Women's Rights & Issues

Novara

(5,843 posts) Thu Jul 9, 2015, 07:04 AM Jul 2015

Dems Propose 'Historic' Abortion Rights Legislation

Dems Propose 'Historic' Abortion Rights Legislation

House Democrats proposed bold pro-abortion rights legislation on Wednesday that has no chance of passing in the GOP-controlled chamber, but highlights the massive gulf between the two parties on the hot-button issue.

The Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance Act, or the EACH Woman Act, would guarantee abortion coverage for all Medicaid recipients and women who receive health insurance through the federal government. The bill, authored by Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and co-sponsored by more than 60 House Democrats, would repeal the decades-long ban on abortion insurance coverage for U.S. federal employees, military servicewomen, Peace Corps volunteers and those who are insured through the Indian Health Service. It would also prevent state legislatures from interfering with the private insurance market and banning insurers from covering abortion.

Specifically, the bill would overturn the Hyde Amendment, a policy rider that bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, except if a pregnancy arises from incest or rape. Anti-abortion politicians have been attaching the rider to important pieces of legislation each year since 1976, and it disproportionately affects minority and low-income women.

"Make no mistake-- these lawmakers really do want to ban abortions altogether," Lee said at a press conference on Wednesday. "Since they can't, they employ these very devious and underhanded tactics to push abortion care out of reach for women who are really just struggling to just make ends meet, and that's just wrong. Politicians have no business interfering with a woman's private reproductive health decisions."

When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, 86 percent of private insurance companies covered abortion. This meant that most women who purchased private insurance plans or received health coverage through their private sector jobs had abortion coverage, while Medicaid recipients and federal employees did not. But the passage of Obamacare seemed to alert Republican lawmakers to the fact that abortion was being covered in insurance plans, and more than 20 GOP-led state legislatures have since passed laws banning private insurance companies from covering abortion.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/08/abortion-insurance-coverage_n_7753564.html

3 replies

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Dems Propose 'Historic' Abortion Rights Legislation (Original Post) Novara Jul 2015 OP

Good! Can't make progress without a road map Demeter Jul 2015 #1

Nearly forty years ago I wrote a paper in a philosopy class. SheilaT Jul 2015 #2

Morality? That's a farce. Novara Jul 2015 #3

Demeter

(85,373 posts)

1. Good! Can't make progress without a road map

Reply to Novara (Original post)

Thu Jul 9, 2015, 07:10 AM

Jul 2015

SheilaT

(23,156 posts)

2. Nearly forty years ago I wrote a paper in a philosopy class.

Reply to Novara (Original post)

Thu Jul 9, 2015, 07:15 AM

Jul 2015

About abortion. I have always been strongly pro-choice, but what was interesting in my research for this paper was discovering why abortion has so long been discouraged. For a very, very long time, until sometime in the middle of the 20th century, abortion was very risky for the woman. We'll ignore the fact that a potential human life is destroyed, and only look at the mother here. Anyway, in a world where you need every woman available to raise the children she already has, to give birth on a regular schedule, even though at least half of her babies won't make it past the second year, and in the same world where the death of the mother may well mean reduced survival for the remaining children, you must find societal ways to keep women from doing such things.

What I learned in my research was that the prohibitions against abortion had nothing at all to do with the morality that we associate with it today, but are leftovers from an era when women were truly taking their lives into their own hands when they tried to terminate a pregnancy. And in a much more precarious world, where so few children live to grow up, every life is precious in a way we don't fully appreciate these days.

And so while I am still a firm pro-choice advocate, I understand where the anti-abortion sentiment comes from.

Novara

(5,843 posts)

3. Morality? That's a farce.

Reply to SheilaT (Reply #2)

Thu Jul 9, 2015, 08:18 AM

Jul 2015

If these people were moral they'd do everything possible to support unwanted children after they're born. They only give a damn about what a woman does with her womb, not what's inside it. And that's in order to control women, not to "save babies." They have no morality when they'd rather see a woman die from a risky pregnancy than end it humanely. They have no morality when they keep pregnant brain-dead women hooked up to machines to incubate a severely compromised fetus. They have no morality when they make a 10 year old who is pregnant through incest and rape carry a pregnancy to term. They have no morality when wealthy women can quietly get abortions in their doctor's offices but poor women must be shamed into carrying an unwanted fetus because they can't afford to drive hundreds of miles and take several days off work to access the only clinic in the state. And pay out of pocket for it all.

There is no moral stance against abortion.

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