an assistant secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan administration.

The house, valued at $1.1 million, is owned by the C Street Center, a sister organization of the Fellowship. It received more than $145,000 in Fellowship grants between 1997 and 2000, according to IRS records — including $96,400 in 1998 for reducing debt.

Its tenants dine together once a week to discuss religion in their daily lives.

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