All I Want For Christmas is Some Health Care
Anti-choice senators struck a backdoor deal in the middle of the night on December 19th when Senator Harry Reid offered an manager’s amendment to the health care bill that is every bit as restrictive as the Stupak-Pitts amendment to the House version of the health care bill. According to NOW:
The provision was drafted to gain the vote of abortion rights opponent Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and is a complicated variation of Stupak-Pitts. It allows any state to prohibit abortion coverage in health insurance exchanges. In addition, all funds that would pay for abortion services would have to be segregated from other private funds and federal subsidies. This requirement would apply to the tens of millions of women who would buy their insurance under the new exchanges and, in the opinion of expert health policy analysts, would mean that insurers simply would not provide abortion coverage in the exchange plans. Eventually, insurers would stop offering abortion coverage altogether.
The next two weeks are critical for pro-choice activists. It’s the middle of the holiday season, but we have to remain focused. Call your senators directly, rather than by calling the Senate switchboard, and tell them that you demand equal health care access for all Americans. Requiring women to purchase additional insurance for abortion coverage is unconstitutional. We shouldn’t have to pay twice as much as men for health care.
For more info about the Nelson amendment, click here. For more info about the Manager’s amendment, click here and here.
1Aaron Agassi
wrote on 31 December 2009 at 16:50
Pro-Life laws and policy are actually sectarian and therefore unconstitutional. Obviously, in so far as each side strives to influence policy in opposite directions, each side seeks to impose their logically conflicting and therefore reciprocally incompatible beliefs upon the other. So, what is the truth? Who is right? At most, only one side or the other.
Class struggle also appears to be a factor in the dispute: If they can’t jail us, then they’ll seek to trip us all up in the purse strings they seek unrightfully to keep hold, irresponsibly penny wise and pound foolish, inflicting upon us all, rather than universal coverage for abortion on demand, instead, the far greater cost of more mouths on the welfare rolls. Too many spokespersons of the worst Wall Street plutocrats entirely well capable of affording for themselves, gold and platinum plated healthcare with dental, Chiropractic, all options of reproductive care and so much more, now continue to profit so scandalously from having brought the world economy to the brink of ruin, standing hardly above blaming the poor most hard hit, now groan and lament at the very suggestion of burdensome reregulation in order curtail abuse or taxes in order to help cope with the damage.
The depraved dittoheaded Pro-Lifers in particular, prefer fantasy unborn babies, to actual real life people suffering in desperate need, among other things, of reproductive rights and services. And so I confess that simply cannot take the Pro-Life position seriously and I even find it pernicious. Therefore, I cannot claim to respect their opinions, nor is that owed them. Yet Pro-Life apologist propagandists have much succeeded in undermining the morale of Pro-Choice by demanding of us ever so tactfully to turn the other cheek instead of openly challenging barking mad fairytales about sapient zygotes, consciousness in the womb or “sleeping” potentiality thereof, whatever that means, from the moment of conception! So, where is the rational Empirical evidence to support such extreme paranormal claims? The Pro-Lifers heartlessly and senselessly guilt-trip and seek to oppress distressed and confused women in crisis, denouncing abortion as murder, whereas clearly an actual murder requires an actual victim, not a potential or an essence, whatever that means.
Moreover, quite naturally, miscarriage, or: spontaneous abortion of exactly such “helpless” zygotes, occurs, usually quite undetected, constantly, all the time! And yet that doesn’t seem to bother the Pro-Lifers much at all. After all, we don’t intervene only to save people from violence or mishap, but also from entirely natural causes. So, if zygotes are actually to be considered people just like everybody else, why such manifest inconsistency on the part of the Pro-Lifers, if they really believe what they say they do? Why, if I actually believed such an absurdity, I’d demand, as a dire emergency measure, the spiking of the public drinking water supply with medicine to prevent miscarriage!
But returning to reality, safe, legal abortions covered under universal health care, can only be better that coat hangers or the back ally, not to mention the disastrous Global Gag Rule, never mind infant mortality and even infanticide as in days of old. Abortion is a good thing. And in the words of PZ Myers: “Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind.” Indeed, there remains no other viable general hypothesis. And therefore clearly, at conception, no person as yet exists in order to suffer or be murdered, because only and never earlier than into the third trimester, will requisite fetal developmental neurology have progressed as minimally necessary for the natural processes underlying awareness and personality at all, never mind whatever necessary input of experience. A zygote, no more than an amoeba or a brick, simply cannot do it, as yet lacking the requisite biological equipment or: “wetware”. A zygote is not a person.
And so, as a legal matter of constitutionality no less than of rational Empirical scientific investigation, without religion, Pro-Life demands or assertions regarding alleged civil rights of the unborn and particularly against abortion, simply have no leg to stand upon. “It’s a life!” they scream. So, exactly what does it mean to employ the very word: ‘life’ as a noun that way? Indeed, the obfuscatory pseudoscientific so-called genetic view posits that the initial recombination from two prior sources into a genetically unique individual zygote at fertilization marks the beginning of life in general, and therefore human life specifically. For all such is the typical abuse of the very word: ‘life,’ in order by implication, to sneak in precepts of the soul and/or Aristotelian potentiality/essence via the proverbial back door. Indeed, literally speaking, if life only means biological activity, then the pseudoscientific so-called genetic view doesn’t even really argue against abortion at all. For that matter, without Teleology, which is Theistic, what becomes of the Aristotelian notions of essence and potentiality? Not to mention, incidentally, that life, biological activity, is continuous all throughout the entire process of procreation, generation by generation, actually beginning in the primordial ooze with the transition from prebiotic evolution into biological evolution proper. Semantics aside, fertilization or conception, so called, actually being no more than the inception of the development of a new individual of whichever species, is another matter entirely.
All hence, for purposes of long overdue scientific ontology before the law, indeed retaining no personal recollection of that fateful day, I implore of the Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, a medical determination upon the burning question, pivotal upon so many issues of law and policy, from future revisitation of Roe v. Wade to deadlocked Universal Health Care and the disastrous Global Gag Rule:
Was I conscious at the moment of my own conception?
Please sign online petition at: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/surgeon-general-please-break-the-healthcare-deadlock
And come to think of it, was there any homework assigned that day?