I've been getting "EMERGENCY ALERT" e-mails from NARAL Pro-Choice America all week, including this one on Saturday:

Heather, late last night we learned that Rep. Bart Stupak has reached new lows in trying to force his abortion-coverage ban into the health-care bill.

He filed a new resolution yesterday and he and his allies are threatening to bring down the whole bill unless they get their way.

Our allies on Capitol Hill are standing strong, and they need you to back them up.

That’s why we need to call on all members of Congress to reject Stupak's outrageous last-minute attempts to hijack health-reform legislation.

Contact your member of Congress immediately.

Our message is clear: No negotiations with Stupak. The House must pass a bill that is not tainted with Stupak-like provisions.

Please take action now and show that we won’t stand for women’s reproductive rights being used as a bargaining chip.

Now, knowing the truly effed-up state of the mainstream feminist/ reproductive rights organizations these days and having both an Internet connection and a couple functioning brain cells, I knew this was crap the minute I read it. The Senate bill includes a provision  introduced by Ben Nelson of Nebraska, which was in some ways more offensive than anything Bart Stupak could think up.

When last seen, the Nelson language would require enrollees in insurance pans that cover abortion -- be they individuals or employers -- to write a seperate check, even if it was just $0.25, that would go into a completely seperate account where it couldn't even touch the clean money of the righteous. (OK, so I added the righteous part. Or would that be "the clean money of the self-righteous"?)

It also eliminated a requirement that at least one plan in any of the health care "exchanges" provide abortion coverage; prohibited insurance companies from taking the cost-saving benefits of abortion versus pregnancy in approving claims, and, just for good measure, removed non-discriminatory language in the form of a "conscience clause" that protects only those who would seek to deny coverage -- not those would would step up and provide women will full reproductive services.

A study by George Washington University this winter found that the Nelson language would have a considerable "spillover effect" on the insurance industry, which, in the face of such restrictions, is likely not to bother providing abortion coverage at all.

But never mind that -- NARAL says we have to help the House pass the bill untainted by "Stupak-like provisions." (Still with me, here?)

And Nancy Pelosi, our pro-choice Joan of Arc, DID NOT COMPROMISE --by compromising.....wait, what?

Pelosi and her leadership team managed to prevent Stupak from bringing the abortion issue to the floor for a seperate vote, which at the very least would have been an embarrassing distraction, and at worst could have swung votes away from the passage of the Senate bill, either by bringing pro-life Dems back to the "no" column or causing pro-choice Dems to walk out in protest.

Instead, they bought Stupak & Company off with the promise of an Executive Order by the President, affirming that the reform bill will be "consistent"  with the nearly 40-year old "Hyde Amendment" prohibition on the use of federal funds for abortion.

(You know, the Hyde Amendment the Democrats have been vowing to kill for the last 30 years. It's in the party platform.)

But surely Barack Obama wouldn't sign off on such a thing? After all, during the 2008 primaries, we Clinton supporters were exhorted to come on over to Barack because he was much more pro-woman and pro-choice that Hillary.

In fact, the Obama campaign assured RHRealitycheck.org that Candidate Obama emphatically did not support the Hyde Amendment. "He believes that the federal government should not use its dollars to intrude on a poor woman's decision whether to carry to term or to terminate her pregnancy and selectively withhold benefits because she seeks to exercise her right of reproductive choice in a manner the government disfavors."

Or, at  least he believed that until it became inconvenient. The White House confirmed yesterday afternoon that the President would sign off on the deal.

There is considerable chatter this morning on what the Executive Order means. The Hyde Amendment isn't a law, it's an item in the budget that has to be voted and approved each year. Theoretically, it's nothing but a symbolic sop.

But the pro-life and pro-choice movements are about 60% legislative and 40% symbolic. Symbolism matters, because the more abortion can be singled out and stigmatized, the easier it is to pass legislation actively restricting it.

We'll spend years debating this law -- what it does, and what it does not do -- but we can say this morning that the pro-life movement got just about everything it could have hoped to get out of this legislative process, and the pro-choice movement just sustained its biggest legislative blow in more than a decade.

A blow delivered by those we elected to protect us..from craven women's rights organizations, right up to the White House.    

And of course, this morning brought me another nice email from NARAL president Nancy Keenan:

Dear Heather,

It is with mixed emotions that I write with news that, tonight, the House of Representatives passed the health-reform bill.

I am extremely disappointed to tell you that the final package includes the insulting, unworkable Nelson restriction on abortion coverage in the new system.

As you may recall, the Nelson language requires Americans in the new system to write two separate checks if the health plan they choose includes abortion coverage. This unacceptable bureaucratic stigmatization could cause insurance carriers to stop covering abortion care. This would represent a major setback, given that more than 85 percent of private plans cover this care for women today.

Despite this totally unacceptable anti-choice provision, reform will bring more than 30 million Americans into a system that includes affordable family-planning services and maternity care for women. It also outlaws some discriminatory insurance-industry practices that make health care more expensive for women. Improving women’s access to birth control and prenatal care and making reproductive-health care more affordable are also at the core of our mission.

Here at NARAL Pro-Choice America, we struggled with the dilemma of how to respond to a bill that included both positive and disappointing provisions for reproductive health. Ultimately, we determined that we could not endorse this bill due to the abortion-coverage restrictions. But, we also could not, in good conscience, call for the bill’s outright defeat and deny millions of American women the promise of better—although imperfect—health-care services that are an important part of our pro-choice values.

That these abortion-coverage restrictions remained in the bill is terrible news for all of us who believe that American women should not have to sacrifice their right to choose in order to gain ground in other areas of health care. It is an outrage that anti-choice politicians such as Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) used women’s reproductive health as a bargaining chip.

But, believe me when I say that Congress and the White House have not heard the last from us. NARAL Pro-Choice America does not accept this bill as the final word on how abortion coverage will be defined in the new health-care system. We are committed to finding opportunities to repeal dangerous and unacceptable restrictions as the new system takes shape.

Thank you for standing with us for so many months. We will keep fighting to elect pro-choice members who share our pro-choice values.