This weekend, the House passed Speaker Pelosi's Health Care Reform bill along with the most damaging attack on abortion access since before Roe v. Wade. The "Stupak Attack" on abortion coverage stomps on a compromise that already kept tax dollars from funding abortions and went further by preventing most insurance plans from covering abortion.

Right now, almost all middle-class women who have private insurance through their employer receive a government subsidy. The Stupak Attack bans subsidies that pay for "any part" of a policy that includes abortion coverage. Essentially, if the current Health Care Reform bill passes Congress, women will not have insurance coverage for abortion.

Why is this important? Because if women can't have coverage for abortions, then many women will not have access to safe, legal abortion as an option.

This, of course, has very real implications. No access to safe, legal abortion leads to either unsafe, illegal abortions or an increase in unwanted pregnancies being carried to term leading to girls and women becoming unprepared mothers.

Now the Health Care Reform legislation moves to the Senate, where Pro-Choice legislators have a second chance to remove the Stupak Attack. Anti-choice activists, urged on by the Conference of Catholic Bishops, are fighting hard to keep the new language in place.

If the Senate does not remove the Stupak Attack, then coverage for abortions will effectively end. In order for a woman to have abortion covered after the Stupak Attack takes effect, she would have to sign up for a special, separate insurance plan that costs her, or her employer more money. This assumes she anticipates needing an abortion long before she needs one - at the time she talks to her employer's Human Resources about insurance.

• Would you ask your H.R. personnel for extra abortion coverage?
• Do you want Health Care Reform to be passed at the expense of the strictest limitation on abortion since before Roe v. Wade?
• Should improving Health Care include driving women to unsafe, illegal abortions?

These are the questions we should be asking our senators this week.

Rachel Maddow covered the topic in the following clip:

Planned Parenthood Federation of America's President Cecile Richards on Hardball after the jump.

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