Abortion should be health care

Abortion should be health care

Mais Jasser explains how the Stupak Amendment to the House health care bill makes it even harder for women to get the health care they require.

November 20, 2009

IN THE national health care plan that passed the House of Representatives earlier this month by a very narrow margin, 51 percent of the population was sold out.

Again, both male and female representatives voted for a health care system that specifically and purposefully excludes access to abortion. Once again, the Religious Right has successfully attacked women's equality.

Since the late 1970s, women's reproductive clinics have become more and more isolated from other health care services, and therefore more vulnerable to being targeted by the campaigns of right-wingers, bigots and religious zealots.

The U.S. remains the only industrialized country where abortion is legal, but where women and doctors are harassed and even subjected to terrorism at clinics. In countries such as Canada, France and Germany--which followed suit and legalized abortion after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision made it legal in the U.S.--abortion has become integrated into the health care system.

In these countries, women can check into any hospital or medical center to get an abortion. Therefore, women entering a hospital for abortion services can't be identified, isolated and targeted. The Stupak Amendment to the national health care bill will only serve to further isolate and stigmatize abortion, coming closer yet to rendering Roe v. Wade totally ineffective.

If fighting terrorism were truly a national priority, then doctors and women would be protected by providing reproductive services alongside every other medical procedure in every hospital. And if we want truly equal access to health care for women, we need to fight for total access to abortion services as part of a rational and publicly funded health care system.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/11/20/abortion-should-be-health-care

People need to be in control of their bodies to be free, and for women readily-accessed abortion rights is part of that. If I had my druthers I'd go further and force every hospital in the land to perform abortions as a condition of receiving federal funds.

And for many people, money is the bottom line.

Hyde has a very long reach.

nt