Students Campaign Against Stupak Amendment

Several Harvard undergraduates held signs outside the Holyoke Center yesterday afternoon, trying to coax fellow students and Cambridge residents to call their congressmen and encourage them to vote against the Stupak Amendment.

The amendment, tacked onto the House Health Care Bill, would deny abortion health care coverage to women receiving care under the public option or any federally-subsidized private plans.

Convincing more than 20 passersby to call congressmen, the half-dozen volunteers represented the Students Against Stupak, a subsidiary of campus organization Students for Choice. They handed out free condoms and coupons to J.P. Licks as incentives to boost what rally organizers said was a national effort to flood representatives with calls to kill the amendment to the House Health Care bill.

“If the Health Care bill were to pass with this amendment, the result would be a women’s health care crisis,” said Leah Reis-Dennis ’13, who led the call-in initiative.

“Anti-choice people tend to call their political representatives very frequently, and I think that pro-choice people sometimes get complacent,” Reis-Dennis added.

Michele S. Zemplenyi ’13, a Washington state native and one of the students who called in, said she was motivated to phone her representative by her belief “that there’s no reason that a woman in the free world should be denied abortion coverage.”

Reis-Dennis said that the national goal was for each college campus to promise 50 calls to congress.

Local residents joined in the effort to call congressmen, sometimes borrowing students’ cell phones.

“Any issue that energizes students to interact constructively with the people who live in Cambridge and therefore step out of the ‘Harvard bubble’ must be pretty special,” Elizabeth J. Newton ’11 said.

If the Stupak Amendment were to pass Congress, the existing House Health Care Bill would only cover abortions in the instances of rape, incest, or potential harm to the life of the mother.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch is also planning to introduce an equally stringent amendment to the Senate bill.

“Our efforts won’t end after this [call-in],” Reis-Dennis said. “This is only one element of a much larger and continued effort to make sure that the Stupak and any other similarly-worded amendment doesn’t pass. Women deserve coverage for abortion.”