[With a hat tip to Jonathan Swift]
I have often gotten a lot out of Meteor Blade's writing, but the polarization in his diary today is self-defeating.
I actually read in one diary that asking poor women to take out supplementary insurance for an event that they don't even know will happen is crazy.
But--duh. That's what insurance is--it's a hedged bet against the future.
As a formerly poor woman, I am sick of the victim stance that so many liberals throw at poor women--and at women in general.
There are a thousand ways to skin this cat. NOW could set up an insurance fund that women of all income levels could buy into--or not.
In such a fund, to reduce the premiums for the poor, women past their birthing age, gay women, and women who can't reproduce--heck, even MEN who feel this is a social good--could buy policies. We're not talking about vast sums of money here.
I've been out of the world for a while, but if an abortion costs $500, how much could such insurance be, with a large enough pool?
As a Formerly Poor Woman [FPW], can I say that the health insurance bill as a whole is SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT! Especially for poor mothers who earn too much for Medicaid. The stress of getting ill, and of living with untreated depression, was hell for me. The fear: am I or my children sick enough to warrent a trip to the doctor? Or will it be a "wasted" trip (ie, a virus) that would have gotten better on its own? I remember getting a$320 bill (my week's earnings) for my children's health exams.
I was an active alcoholic in my early 20s when I got pregnant. I earned about $3600 a year, and an abortion cost $150. I had taken drugs recently, and so I decided, though I'd always wanted children, to get an abortion. I scraped together the money. Poor women have social networks, and they also know how to do without to reach a goal.
But the day-in day-out of living without health insurance, worrying about your kids, what will happen if you end up really sick, etc etc...
Please don't insult those of us who classify the Stupak amendment as not-the-end-of-the-world or coathanger-time as being patronizing, or antiwomen.
As someone pointed out, the insurance companies themselves have a HUGE incentive to put together a supplemental abortion pool. $400 vs the $10,000 to $40,000 (Caesarian) for a live birth? It's a no brainer. Here is a place the market will work. Or a place for nonprofits like Planned Parenthood or NOW to use their smarts on funding a solution, instead of pissing their money away lobbying against this.
The amendment is stupid in that no one is quite sure how it will work, but this community has its head in the sand if they think threats against the Dem Party will change things. As I said in another diary, where the hell do Democrats have to go? And many Catholics who are anti-abortion are Dems; it's not as if Dem women think with 1 brain.
We are not a single issue party. And poor women are not single issue thinkers. If their main issue of healthcare is dealt with, they'll be so much better off, even if no nonprofit uses its smarts to create a pool. The money they save with subsidzed insurance will cover an abortion (if they can find someone to give it.)
But many taxpayers sincerely see abortion as murder, and they don't want to pay for it.
[Forget the arguments about how we all pay for war, etc; it's a given; or that the tax deductions of businesses who provide abortion-having insurance subsidizes abortions already {For god's sake don't get there, or the zealots in Congress will start targeting those plans too!}]
Right now, taxpayers [think they] don't pay for it. Don't buck that. Get creative--this can be solved in the private or nonprofit sector.
The following thoughts are unrelated to the political content of the above essay.
I want to tip my hat to Arkansas and the other man whose mom gave birth to him against the odds. I am firmly pro-choice: I would have risked a lot before giving birth to a baby perhaps burdened with defects from my alcoholism. (I went in my early 20s for one when I was drinking heavily and doing drugs.)
But from the seat of 53, the thing that means the most in my life, and was by far the biggest factor in my spiritual development, was getting pregnant out of wedlock [again!] by a drug addict [again!], but not drinking that much at the time, and not doing drugs, knowing that this time the fetus had a shot. My creative work, my money-earning career, all pale beside the depth of the child I bore, and whose life eventually led to me and then my partner cleaning up. A lot of folks who have problems with abortion are coming from a spiritual place--not sexism. Coming from a place of belief in the unintended positives of having a child.
To close, the people I've known who have been most anti-abortion were poor teenagers from the inner city I taught. I was stunned; now I understand, I think. Their moms had fought great odds to rear them: they knew they were important.
I've been living in China for the past 18 months, in Macau. Children here are at the center of their families' lives. People live in tiny apartments, but spend any excess money on giving their kids lessons. In return, the kids understand they owe their parents for the investment, and choose studies that will lead to a good job. It's a tradeoff of deferred dreams for both generations, but when you look at the tightness of the social fabric, the lack of crime, it's hard not to compare with our own country. And in mainland China, where until recently the One Child program not infrequently led to forced abortions, this valuing of children is even more intense.