Women's Health in Healthcare Debate

  
Last night, I was watching The Rachel Maddow Show, and Melissa Harris-Lacewell was a guest on a segment related to women's health and religious bigotry. While watching, I was dumbstruck by the provision to not fund women's reproductive health in the current healthcare reform bill proposed by President Obama.

Here is the segment I watched:

It seems to me that this may just be a first step in repealing healthcare rights disguised as reform. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don't seek out hidden messages or back room shenanigans and try to find out how the government is pulling the wool over my eyes. But this made me take a huge pause because here is a concrete example of how easily it is to take something away through compromise, and it exemplifies everything that is wrong with our current political structure.

Everyone has a different perspective on what good policy is. Everyone has a different perspective period. But there are some things that should be non-negotiable in my mind's eye. If we are talking about healthcare reform, we should be talking about healthcare reform for ALL people. Abortion is legal. Let me reiterate that: abortion is legal. In fact, the Supreme Court ruled on it.

And yet, here women are caught in the crosshairs of political expediency and "coalition building" to move a piece of policy forward that Republicans don't even support and will never support. It seems like an abject failure of government to not create policies that are in line with what is currently legal. I don't care who the president happens to be.

A converse example of this is when Bush Administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee wrote memos legalizing torture. Torture is illegal. Once again, torture is illegal. Yet the Bush Administration found a convenient way to make everything they did legal: issue a memo reinterpreting the law.

All of this interpretation, reinterpretation, and re-imagining of policy is on one level understandable. There is always room to interpret something differently than someone else. It is how pluralism works. However, if healthcare includes your body, it should cover all aspects of your body including reproductive organs. And, if the law states that abortion is legal, it should be legal in all iterations of policies around healthcare. Conversely, if a policy is already written that outlines what torture is and states that torture is illegal, an executive memo shouldn't be able to quickly overwrite that policy.

I worry that this encroachment on women's reproductive rights are just the tip of the iceberg. I worry about what else might be chipped away. I worry that my family that is HIV positive will see their rights whittled away with a simple justification of, "Hey, you could've prevented contracting it in the first place." I worry that my family that has depression might be told "You're mental health isn't covered because your brain is different." I worry that my family that is sick and dying will be told "You can't end your life because that's immoral." These all seem like far-fetched ideas. But so does removing organs from a healthcare bill.

Organs that already have laws protecting them.

For more information on the current healthcare bill as related to women's health, read Ann Nueman's "Rationing, Abortion Funding Are Back: Debunking “Pro-Life” Criticism of the Health Care Bill."

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