Last week, the debate over the Democratic health reform effort took a brief and unexpected philosophical turn. Bart Stupak, a pro-labor Catholic Democrat representing Michigan's 1st congressional district, managed to pass the Stupak amendment as part of the House health bill. Sensing that an insurrection among anti-abortion Democrats threatened to derail the legislation, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who ardently opposes restrictions on abortion, allowed Stupak to offer the amendment, and it passed by a wide margin thanks to Republican votes.

The amendment places restrictions on the abortion coverage offered by insurance plans subsidized through the new national insurance exchange, including the proposed government-run insurance plan. Stupak's basic argument is that taxpayers should not be forced to fund a practice they consider morally objectionable. But how far should this principle extend?

In an interview with The Atlantic's Chris Good, Stupak has characterized his amendment as an extension of the 1976 Hyde amendment, which bans public funding for abortion. Insurers would be allowed to sell unsubsidized supplementary abortion coverage. With that in mind, Stupak's critics have suggested that there is something deeply inegalitarian about the amendment. While subsidized plans offered through the exchange can't offer abortion coverage, private plans purchased by employers can. In effect, the rich will have more access to abortion coverage than the poor, just as they have more access to high-quality schools, homes and vacations.

Part of what's going on underneath the surface is that the abortion debate goes beyond "pro-life" and "pro-choice." Among self-described "pro-choice" voters, there are two broad factions, which you might call the pro-choice right and the pro-choice left. The pro-choice right resents state interference in private life. Many of its members object to abortion on moral grounds, yet oppose abortion restrictions because they believe that the state should remain at arm's-length. The pro-choice left, in contrast, believes that the freedom to have an abortion is meaningless if one can't afford the procedure, and so abortion access should be subsidized.

In his book Bearing Right, Willam Saletan described the political ascendancy of the pro-choice right in the 1980s and 1990s. But the pro-choice left is experiencing a rebirth within the Democratic coalition. Rather than see the Stupak amendment as a concession to deep moral disagreement over abortion, the pro-choice left sees it as an assault on the freedom of poor women. Which of these positions is truly liberal? The answer is by no means obvious.

Abortion, lest we forget, isn't the only morally contentious issue. During the 1990s, Gerald Solomon, a conservative Republican from Upstate New York, successfully sponsored legislation that restricts federal funding to universities that bar access to military recruiters. After the Republican Congress strengthened the Solomon amendment in 2001, a number of elite law schools joined together to challenge it on constitutional grounds, a challenge that ultimately failed. The law schools opposed the Solomon amendment in large part because they objected to the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which effectively bars lesbians and gay men from serving openly in the military.

Opponents of the Solomon amendment believed that it compelled them to endorse a policy they found repugnant, just as Stupak and others feared that the House health bill would, in unamended form, compel them to subsidize abortions. Granted, the Solomon amendment allowed universities that receive no federal funding to go their own way, just as the Stupak amendment allows unsubsidized private insurance plans to offer abortion coverage. So there is no logical reason one can't be both pro-Solomon and pro-Stupak, the stance embraced by most congressional conservatives. But there is an undeniable tension here.

One could argue that the truly liberal position would be anti-Solomon and pro-Stupak, a position that would consistently defend the interests of dissenting minorities. What would happen if we took this instinct seriously? One obvious answer is that we'd have to move towards a far more decentralized government, in which the most morally polarizing questions are handled at the state and local level. Or, if we chose to retain a large government on egalitarian grounds, we could give individuals far more freedom in deciding how their tax dollars are spent by, for example, redirecting all federal education funds to personal educational spending accounts that could go to a wide range of goods and services, ranging from Bible Study to Chinese language tutoring to advanced archery classes.

And while members of the pro-choice left might consider this a deeply unattractive world, consider that a government that was more respectful of moral disagreement would also be more reluctant to use the death penalty or wage war. If opponents of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan were allowed to withhold their tax dollars from the Pentagon, it's hard to imagine that the military-industrial complex would have ever reached its present size.

It should go without saying that this approach to government would be difficult if not impossible to implement, and even Bart Stupak is not a partisan of what one might call Stupakism. But it has an undeniable appeal, particularly for those who often find themselves politically outnumbered.