That’s 20,000 real people with minds, memories, families, hopes, and dreams. People who can feel pain, people who know as they die that it didn’t have to happen. The hook for the lie that federal money will pay for abortion is the fact that by subsidizing health insurance purchases for those who can’t afford it, and by not forcing insurance companies to deprive women of their pre-existing abortion coverage, that’s a subsidy of abortion. In addition, there’s the possibility that a public option that would be available for individual purchase would cover abortion.
In the former case, the claims are without merit. Imagine a woman who works for the federal government and receives a paycheck. If she then gets an abortion, that’s with “federal” money, but few would be dopey enough to claim that’s an overturn of the Hyde Amendment. If they did make that claim, we’d be right to believe that they’re mostly objecting to the idea that a woman can draw a paycheck. Similarly, I’m forced to believe that people who object to the government giving people money who then use a tiny percentage of it for abortion are mainly objecting to giving people money to pay for health insurance. Which brings us back to the unnecessary deaths of 20,000 people a year, and is thus the opposite of “pro-life”. With the public option, we have a similar situation. People will be buying it with their own money, and thus the taxpayer isn’t paying for any procedure. The public option members are. It’s as simple as that.
What all this fact-checking and being rational obscures, however, is the larger moral question of whether or not the federal government should use federal money to directly pay for abortion, which would mean subsidizing that service at places like Planned Parenthood or covering abortion for Medicaid/Medicare recipients, as well as federal employees. And of course the federal government should pay for abortion. Creating entire classes of female citizens who are officially penalized for being sexually active is straight up discrimination. And in this case, doing the right thing is better for all involved. A female soldier who realizes, when she gets pregnant, that she’s better off ending a bad relationship and getting an abortion will be a better soldier than one who’s always caught up with relationship woes because she thought she had no other choice but to marry when pregnant. A Medicaid recipient who decides that she’s not going to have this baby, but instead get vocational training so she can get a better-paying job benefits herself and the taxpayer. If you think of women as human beings with lives and jobs, instead of as the fleshy stuff surrounding the sex organs, it’s easy enough to see why we need to support choices that are already made.
Sure, sure, you have moral objections to abortion and don’t want to see your tax money go to it. I have moral objections to you and your ideology, but I wouldn’t say that you shouldn’t receive Medicaid should you need it. The emptiness of this argument makes sense if you take a millisecond to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. I object to using federal money to kill men, women, girls, boys, and fetuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no one’s taking my moral objections seriously, presumably because I don’t stay up at night worrying about the condition of the hymens of America.
What makes the anti-choice freak out over health care reform so funny is that it’s grade A hypocrisy, not that we’d expect any less. If you really object to abortion itself because you value fetal life, then you should be the first in line demanding massive health care reform. Forty-sex percent of women who have abortions weren’t using any kind of contraception at all when they became pregnant, and of the rest, a significant portion were inconsistent in their contraception use. It’s not a coincidence, I suspect, that Western European nations that have universal health care and have normalized the idea of health care for all also see much higher rates of consistent contraception use, and therefore lower abortion rates.
If you visit places like England or France, you see how much more normal it is for everyone to receive regular health care, and it’s not hard to see how you make the leap to using regular contraception. Anyone who really is sincere about fetal life should want that reduction in the abortion rate. In addition, you’d think that people who loves fetuses so much could love them enough after they’re born to be ashamed that the U.S. has a shamefully high infant mortality rate, one that’s linked with low incomes (and lack of regular health care access), to no one’s great surprise.
But as we well know when dealing with the anti-choice movement, when given a choice between preventing abortion and punishing women for sexual activity, they’ll choose the latter every time. Universal health care will most likely lower the abortion rate, but it will likely increase the use of effective contraception techniques, as well as STD screening, HPV vaccinations, and regular Pap smears, all of which reduce the “consequences”---some fatal---of being a woman who has sex. Since female sexuality is the real offense, anti-choicers are predictably protesting a potential reduction in abortions that would have the concurrent benefit of making it safer to be a normal woman. But the rest of us shouldn’t be fooled---if you love life and you love women, then the only sane choice is universal health coverage, one that covers all necessary health care, and yes, that does include contraception and safe abortion.
