Compromises limit abortion accessibility

Originally published in the Nov. 9 issue of the Daily Beacon, this column I wrote discusses the potential limited accessibility to abortions caused by the House's Nov. 7 passage of the health care reform bill:

I feel sick about the concessions abortion-rights Democrats made in order to pass the health care bill through the House Saturday night.

Forced to choose between a public option and readily available abortions, pending passage through the Senate, this bill may successfully limit women’s access to affordable abortions.

It’s shameful that there was little to no coverage of this abortion amendment, which passed 240-194, prior to the passage of the bill as a whole. Most articles available as of Sunday morning touted the passage of this bill as a great success and relegated the issue and implications of the abortion amendment to the last few lines of a larger story about the bill’s “historic” passage. (The New York Times did create a nice graphic and map showing the geographical spread of support and dissent for the amendment, which shows us Tennesseans that only one of our representatives voted against the abortion amendment: Steven Cohen, Democratic representative from Tennessee’s ninth district.)

Luckily, in perusing the Internet Saturday night, I came across Meredith Simons’ Nov. 7 doubleX.com blog entry entitled “A Critique of the Stupak Amendment: Choose Between Health Care and Abortion.” Published at 10:07 p.m., just before the bill itself was passed, Simons warned, “Remember those conservatives who don’t want the government interfering in health care plans? Right, well, it turns out what they meant was they don’t want the government interfering in health care plans, except when it comes to abortion. At that point, the government can interfere to its heart’s content.”

This is obviously a controversial topic, and I can understand anti-abortion supporters’ conviction that the government should not fund a procedure they deem morally reprehensible, to the point of considering it murder. Such a concern is, of course, a justifiable reason for the addition of the amendment.

The language of the bill (H.R. 3962) is fairly neutral, promising “no preemption of state laws regarding abortion,” “no effect on federal laws regarding abortion” and “no effect on federal civil rights laws” in section 258. Section 259 demands that any “federal agency or program and any state or local government that receives federal financial assistance under this act” cannot discriminate against any “health care entity (who) does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of or refer for abortions.”

This seems harmless enough, right? Wrong.

“To say that this amendment is a wolf in sheep’s clothing would be an understatement of a lifetime,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) during floor debate. It “will be the greatest restriction of a women’s right to choose” passed by Congress “in our career,” according to a Nov. 7 Bloomberg.com article.

The bill will theoretically allow women to purchase a “rider” for their government-sponsored health insurance that would provide them with coverage for abortion procedures. We all know who this kind of provision favors — those who can afford to buy private health insurance anyway, not the poor and underprivileged, those who desperately need access to affordable abortions.

Such a plan will actually limit the coverage of “low- and middle-income women who qualify for government subsidies, along with the legions of women who will buy insurance on the exchange because they are either self-employed or employed by small businesses.” They “won’t be able to get plans that automatically include abortion coverage,” Simons writes.

Even worse, a Sept. 30 New York Times editorial claims this “rider” option is actually a charade, “an unworkable approach given that almost no one expects to need an abortion, few women would buy the rider and, therefore, few insurance companies would even offer it.”

Simons reiterates this point: “Businesses don’t like to sell products that don’t have a market, and the market for something like an abortion rider — essentially a plan for an unplanned pregnancy — is notoriously slim.”

By allowing this concession and effectively restricting the availability of abortions to those who can afford to pay for the procedure out of pocket, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has successfully limited the rights of women, pending the passage of a similar bill through the Senate.

According to a Nov. 8 New York Times article entitled “Abortion Was at Heart of Wrangling,” “Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said the bill’s original language barring the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions should have been sufficient for the opponents. ‘Abortion is a matter of conscience on both sides of the debate,’ DeLauro said. ‘This amendment takes away that same freedom of conscience from America’s women. It prohibits them from access to an abortion even if they pay for it with their own money. It invades women’s personal decisions.’”