The House Energy and Commerce Committee, for example, included the Capps Amendment, under which private insurers would not use federal money to pay for abortion, but nor would these private insurers be required to drop abortion coverage they now offer. Bills coming from the other House committees and the Senate have similar language. In addition, the Capps Amendment has a gimme for anti-choicers---each state exchange would be required to offer abortion hysterics at least one plan that doesn’t cover abortion (so they won’t be tempted, I suppose). This represents an improvement for Fetus People everywhere, as most of them currently are paying into insurance systems that cover abortion, though probably most don’t realize it. After all, even for the most diehard anti-choicers, abortion seems only to matter when it can be used as a cudgel for a larger right wing agenda.
In order to maintain an abortion neutral stance, the Capps Amendment would require that insurance companies bookmark all money coming in from federal subsidies as non-abortion money, and only pay for abortions out of privately paid premiums. Since this would require further bookkeeping, I was concerned that insurance companies would simply forgo covering abortion, rather than pay to keep track of what money they can and can’t use to cover abortion. But I contacted the National Partnership for Women and Families, who has been doing the hard work of keeping track of all the complicated details of the various bills and their potential effects, and they pointed out that the Capps Amendment requires there to be at least one insurance company that does provide abortion and one that doesn’t in each state exchange, and this creates an incentive for insurance companies who already cover abortion to keep doing so. (However, this provides no more than incentive---the amendment doesn’t give the government power to require that any one company does provide abortion coverage.) That, and insurance companies are used to endlessly complex bookkeeping, so adding one more requirement separating this pool of money from that wouldn’t be too difficult for them.
All of this hard work on creating an abortion neutral stance might be for naught, however, as some (invariably male) members of Congress are promising to fight for abortion restrictions to be injected in the bill during the debate process. The House Rules Committee could put a stop to such amendments, so the greatest danger lies in the Senate, where Orrin Hatch has indicated he will try to amend the bill so that it prevents any insurance company in the system from covering abortion, no matter whose money they use to fund it.
If he succeeds, this would strip abortion coverage from millions of American women who currently have that coverage under private insurance. To make things worse, I have no doubt that such a victory would do nothing to satiate those who are screaming about how health care reform will turn the nation’s women into a sea of hussydom; they will simply move onto to protesting contraception coverage in the bill. And since they’ve got no problem lying about what’s in the bill now---see again rumors about abortion clinics being established in schools---stringent bans on abortion funding will not keep the right wing rumor mill from churning out stories about how health care reform means federal funding for abortion. For pro-choice congresspersons tempted to give in on abortion to move this thing forward, please remember this: Our opposition isn’t constrained by the truth, and they’ll happily keep spreading misinformation about abortion funding if that’s what it takes to keep the protesters active and pressure high to kill health care reform altogether.
Right now, an amendment that would require insurance companies to drop coverage for abortion looks unlikely. A coalition of 40 anti-choice House Democrats, led by Rep. Bart Stupak, are making factually incorrect claims about the Capps Amendment and abortion subsidies, in order to push for a bill that would strip women of already-existing abortion coverage. Stupak has threatened that a bill without a ban on abortion coverage would be voted down by this contingent of badly-informed anti-choice Democrats, but in reality, this seems unlikely. There might be a few Democrats willing to destroy health care coverage in order to force unwilling women to give birth, but at the end of the day, I’m sure most of them aren’t looking forward to being held accountable for stopping legislation that would relieve the voting public of many of their health care woes.
Anyone who uses abortion as a weapon to stall or kill health care reform should be ashamed to use such a feel-good term as “pro-life” to describe themselves. The only people demonstrating respect for life in this debate are the people who want to pass health care reform that will save actual human lives. The willingness of so many anti-choicers to subject the public at large to escalating health care costs and lack of coverage in order to send a dogma-inspired message of disapproval for citizens’ private sexual choices should make it clear that they’re far from being anything even resembling “pro-life.” After all, if you were really such a fan of life, you would put life and the saving of it before petty, reactionary attitudes about sex and gender roles that inspire all this anxiety over abortion. It’s time for our representatives to stop pandering to the public’s impulse to lay sexual judgments, and start doing their job of protecting the public’s actual interests. And right now, we the people need better health care coverage. Â
