Throughout the health care debate of the past year, I pointed out numerous times that if Planned Parenthood and the pro-abortion lobby were happy with the legislation, pro-lifers ought to be very worried.

These pro-abortion organizations energetically resisted the inclusion of the Stupak-Pitts amendment, because they knew it would dry up these funding sources.

But they put up only token resistance to the final Senate bill passed through reconciliation by the House, because they knew that without Stupak-Pitts language it would preserve the funding streams they desired.

And now that President Obama's ink has dried on the legislation, the abortion industry is busy breaking ground. This from Laura Berman at the Detroit News (emphasis mine):

An early sign of health care reform's impact is Planned Parenthood's decision to open a new Oakland County clinic within the next 18 months, adding to 15 locations, including Detroit, Warren and Livonia. Unlike other Detroit area centers, the new location is likely to include abortion services.

[Planned Parenthood President Cecile] Richards and Lori Lamerand, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan, are ramping up for a boom in birth control and other reproductive services -- what Lamerand calls "an onslaught" of women poised to gain new access to reproductive health care.

Make no mistake: "other reproductive services" is always an umbrella euphemism that includes at its core abortion.

I don't know how the situation could be any more clear: Planned Parenthood is now getting new customers (including new abortion customers) because Congress passed health care legislation.

This simple fact appears to be lost on some who consider themselves part of the pro-life movement, but this new evidence will hopefully provide an opportunity to settle this disagreement.

During the Presidential election, pro-lifers and pro-life organizations said that if the nation elected Barack Obama, he would make pro-abortion decisions. Other individuals - even some individuals who said they were pro-life - claimed he would not. But he did, and has, and will. The pro-lifers and pro-life organizations were right. And those few pro-life individuals who said he would not be a pro-abortion President were wrong.

During the health care debate, many of the same individuals lined up on their respective side and argued, this time, that the health care bill would not fund abortions and abortion providers. It certainly would not allow women to pay for abortions with money from other taxpayers, they said.

The correct side of this debate about predicting the outomce of health care passage is the one pointed to by the tangible evidence of new abortion clinics under construction, and by the national president of the largest abortion provider in the country - Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood - directly attributing this expansion of "services" and customers to the passage of health care legislation.

Again, I don't see what is complicated about this. The health care bill, of course, was designed to be complicated in order to hide its true implications, especially its implications for "reproductive health." But simple logic could quickly conclude that, taking into consideration the goals of the pro-abortion lobby, the fact that they were pleased with the development of the bill's language should guarantee that pro-lifers ought to be deeply concerned.

That said, the editors of the Public Discourse have accomplished the important heavy lifting of explaining, piece by piece, the mechanism for how the abortion industry is getting its way with this legislation, whether by a "pinky-swear" (my words) executive order, through community health centers, or the non-extension of the Hyde amendment to the new funding streams established by the law. Read the full exposition here.

(Full disclosure - I am employed by the American Principles Project, a close ally of many who work for the Witherspoon Institute and publish The Public Discourse).

More interesting to me, however, than the "how" of the bill, is the "who" of the bill's defenders. In other words, it's very clear to me - having read the summary written by the editors of the Public Discourse, and having seen the tangible evidence of abortion clinics opening up - that the bill does fund abortions and abortion providers.

But the "who's who" of the bill's defenders - those who have categorically claimed the things will not happen which are happening now before our very eyes - is revealing. After all, the bill won't do any more bad things than what it is already doing (again, see above), but the individuals who defended the bill will continue to do new harms as they obfuscate, back-track, and hope we forget about the claims they have made.

That's why I'm glad the editors of the Public Discourse publicly call-out by name, for instance, the editors at Commonweal and other individuals and groups that inhibited the activities of the pro-life movement to solve the problem of taxpayer-funded abortion while there was still time.

All these individuals and groups, to varying degrees, found themselves on the same side of this debate as the pro-abortion lobby, a fact which one would think would have given them pause. Why did the pro-abortion lobby fear what genuine pro-lifers were doing in terms of activism and amendments, but not fear what "Commonweal Catholics" were arguing for and saying? Quite simply: because the pro-abortion lobby saw no need to dispel the myths of those who they could already count on to be their allies, intentionally or not.

After all this, however, and especially after the ribbon cutting at Planned Parenthood's newest Michigan clinic, it's hard to see how any further agreement between Commonweal Catholics and the legislative priorities of the abortion industry could be unintentional.

Some may say the tone of this piece is harsh, but lives really are on the line in this debate. So pro-lifers may be accused of being harsh when they really mean to be urgent and uncompromising. We believe the lives of the unborn children who will die at this new clinic in Michigan and other places, in the wombs of mothers who are receiving tax-supplemented health credits from a government-run health care exchange, are hanging in the balance.

Cecile Richards, whom I've never heard anyone describe as unintelligent, knows why all this is happening, and says why publicly. The editors of Commonweal and other individuals who said this would not happen might do themselves a favor by listening to her, if they won't bother to read The Public Discourse.

My thanks to the St. Michael Society and Mirror of Justice blog for alerting me to sources for this article.