The inaccurate claims that a health care reform bill would
be using federal money to pay for abortion—something strictly banned by the
Hyde Amendment—have grown louder and more incoherent in the past month, as
the right wing has realized that the issue can be an effective red herring to
paint the forces that would deny 46 million people health insurance as
“pro-life”, even though their stance would continue to allow 20,000
people a year to die unnecessarily.

 

That’s
20,000 real people with minds, memories, families, hopes, and dreams.  People who can feel pain, people who
know as they die that it didn’t have to happen.  The hook for the lie that federal money will pay for abortion
is the fact that by subsidizing health insurance purchases for those who can’t
afford it, and by not forcing insurance companies to deprive women of their
pre-existing abortion coverage, that’s a subsidy of abortion.  In addition, there’s the possibility that a
public option that would be available for individual purchase would cover
abortion. 

In the former case, the claims are without merit.  Imagine a woman who works for the
federal government and receives a paycheck.  If she then gets an abortion, that’s with “federal” money,
but few would be dopey enough to claim that’s an overturn of the Hyde Amendment.  If they did make that claim, we’d be
right to believe that they’re mostly objecting to the idea that a woman can
draw a paycheck.  Similarly, I’m
forced to believe that people who object to the government giving people money
who then use a tiny percentage of it for abortion are mainly objecting to
giving people money to pay for health insurance.  Which brings us back to the unnecessary deaths of 20,000
people a year, and is thus the opposite of “pro-life”.  With the public option, we have a
similar situation. People will be buying it with their own money, and thus the
taxpayer isn’t paying for any procedure. 
The public option members are. 
It’s as simple as that. 

What all this fact-checking and being rational obscures,
however, is the larger moral question of whether or not the federal government
should use federal money to directly pay for abortion, which would mean
subsidizing that service at places like Planned Parenthood or covering abortion
for Medicaid/Medicare recipients, as well as federal employees.  And of course the federal government
should pay for abortion.  Creating
entire classes of female citizens who are officially penalized for being
sexually active is straight up discrimination.  And in this case, doing the right thing is better for all
involved.  A female soldier who
realizes, when she gets pregnant, that she’s better off ending a bad
relationship and getting an abortion will be a better soldier than one who’s
always caught up with relationship woes because she thought she had no other
choice but to marry when pregnant. 
A Medicaid recipient who decides that she’s not going to have this baby,
but instead get vocational training so she can get a better-paying job benefits
herself and the taxpayer.  If you
think of women as human beings with lives and jobs, instead of as the fleshy
stuff surrounding the sex organs, it’s easy enough to see why we need to
support choices that are already made.

Sure, sure, you have moral objections to abortion and don’t
want to see your tax money go to it. 
I have moral objections to you and your ideology, but I wouldn’t say
that you shouldn’t receive Medicaid should you need it.  The emptiness of this argument makes
sense if you take a millisecond to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.  I object to using federal money to kill
men, women, girls, boys, and fetuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no one’s
taking my moral objections seriously, presumably because I don’t stay up at
night worrying about the condition of the hymens of America.

What makes the anti-choice freak out over health care reform
so funny is that it’s grade A hypocrisy, not that we’d expect any less.  If you really object to abortion itself
because you value fetal life, then you should be the first in line demanding
massive health care reform. Forty-sex
percent of women who have abortions weren’t using any kind of contraception
at all when they became pregnant, and of the rest, a significant portion were
inconsistent in their contraception use. 
It’s not a coincidence, I suspect, that Western European nations that
have universal health care and have normalized the idea of health care for all
also see much higher rates of consistent contraception use, and therefore lower
abortion rates. 

If you visit
places like England or France, you see how much more normal it is for everyone
to receive regular health care, and it’s not hard to see how you make the leap
to using regular contraception. 
Anyone who really is sincere about fetal life should want that reduction
in the abortion rate.  In addition,
you’d think that people who loves fetuses so much could love them enough after
they’re born to be ashamed that the U.S. has a shamefully high
infant mortality rate, one that’s linked with low incomes (and lack of
regular health care access), to no one’s great surprise.

But as we well know when dealing with the anti-choice
movement, when given a choice between preventing abortion and punishing women
for sexual activity, they’ll choose the latter every time.  Universal health care will most likely
lower the abortion rate, but it will likely increase the use of effective
contraception techniques, as well as STD screening, HPV vaccinations, and
regular Pap smears, all of which reduce the “consequences”—some fatal—of
being a woman who has sex.  Since
female sexuality is the real offense, anti-choicers are predictably protesting
a potential reduction in abortions that would have the concurrent benefit of
making it safer to be a normal woman.   But the rest of us shouldn’t be fooled—if you love
life and you love women, then the only sane choice is universal health
coverage, one that covers all necessary health care, and yes, that does include
contraception and safe abortion.