Mermaid Musings

So much for repenting away abortion: the US Dept. of Health and Human Services is now considering regulations to ensure that health care services and organizations cannot “discriminate” against care providers who refuse to dispense birth control or perform abortions for “reasons of conscience.” (see NYTimes article)

If that in itself wasn’t bad enough, the new regulations go so far as to define abortion as:

“any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”

This definition would effectively codify the belief that life begins at conception and open the way for restricting access to many of the most popular forms of birth control, including all hormonal methods, the IUD and, the already controversial, emergency contraception.

In addition to protecting anti-abortion health care providers from discrimination, the regulations would also restrict funding to any agency that has a policy of providing contraceptive or abortion services. In other words, hospitals that require doctors to offer emergency contraception to victims of rape could no longer receive federal funding unless they changed their policy.

There are so, so many problems with this new proposed regulation (and what else is new with Bush Administration policies?) that is hard to know where to start.

First and foremost, I find it really disgusting that health care practitioners who wish to deny women their human right to control their reproductive lives are given such, dare I say, special protections. I mean, there are plenty of places for these folks to practice medicine and pharmacology where they don’t need to come into contact with women or reproductive health. If you are a health care practitioner who is morally opposed to abortion and/or contraception, there is plenty of room to practice where you don’t have to confront this issue. Go work there. The fact that the federal government is now giving these people not only license to deny basic care to women, but actually protecting their right to do so. It is just abominable.

Second, those anti-abortion extremists who wish to deny women access to contraception are just confusing. After all, the surest way to prevent abortions is to prevent unwanted pregnancies. What better way to do that than with birth control? The stance that hormonal birth control methods (which may or may not interfere with implantation of a fertilized egg) are just a form of early abortion is fairly new to me. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association both define pregnancy as beginning with implantation. With this new definition, the Bush Administration is creating its own definition of pregnancy. It is really scary when government ideologues start interfering with the medical community and defining the terms of medical care (ala “Partial Birth Abortion”). I mean, what happens when someone opposed to immunizations or blood transfusions on moral grounds gets into office?

Finally, this proposed rule illustrates clearly that the agenda of the Bush Administration and the right-wing fundamentalists they pander to are not really concerned about saving the lives of the unborn. They are really interested in controlling women and women’s sexuality. There is no possible positive outcome for women in having the federal government deny them access to contraception. This is clearly a last-ditch effort to leave an anti-woman, anti-sex legacy. It also clearly illustrates that the struggle for reproductive rights will not be successful if we focus our energy merely on keeping abortion legal. As a movement, we really need to start talking about women’s human rights to control her reproduction. And we need to assert our human right to our sexuality and sexual expression.