Not Under the Bus: the Fight for Women's Healthcare

Check out the organization that sponsored the ad above: Not Under the Bus.

Remember this: first they went after abortion coverage (Federal money is already banned, this is abortion coverage paid for by PRIVATE MONEY). Next its birth-control coverage (it already is birth-control coverage by most "pro-life" groups, see the Pill Kills) and some efforts have been made to refuse to cover STD screenings and pap-tests. This is not about the babeeez, its about anti-woman, anti-sex, anti-reality based thinking taking over your medical decisions and care.

Second, I'd like to point out that the vast majority of abortions are paid for out of pocket, even by women who have abortion coverage (the stigma is a serious factor for many and not having an abortion "track-record" is a concern for others), but those that are typically covered by insurance premiums are the SERIOUS abortions for reasons like protecting the life and health of the woman. Protecting the health of a woman is NOT protected in the current amendment (Stupak-Pitts). So, say at five months, you find out that your wanted baby is actually a brain dead fetus--you really want kids, but before you can deliver your dead baby, it will go septic resulting in you having to have a complete hysterectomy and no chance at ever having a kid. Oh, but that's the pro-life position because after all, if you were a good Christian woman God would never have punished you with a dead baby (or so goes the wackadoodle fantasy). Bad stuff happens to good people, good stuff happens to bad people, that's just chance folks. Pregnancy and birth are serious business and a friend in medical school (after her genetics class) said that she was amazed any fetuses turned into health babies considering all that can go wrong (half-joking of course). Sometimes abortion is the most moral option--the best health outcome and supporting of a woman's autonomy as a free-thinking human being. The rhetoric of the center, that abortions are awful, sad things really plays into the idea that all abortion at the outset is bad. The fact is, its the conditions around the abortion and the individuals involved, who get to decide if its freeing, sad, moral, immoral, life-affirming, etc. Not you, not me--its the woman, her partner, her family, etc. And especially in cases where abortion becomes seriously complicated due to the above or similar conditions, it becomes really expensive. A woman should have to go bankrupt to protect her fertility and her ability to have children. That is fundamentally what this amendment does--it punishes women for nature's own accidents. Yes, $500 is a pretty big piece of change for a woman in poverty and in many case denies her full humanity. That's why we need to overturn the Hyde Amendment. But the Stupak-Pitts goes even further into erasing the common-sense, life-affirming abortions for those wanted pregnancies that go very very wrong. Its so indicative of how much conservatives really hate women. Its not about the babeez, its about controlling and punishing women for sex, for the capacity to give birth, for not obeying the sperm magic of the patriarchy.