Abortion is not medical care.
That’s why Americans should be concerned about abortion coverage in their current health care reform bills:
The two major health-care bills that Congress is examining would, according to Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee, “result in federally mandated coverage of abortion by nearly all health plans, federally mandated recruitment of abortionists by local health networks, and nullification of many state abortion laws. They would also result in federal funding of abortion on a massive scale.”
North of the border, we manage to maintain the spectacular inconsistency that abortion is a woman’s choice, and that at the same time, it is medically necessary. (Abortion is medically necessary when the woman says it is medically necessary.)
So why do even good doctors comply with women’s demands even when they are not necessarily comfortable with abortion and can, with all clarity, see that it is not medically necessary? (That’s another blog post for another day.)
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On the other hand, Brigitte would like to add the following: I was in Montreal this afternoon and I heard a story on the radio (CBC, I believe) that made a reasonably big fuss about timely access to abortion there and how the city’s health and social services agency wanted to reassure citizens that they were doing everything they could to guaranteed access to the procedure. You’d have thought they were discussing care for something serious and medically necessary like, say, heart attacks or cancer patients. But no. Those people can wait while the public systems scrambles to guarantee quick and easy access to abortion.
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I have my doubts about this – I hear from pro-life sources that the reform would allow funding for abortion, but from pro-choice sources that it explicitly prohibits funding for abortion. It’s very confusing. The bill is far too long and complicated for me to check for myself, and constantly changing as details are negociated.
As best I can figure out, none of the proposed laws explicitly permit funding for abortion – but they could be creating situations in which it would become quite easy to allow that funding indirectly, because it places the control of that area of policy outside of the legislature. It’s not mandating abortion coverage, merely setting up the situation that may allow coverage to be mandated in future by administrative policy rather than by legislative action. As the article points out, any mention of abortion is conspiculously absent.
I’ve also noticed a lot of pro-lifers getting very upset about it funding areas of reproductive care other than abortion – I could complain at great length about that, if given a good excuse.