Providing prenatal services to pregnant women is a pro-life gesture by any stretch of the imagination. As is providing health insurance to young children. As we saw the other day, uninsured children are over three times more likely to die from their trauma-related injuries than are commercially insured children, even after adjustment for other factors such as age, gender, race, injury severity and injury type.
But Nelson won’t let those lives be saved unless the bill is modified in an insulting and discriminatory way. And part of the insanity of it is that the actual impact on the number of abortions in America is going to be tiny. Middle-class women will be able to pay for abortions out of pocket, and the “Hyde Amendment” status quo already screws poor women. But it’s a nice symbolic dig at pro-choice America, and a further means of stigmatizing reproductive health services as somehow not real health care. And Nelson, Bart Stupack, and various bishops love the idea of holding the whole package hostage to this point, since I guess the dead kids with trauma injuries will go to heaven anyway or something.
Now, I won't pretend this isn't a passionate issue for some people; there are those who sincerely believe that abortion is by far the greatest horror besetting the United States. For those people, discussing the issue dispassionately and with any kind of distance is impossible.
Yet, quite simply put, Ben Nelson, Bart Stupak, and most other "pro-life" politicians couldn't give a fart in a hurricane about ending abortion. If they did, they had plenty of opportunities during the Bush Administration to do so. That they did not proves to me, and quite a few other on-lookers, that they enjoy keeping the issue alive in order to do things like this - use it as a bludgeon against women and minorities. The fetus doesn't enter their calculations as a real thing, needing (among other things) a healthy woman to bring it to full term.
By attempting to hold health care reform hostage to the continued existence of the fetus, as a theoretical proposition, is not "pro-life", but stupid, purblind politics of the most horrible sort. No "life" of any consequence is saved by this.
