Tyler Bilbo, Staff Writer
Ideology: Yellow Dog Democrat | Writing From: Georgetown University
If you had told me a few months ago that the passage of health care reform would ultimately come down to the divisive issue of abortion, I would have called you crazy. Yet that is exactly what happened in the House of Representatives with the passage of an amendment that drastically undermines Roe vs. Wade.
The Stupak-Pitts Amendment is a despicable affront to a woman’s reproductive freedom that effectively prevents lower income women from getting an abortion. Of course, I speak only of safe procedures that are thankfully legal.
Recently out of college with a promising future ahead of her, Marie Johnstone found out she was pregnant in the mid-1950s. The father of her baby was an older man with whom she had no intention of marrying. Unlike today’s women, Marie could not choose to undergo a safe abortion. After she obtained enough money from her baby’s father, she delved into the underground world of abortion and found a man who performed the incredibly unsafe procedure in an isolated carport. Marie was one of the lucky ones. While she bled profusely for days, she did not die or sustain any permanent physical damage.
The same could not be said of a tragic number of Marie’s contemporaries. Marie’s abortion was one of at least 200,000 illegal abortions that occurred in the 1950s (200,000 is the conservative estimate. Some experts say that number is closer to 1.2 million). Within that same period, between 160 and 260 women died from unsafe abortions while thousands sustained life-threatening injuries. Everyone, even those who equate abortion with premeditated murder, should feel disgusted when they hear about the consequences of unsafe abortions.
The Stupak-Pitts Amendment re-creates the kind of society that brought Marie into that carport in the early 1950s. The Affordable Health Care for America Act that passed the House by a vote of 220-215 establishes a central health insurance exchange that attempts to make our chaotic health care market more efficient. The exchange is structured so that it covers lower and middle income Americans who will almost certainly require access to government-issued affordability credits. The Stupak-Pitts Amendment effectively prevents women who participate in this exchange from accessing an insurance plan that covers abortion, even women who pay out of pocket through the private portion of their health care premium.
How do Congressmen Bart Stupak and Joe Pitts get away with a piece of legislation that effectively bans a legal procedure? They claim that a provision that allows women to purchase a separate insurance policy, known as a “rider” in the bill, sufficiently covers abortion. The abortion rider would supplement a woman’s primary health care plan and would function as an additional insurance policy and an unnecessary financial burden.
The establishment of an abortion rider is based on a naïve and insulting notion that women plan for an abortion. Unexpected pregnancies are exactly what they are: unexpected. Stupak and Pitts are either incapable of understanding this reality or they harbor the ugliest and most sexist notions about female promiscuity.
Proponents of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment have tried to frame the legislation as nothing more than an additional assurance that the Hyde Amendment will be applied to health care reform. The Stupak Amendment, however, goes far beyond the scope of Hyde. While Hyde restricts the direct appropriation of funds to pay for abortions through the annual budget for the Department of Health and Human Services, the Stupak Pitts Amendment would prevent a woman from accessing an abortion through her own private insurer.
I urge Bart Stupak and other anti-abortion politicians to advance legislation that does not exclusively target the lower and moderate income women that would participate in a health insurance exchange. Severing access to a safe procedure for non-affluent women would further exacerbate our country’s unjust delivery of health care and I pray that the Stupak-Pitts Amendment is omitted from a final health care bill.
There are many things wrong with your arguments. First of all, nobody should be *entitled* to an abortion. If people could have the government pay for first-term abortions, who would wear condoms? There are so many low-cost preventative measures and even many low-cost CONTINGENCY measures (morning after pill) that to say that this will effectively turn the clock back 60 years is ridiculous. Next you’ll say that since black people typically are poorer, this provision is also racist.
Now, that said, I AM pro-choice, because sometimes shit happens. First-term abortions should be legal, because it’s really not alive at that point. But half of America doesn’t want their tax dollars going to fund abortions.
The health care bill is ALREADY a 2000 page monster. Frankly, I have no idea why we’re trying to reform it when the rest of our economy is in the toilet (I guess the Dems want to get their agenda approved while they still have a filibuster-proof majority), and not when it has recovered somewhat.
And I really wouldn’t worry about the “can’t even get it covered by a PRIVATE insurer” part. I’m fairly confident that the insurance lobby will bribe the right people and that part will be taken out.
John:
You say that “half of America doesn’t want their tax dollars going to fund abortions.”
Well, I don’t want my tax dollars going towards the war in Iraq or capital punishment. But guess what?! My tax dollars do get used for those purposes. People can’t pick and choose what their tax dollars go towards, therefore that argument isn’t valid. I’m sick of people trying to bring it up.
It was either the health care bill with the Stupak Amendment or no health care bill. Which would you rather have?
There are some issues that the left(House Democrats) knows will cause the right to go ballistic: Stupak amendment was deliberately included to start an irrelevant controversy. The fact is, Demos don’t give a rat’s a– about how many or what kind of dead babies they leave behind, they just want to cause a stir, a diversion, to deflect criticism away from their miscarriage of a bill.
For them it’s not about the abortion, the dead fetus in the pan, so to speak. It’s about the POLITICS of the dead baby in the pan.
While everybody acts crazy about abortion, pro-abortion, pro-life alike, they forget about the indispensible tool that preceded all of this and always provided the social grace, remember…adoption!? But with the left, it’s more fun to politicize the issue, than to speed to the correct answer.
“Stupack” reverse-rhymes with “stupid.”
Recently out of college with a promising future ahead of her, Marie Johnstone found out she was pregnant in the mid-1950s. The father of her baby was an older man with whom she had no intention of marrying.
Stop right there. Maybe, just maybe, she shouldn’t have been sleeping with a man she had no intention of marrying…did you think of that part?
Have you seen this petition (http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/send_a_coathanger/)?
I have already signed.
Frankly this is such an insidious move. I can at least appreciate honesty of the anti-choice movement — they want to ban abortion. That’s what they say and that’s what they mean. But to include a measure that systematically targets low income women — women who are the likeliest to need an abortion is above and beyond the ‘usual unusual’
It’s nothing short of barbaric.
My apologies for the broken link — I do wish I could edit it. Here’s the proper link:
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/send_a_coathanger/
Amanda C your argument has one major hole. National security and justice are public goods. Abortion is a private good. Although I am anti-war and anti-death penalty I can’t see your point comparing the two.
To further drive home what Om said:
Abortion is different, it’s a private medical procedure. War and the death penalty (which I am against) are called state-interests. The state supposedly has a clear interest in conducting both defense of itself, and the execution of those deemed a threat to society.
The same cannot be said of abortion. It is a private procedure that is paid for by the woman looking to get one.
I’m against the death penalty, but I’d never be in a position where I’d have to somehow be seeking to get one, or privately paying for one.
Pro-choicers like to say that abortion is “between a woman and her doctor”. Never “a woman, her doctor, congress and the tax payers”
Let’s keep it that way.
JohnH,
You assert that “nobody should be *entitled* to an abortion.” This bill establishes the wealthy as the only members of society that can afford reproductive care. Stupak-Pitts enshrines this sense of entitlement into the law.
Kelly,
I’m overwhelmed by your capacity to empathize with other women. But really, more sanctimonious moralizing about the virtues of personal responsibility? Are you so detached from reality that you cannot understand how this mindset exacerbates our country’s abortion problem via abstinence only education, etc? Get off your high horse and enter reality. Just like the woman who ventures into a back-alley with a coat hanger in hand, you are not perfect and nobody, absolutely nobody, deserves to die for their imperfections.
The Stupak Amendment clearly shows that the pro life caucus is the majority in the United States Congress, even with a large Democratic majority. It also shows how many Democrats are serving socially conservative, Republican leaning districts at the moment.
The amendment itself is one that does not belong in the bill, though. The same government that ensures a woman’s right to choose should be ensuring the woman’s right to choose also in its health care reform bill. I don’t think the issue here is whether you are pro life or pro choice, but whether this is clearly impeding on past precedents set on abortion by the same Congress.
On a political note, the Democrats will feel the rebuttal of taking the Stupak Amendment out of the bill. They’ve depended on millions of pro-life voters to elect them to majorities in the Congress, and they should try to keep those voters as part of their “big tent”.
It’s quite saddening that possibly the most polarizing part of this process may be the Stupak Amendment, and how it will effect not only the bill, but the jobs of the people who are voting on this bill (in the House and and in the Senate). We need to find common ground, and discuss the most important parts of the bill.