"America, America, God shed His grace on thee."

Many demoralized souls felt over recent months that this famous appeal in "America the Beautiful" had been falling on deaf ears.

But we've had a miracle. The socialized medicine freight train, chugging down the track with seeming insurmountable inevitability, has been, for the moment, derailed.

And, miraculously, the derailment has occurred because of values as well as economics.

Conservative Democrats have parted company with their liberal colleagues because the health care legislation in process will bust our federal budget and deliver new federal abortion funding.

Subsidized health care delivered through a proposed government insurance plan would inevitably mean abortion funding in the standard benefits package. The only way around this would be explicit language to prohibit it.

Attempts by Republicans in three House committees to insert such language were defeated, despite a handful of conservative Democrats joining them.

Now a broad coalition of pro-life organizations has initiated a campaign to fight any health care legislation permitting new government abortion funding.

President Obama has called this an attempt to "micromanage" health care benefits. Planned Parenthood has echoed these sentiments.

Is the concern of these pro-life groups legitimate? You bet it is.

Pro-abortion forces have been forever calling abortion health care. Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider, defines its business as providing "reproductive health care."

Or consider our president's thinking.

Then Senator Obama stated his disagreement with the Supreme Court decision banning partial birth abortion because it "departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women."

Partial birth abortion is a procedure in which a doctor kills an infant near birth by smashing its skull and sucking out its brains. The Supreme Court acted in 2007, thank God, to make this illegal. The decision permits the procedure if the life of the mother is danger.

Yet this is unacceptable to our president. He wants vaguely defined health considerations, beyond the question of the life of the mother, to permit what is essentially murder. Continued...