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.