Whether it's a flub or not, it won't be interpreted as one

MJ says:

In December, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was struggling to convince all 60 members of the Democratic caucus to vote to break a filibuster of the bill. … In a rush to appease [liberals], moderate Democrats agreed to back … expan[sion of] the reach of community health centers, which have provided low-cost health care to people in underserved areas since the 1960s. And they wanted the health care bill to commit $7 billion for these health centers. The moderates agreed, and new language was hurriedly added to the Senate bill.

"This is all stuff that was inserted late at night and they were trying to reach a final agreement" on the bill, says Timothy Jost, a professor and health law expert at the Washington and Lee University School of Law. Unfortunately, no one remembered to write in an explicit provision explaining that this $7 billion in spending for the health care centers would be subject to all the usual restrictions on how federal money is spent. One of those restrictions, the so-called Hyde Amendment, prohibits most federal funding for abortions. (Abortion has been a key point of contention in the health care reform debate on another front: whether consumers who purchase private insurance plans with the help of government subsidies can obtain plans that cover abortion.)

Other, similar parts of the Senate bill do include the explicit restriction. A provision providing funding for the Indian Health Service, for instance, notes: "Any limitation pursuant to other Federal laws on the use of Federal funds appropriated to the Service shall apply with respect to the performance or coverage of abortions." A section appropriating money for school-based health centers says the funds "may not be used to provide abortions." That's the sort of sentence that should have been added to the community health center section—but it wasn't.

Yes, and what happens when such laws are litigated? "'[W]here Congress includes particular language in one section of a statute but omits it in another section of the same Act, it is generally presumed that Congress acts intentionally and purposely in the disparate inclusion or exclusion.'" Russello v. United States, 464 U.S. 16, 23 (1983) (alteration in original) (quoting United States v. Wong Kim Bo, 472 F.2d 720, 722 (5th Cir. 1972)). If it was a goof, fix it. Otherwise own up to the consequences. And either way, stop with the disingenuous bleating that the bill is "neutral" on abortion; if that were true, you would have no objection to putting in language that explicitly made it what you claim it implicitly already is.