“Good Girls Don’t Have To Pay”: Michigan’s Shameful “Rape Insurance” Plan
No one plans to get raped, to be the victim of incest or to find herself pregnant when her birth control fails or was not used (something that is a joint responsibility, which lawmakers trying to legislate sex sometimes forget). So why would anyone buy abortion insurance? Who plans for such a thing?
Yet, this is exactly what Michigan’s legislature is requiring women to do. Using a rare procedural tactic, the state’s legislature is forcing – without the signature of the governor, conservative Republican Rick Snyder – women to obtain “abortion insurance” even before they get pregnant. The idea is so extreme that even Snyder opposes it. And it flies in the face of perhaps the most important part of the Affordable Care Act, that which prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage due to “pre-existing conditions.”
It’s similar to policies some people have had prior to the passage of the ACA, policies that, for example, demanded people buy special cancer insurance just in case they get the serious illness. Who thinks he or she will get cancer? But if you do, and you don’t have the coverage to pay for the very expensive treatment, you’re dead. Maybe literally.
What makes the Michigan law so hateful and misogynist is that it has little to do with actual cost; abortions don’t cost as much as chemotherapy and tumor-removal surgery. It’s about shaming women, insisting that they brand themselves with a big scarlet A on themselves to show they think they may be just the sort of irresponsible whores who might need abortion access at some point. Good girls, apparently, don’t have to pay, since they won’t be having sex.
And what about cases of rape or incest? It shouldn’t matter, since the decision to have an abortion ought not be based on whether the female in question is a victim or sexually active. But women and girls – some of whom might be too poor to pay for an abortion or too scared to come forward after an assault – will have to pony up for an abortion or pay in advance.
This raises some interesting issues for the defense, should a female report a rape or incest to police. So, Miss Slutsmith, you purchased abortion insurance. Should we not infer that you were planning to get pregnant – and could not possibly have been raped or abused by a male relative?
But then again, the law doesn’t address men’s sexual health. It doesn’t insist that men pay in advance, for example, for treatment for sexually transmitted diseases or for Viagra. They get to have sex without consequence, unlike the women. They don’t have to give up their privacy and undergo the humiliation of paying extra to deal with erectile dysfunction or gonorrhea. But for the women – shame! The word is appropriate here. But it ought to be directed at the Michigan legislature.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, December 13, 2013
“An Assault Upon The Very Notion Of Secular Law”: Corporate Owner’s Religious Beliefs Stop At Their Employees’ Doctors’ Offices
The Hobby Lobby case, which the Supreme Court agreed last month to hear, shouldn’t only scare you if you’re a woman concerned about reproductive rights. It should scare you if you’re an American concerned about civil rights and the very principle of secular law. The Hobby Lobby case threatens to extend corporate personhood to allowing companies to force employers’ religious beliefs onto individual employees, deny them health care, and opt out of laws they don’t like.
Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases – Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. v. Sebelius and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius – challenging the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employer-provided health plans included birth control coverage. Previous court rulings have been all over the map, including one in Hobby Lobby’s favor from the shorthanded 10th Circuit here in Denver.
The companies object to certain forms of birth control because the “religious beliefs” of their owners forbid them from covering contraceptives that prevent implantation of a fertilized egg and thus in their minds are “abortifacients.”
Unfortunately for their women employees, the companies’ “science” is in line with those who think people and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. According to a friend of the court brief filed in the Hobby Lobby case by Physicians for Reproductive Health, the companies “fail to cite any scientific authority for their assertions that any FDA-approved contraceptives are abortifacients … there is no scientific evidence that emergency contraceptives available in the United States and approved by the FDA effect an existing pregnancy. None, therefore are properly classified as abortifacients.”
Pregnancy itself is a complicated concept, as is the science of contraception. According to Jessica Arons of the Reproductive Health Technology Project, “Contrary to popular belief, pregnancy does not occur in a ‘moment’ of conception within hours of intercourse, but rather over a span of several days. An embryo can be present in a woman’s body for up to 9 days before she becomes pregnant.” Approximately 50 percent of fertilized eggs never implant, so Mother Nature is a pretty thorough abortionist by Hobby Lobby’s definition.
Also worth noting: the employer birth control coverage mandate didn’t come from the Obama administration. Most of it has been law well over a decade. According to Mother Jones:
In December 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that companies that provided prescription drugs to their employees but didn’t provide birth control were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex. That opinion, which the George W. Bush administration did nothing to alter or withdraw when it took office the next month, is still in effect today.
The difference now is that contraceptive coverage falls under the umbrella of the Affordable Care Act, and is covered with no or little out of pocket costs.
Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood aren’t individuals or churches. They are corporations. Nobody is stopping them from practicing their religion or forcing them to use the pill or get an IUD. But their religious beliefs do not entitle them to make those decisions for their employees – their beliefs stop at their employees’ doctors’ offices. None of these personal, private health care decisions by workers are any of Hobby Lobby’s damn business.
What if these companies decided they didn’t want to cover AIDS drugs? Or plans that included blood transfusions? Or that their religion forbade them hiring different races or abiding by wage and hour guidelines? Where does it stop?
This is why these two cases are so dangerous: if a company can invoke religion to exempt itself from a law it doesn’t like, it destroys the very notion of secular law. And it turns employees into chattel whose personal, private health care decisions are owned by their employer.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, December 6, 2013
“What’s The Matter With Motherhood?”: Hey Conservatives, Health Coverage Including Maternity Care Is A Right-To-Life Issue
If you’re a conservative strongly opposed to abortion, shouldn’t you want to give all the help you can to women who want to bring their children into the world? In particular, wouldn’t you hope they’d get the proper medical attention during and after their pregnancy?
This would seem a safe assumption, which is why it ought to be astonishing that conservatives are positively obsessed with trashing the Affordable Care Act’s regulation requiring insurance policies to include maternity coverage.
Never mind that we who are lucky enough to have health insurance end up paying to cover conditions we may never suffer ourselves. We all want to avoid cancer, but we don’t begrudge those who do get it when the premiums we pay into our shared insurance pools help them receive care.
Yet critics of Obamacare apparently think there is something particularly odious when a person who might not have a baby pays premiums to assist someone who does. It’s true that men cannot have babies, although it is worth mentioning that they do play a rather important role in their creation. In any event, it is hardly very radical to argue that society is better off when kids are born healthy to healthy moms.
Yet the conservatives’ ire over this issue knows no bounds.
“And so what if a health policy lacks maternity care?” wrote Deroy Murdoch on National Review’s Web site , the italics on that impatient “so what” being his. “Not all women want to bear more children — or any children at all. . . . And how about lesbians who do not want kids, and are highly unlikely to become pregnant accidentally?” It’s touching, actually, to see such concern for lesbians in a conservative publication. Behold the miracles Obamacare already has called forth.
On “Fox News Sunday” this month, host Chris Wallace was very worked up as he pressed Zeke Emanuel, a former health-care adviser to President Obama, over how unfair it is that a single woman with a 24-year-old son would be forced to pay for such coverage. “She’s not going to have any more children,” Wallace said with great certainty. “She’s not going to need maternity services.”
Writing on the FreedomWorks Web site, Julie Borowski declared, unhappily: “Maternity coverage will be mandatory — even for men. . . . Adding coverage for things that some people do not want will only increase insurance costs for everyone .”
Well, not exactly. But you get the drift. Who knew that supporting motherhood was suddenly controversial?
All of which ought to present members of the right-to-life movement with a challenge. In the name of consistency, they need to break with their conservative allies and insist that maternity coverage be included in all health-care plans. Shouldn’t those who want to prevent abortion be in the forefront of making the case that a woman will be far more likely to choose to have her baby if she knows that both she and her child will get regular medical attention?
For too many politicians on the right, what they say about abortion is at odds with what they say about so many other issues. They speak with great concern and compassion for the unborn, and I respect that. You don’t have to support making abortion illegal to think that there are too many of them in the United States.
To their great credit, some right-to-lifers really do follow the logic of their position and support expanded health coverage, food stamps, the Women, Infants and Children feeding program and other measures that help parents after their kids are born. This reflects a consistent ethic.
But many other conservatives would make abortion illegal and leave it at that. Thus we have the spectacle in Texas of right-wing politicians trying to make it as difficult as possible for a woman to obtain an abortion while proudly blocking the state’s participation in the expansion of Medicaid to cover the near-poor. Does it serve the cause of life to keep more than 1.8 million Texans from getting health insurance?
President Obama apologized last week after all the criticisms of what’s happening in the individual insurance market. But where is the outrage over governors and legislators flatly cutting off so many lower-income Americans from access to Medicaid? The Urban Institute estimates that 6 million to 7 million people will be deprived of coverage in states that are refusing to accept the expansion.
If health coverage — yes, including maternity care — isn’t a right-to-life issue, I don’t know what is.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 10, 2013
“The Texas Abortion Emergency”: This Isn’t Complicated, Women Are Paying An Unconstitutional Price
Outside the chambers of federal appellate judges Priscilla Owen, Jennifer Elrod, and Catharina Haynes, virtually everyone understands that H.B. 2, the new Texas law that places various restrictions on a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion, is not about protecting women’s health — it’s about stopping abortion.
And yet on Friday, those three judges, who sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, ruled that the law could go into effect, since it was “not designed to strike at the right itself,” and wasn’t invalid simply because it “has the incidental effect of making it more difficult or more expensive to procure an abortion.”
That ruling led to the immediate closure of one-third of clinics in Texas where abortions are performed — several in rural areas that serve women without the means to travel hundreds of miles to another clinic.
On Monday morning, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia allowed the charade to continue for at least another week when he declined to grant an emergency request by the law’s challengers to stay the appeals court’s ruling, and ordered the state to file a response by Nov. 12. (Justice Scalia hears all emergency-stay applications out of the Fifth Circuit.)
The law requires, among other things, a doctor to have admitting privileges at a hospital no more than 30 miles from where he or she performs abortions. On Oct. 28, U.S. District judge Lee Yeakel ruled that this provision was “without a rational basis and places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.”
The state appealed immediately, and on Friday, the Fifth Circuit panel issued its stay of Judge Yeakel’s ruling.
But no matter what the panel says, the law is intended precisely to “strike at the right itself” — only dishonest politicians pretend otherwise. Making it harder for women to get an abortion is not an “incidental effect” of the law; it is its primary goal.
Consider the words of Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, who claimed during the trial before Judge Yeakel that the state has a vested interest in “protecting the life of the unborn child,” and thus may impose “inconveniences on women seeking abortion in hopes that it may lead women considering abortion to consider childbirth instead.”
Like similar laws popping up all over the country, H.B. 2 is cloaked in the guise of protecting women’s health only because anti-abortion activists know it’s their best shot of surviving judicial scrutiny.
This shouldn’t be complicated. On one side is a law of dubious constitutionality passed by legislators who openly admit their desire to end all abortions. On the other side are real women whose constitutional right to have an abortion is being effectively blocked.
The arguments of all sides have been on the table for months, which is why Texas was able to file its appeal within hours of the district court’s ruling. Now the state has at least another week, while Texas women pay the price.
By: Jess Wegman, The Opinion Pages, The New York Times November 4, 2013
“The GOP’s Limited Appeal”: New Data Shows Why The Next Republican Nominee Is Screwed
Immigration reform isn’t quite dead yet, but the political fall-out of immigration reform’s demise is pretty clear: the GOP rebrand is going to be pretty tough. Despite relatively favorable circumstances, immigration reform advocates weren’t able to drag the party toward the center. And if congressional Republicans can’t advance the rebrand by allowing losing issues—like a pathway to citizenship or background checks on gun purchases—to advance through Congress and depart from consideration in 2016, then the next Republican nominee will be left with the difficult task of broadening the appeal of the GOP.
Today, a new Pew Research survey suggests that Republican presidential candidates won’t find it easy to move toward the center. The poll shows that Republicans recognize the need for change—with 59 percent even suggesting they need to change on the issues. But when it comes to the specifics, most Republicans support maintaining the party’s current positions or even moving further to the right. When asked about the party’s current stance on gay marriage, immigration, government spending, abortion, and guns, at least 60 percent of Republicans said they thought the party was about right or too moderate.
Desire for change was greatest, if still very limited, on cultural conservative issues. On gay marriage, 31 percent of Republicans said they wanted the party to moderate. But 27 percent thought the party wasn’t conservative enough (do they want a return to sodomy laws?) and another 33 percent were satisfied with the party’s current stance. The numbers were similar on abortion: 25 percent wanted the party to moderate, but 26 percent thought the party wasn’t conservative enough, and another 41 percent were satisfied with the party’s current position.
On immigration, where the party’s current position is potentially less clear to voters, the Republican rank-and-file isn’t itching to get behind a compromise. 17 percent support moving to the left on immigration, compared to 36 percent who want the party to get more conservative. More generally, 67 percent of Republicans think the party is compromising too much or the right amount with Democrats.
Unfortunately, the poll offered fewer answers on economic issues, the center of much of the discussion of the Republican “rebrand.” The poll only asked about government spending, where Republicans are predictably all but unified—only 10 percent want the party to moderate, compared to 46 percent who want a more conservative stance and another 41 percent who are satisfied with the party’s current position. But the poll offers few answers on other economic issues, like taxes, Wall Street, or the various proposals for making the party more “populist” within its current ideological bounds. The degree of party unity on government spending, however, suggests that there might not be very much space for movement on economic issues.
With little Republican appetite for moderation, it’s not surprising that Rubio’s numbers have dropped. It’s also not surprising that he’s moving to reaffirm his conservative credentials on the push to defund Obamacare and ban abortion after twenty weeks. These numbers suggest that the Republicans won’t be eager to nominate someone pushing the party to moderate, at least on cultural issues and government spending. Chris Christie’s favorability ratings suggest as much: He’s only at plus-17, with 47 percent favorable and a sizable 30 percent holding an unfavorable opinion. That’s worse than Romney ever had, and it’s probably inconsistent with winning the Republican nomination.
The composition of the Republican primary electorate makes the challenge even greater. In the Pew poll, 49 percent of Republicans who participate in every primary support the tea party—just 22 percent consider themselves moderate. In last year’s primaries, evangelical Christians represented more than 40 percent of the electorate in just about every major contest, including relatively moderate Romney states like Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Florida.
Given today’s numbers and Mitt Romney’s difficulty securing the nomination, it’s highly unclear whether Republicans could nominate a candidate who wants to moderate the party. And if the primary process is unlikely to yield a candidate who can moderate the party, then the Republican House would be wise to preemptively bail out the next Republican candidate, and relieve them of the obligation to oppose a pathway to citizenship, background checks on gun purchases, or whatever else. That doesn’t look like it will happen. Instead, it looks like Republicans will need to count on the appeal of their 2016 presidential candidate and economic fundamentals to overcome the party’s limited appeal.
By: Nat Cohn, The New Republic, July 31, 2013
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