The Stup** Amendment
In an astounding act of misogyny, the US House of Representatives added the Stupack Amendment to HR 3200, passing the most sweeping health care reform bill while simultaneously stripping women of their human rights and dignity. Once again demonstrating our government’s willingness to play politics with women’s bodies and women’s lives.
I have to agree with Frances Kissling (which I don’t always do) in her call to repeal the Hyde Amendment once and for all. Afterall, these politicians are willing to sell out women, especially low-income women, anyway. It is high time that we demand justice once and for all. Now is not the time to go after what is ‘possible’ or politically expedient. The reproductive justice movement must stand together and demand the end of Hyde. It is the height of injustice to claim that women only deserve the rights they can pay for. I am sick to death of the arguments of the anti-abortion crowd. If any of them really cared about reducing abortions, they would work to ensure that all women had access to the reproductive health care they need. Period. Study after study has shown that restricting access to abortion does nothing -NOTHING- to reduce abortions. Providing women with contraception, sex education, and unfettered access has worked in numerous countries to reduce the need and therefore the numbers of abortions performed.
I am sick to death of all this feigned concern over fetal rights. If you care so much about the fetus, start by providing health care, unrestricted health care, to the women who might end up carrying those fetuses. Oh, but that’s right, once a woman starts ovulating, her potential babies are what is really important.
I can’t believe that every single keep-the-government-out-of-my-business-Republican voted for this ridiculous amendment. If that is not the biggest hypocrisy of this decade, I don’t know what is. We don’t want single-payer health care because we don’t want the government involved in our private lives. Unless you’re a woman who needs an abortion - then we’ll dictate what your private insurance can cover as well as restrict public money for your health care. Because it’s ok for the government to interfere in pregnant women’s lives. Just not wealthy white boys’.
Published November 9, 2009 . Filed under: Abortion, Politics
I will start out with I have always been pro choice but find myself more in the middle of the abortion argument lately. However, my position about publicly funded abortions is not tied to legality of abortion.
My question, I guess, really is why should an abortion be considered a right provided by the government and part of health care? At the end of the day it is an elective procedure. Pregnancies are avoidable (at an astoundingly high rate) so to get pregnant is almost always a result of not taking the proper precautions. Then someone doesn’t like the consequences of their action and wants the tax payers to help “fix” it?
The argument that not paying for them doesn’t stop them from happening doesn’t seem like a valid argument. That’s the same thing as saying “we don’t provide marijuana to people but they just keep smoking it so we might as well just make it legal”. Just because people will make poor decisions (in this case to get pregnant) doesn’t mean we should justify them (by helping them “fix” it).
I’m all for putting people (both sexes) in charge of their reproductive rights. Let’s teach them about the consequences of their actions. Let’s teach them how to avoid the consequences they don’t want. But I just don’t understand why abortion should be considered a right provided by our government.
How about the argument that not paying for them disproportionally impacts poor women, creating a two-tier system in which women with means have access and women without means don’t? What about the public health impact of women who can’t afford a safe, legal abortion who then try to self-abort or go to some back-alley practitioner and finds herself in a worse condition than before?
Who is to say that an abortion is an ‘elective’ procedure? Abortions save lives every day. Circumcision is ‘elective’ but it is covered. No one is arguing that preventing unwanted pregnancy shouldn’t be a priority. It should. And the same folks that are screaming in D.C. that abortions should not be publicly funded are clamoring for abstinence-only sex education that has been demonstrated over and over again not to work.
Abortion IS part of a woman’s health care. Any reproductive health care for women that is to be considered ‘comprehensive’ MUST include abortion services. To exclude it is to deny women access to one of their fundamental human rights: the right to their autonomy, their body and to determine the course of their own lives. It is fundamentally sexist to single out a single health care procedure that only women will ever need.
We don’t let people who are opposed to blood transfusions or childhood immunizations decide public policy on these medical treatments (and one could argue that immunizations are also ‘elective’). Why should people who are opposed to abortion have the right to determine public policy on abortion?
Thanks for your comment!