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So, I’ve been warm­ing up on this blog for a while now, so I fig­ure it’s time to start link­ing to other blogs that I read. Today’s sub­ject is a post over at Fem­i­niste, “one of the old­est fem­i­nist blogs designed by and run by women from the ground up.”

Just as back­ground, let me say that I am both pro-choice and a fem­i­nist (in some sense, but that is a topic for another time). But, I am against uni­ver­sal health care, for com­pli­cated rea­sons includ­ing, but not lim­ited to, that health care is a need and not a right, that it would sti­fle med­ical inno­va­tion, that it would vio­late doc­tors’ right to con­tract freely, that it would not be able to con­trol costs, and that it is morally worse for the gov­ern­ment to engage in care rationing than for a pri­vate insur­ance com­pany one has vol­un­tar­ily hired to do so (but, this too is a topic for another time).

On to the Fem­i­niste arti­cle. It’s on the topic of some other work by Chris Korzen about abor­tion and health care reform. To be hon­est, I haven’t been fol­low­ing the news on health care reform in the leg­is­la­ture too well, because my gag reflex is a lit­tle weak. Even so, it is appar­ent that the posi­tion taken in the Fem­i­niste arti­cle is philo­soph­i­cally shal­low. It is a great exam­ple of why I can’t get on board with many main­stream fem­i­nists regard­ing repro­duc­tive issues, even though I am pro-choice. Here are the highlights:

“That last part [of the Capps Amend­ment] strikes me as par­tic­u­larly stu­pid — what’s the point of requir­ing that one plan in each region not cover a spe­cific procedure?”

Here, the author fails to take seri­ously the fact that many of those with seri­ous moral objec­tions to most or all abor­tions have a very strong desire not to be asso­ci­ated with any abortion-promoting or per­mit­ting group in any way, shape, or form. It is not true that under uni­ver­sal health care no one will be forced away from their cur­rent plan. In fact, many employ­ers would have a finan­cial incen­tive to dump their employ­ees into the so-called pub­lic option. If you are one of these employ­ees, and your cur­rent plan doesn’t cover abor­tion but the pub­lic option will, this may be very upset­ting to you. Hence the need for one plan in each region that will not cover abor­tion, which is not just a “pro­ce­dure” to pro-lifers, but a moral abom­i­na­tion. Fur­ther­more, even if your cur­rent employer-based plan does cover abor­tion and you are ok with accept­ing the cov­er­age, you might think that there is some­thing espe­cially bad about the gov­ern­ment foot­ing the bill for abor­tions, as opposed to your pri­vate employer. At least you are work­ing for your employer vol­un­tar­ily, and could quit at any time. But you can’t quit the gov­ern­ment, if they start to encour­age abor­tions or whatever.

At the end of the day, many pro-life peo­ple sim­ply don’t want their tax dol­lars to pay for cov­er­age for them­selves or any­one else to have an abor­tion. If you think that abor­tion vio­lates human rights, it will not be sat­is­fac­tory for a pro-choice per­son to note that Obama/democrats/the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion is pro-choice and they make the rules, because human rights are not the sort of thing that a major­ity can vote away. And since being pro-life is about not hav­ing abor­tions, the best you can do within your own pri­vate life to be actively pro-life is to not have abor­tions, orga­nize to com­bat abor­tion, and clean your hands, so to speak, of affil­i­a­tion with or sup­port of pro-choice peo­ple and groups. That will obvi­ously include your health care. Point­ing out that lots of peo­ple object to things that their tax dol­lars fund (bio­log­i­cal weapons research, pub­lic school, etc) is not fruit­ful, because a per­son can just agree that the whole class of expen­di­tures is indeed unjust. So, I basi­cally can’t believe that any rea­son­ably well-informed per­son inter­ested in abor­tion debate could fail to real­ize why there might be a push for pub­lic option health care plans that do not fund what many con­sider to be murder.

“I hap­pen to think that the com­mon ground mes­sage is a good one, but that’s mostly because it sheds light on the fact that anti-choice groups are doing absolutely noth­ing to try to decrease the abor­tion rate. “Com­mon ground” on abor­tion, to most peo­ple, means mak­ing abor­tion less nec­es­sary, or find­ing ways for pro-choice and “pro-life” groups to work together to make abor­tions less common.”

The alleged “com­mon ground” of mak­ing abor­tion less nec­es­sary or com­mon is a com­mon ground only to pro-choice peo­ple and those pro-lifers who do not also believe that con­tra­cep­tives are morally on a par with abor­tion. Since I per­son­ally don’t think there is any­thing inde­pen­dently morally unac­cept­able about con­tra­cep­tives, I share many fem­i­nists’ frus­tra­tion that some or even many pro-lifers oppose con­tra­cep­tives as well as abor­tion. That kind of pro-life posi­tion usu­ally amounts to absti­nence only until mar­riage, at which point women should begin turn­ing out babies as the lord sees fit. But if fem­i­nists are really inter­ested in find­ing com­mon ground on the abor­tion debate, and some of the par­ties at the bar­gain­ing table have moral qualms with con­tra­cep­tives, then they’ll have to keep look­ing for that com­mon ground in places other than push­ing the Pill. I should men­tion here that I do not think any com­mon ground exists between these groups, as their mem­bers often have dia­met­ri­cally opposed world­views, and that the divi­sive­ness and hope­less­ness for moral com­pro­mise when it comes to state-provided goods and ser­vices such as health care or edu­ca­tion is a strong rea­son against their pro­vi­sion in the first place.

“I under­stand that some Amer­i­cans — even many Amer­i­cans — don’t want their tax dol­lars sub­si­diz­ing abor­tion. But at the end of the day, abor­tion is one of the most com­mon sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dures in the coun­try. It’s a pro­ce­dure that one in three women will have in their lives. The fact that such a com­mon sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dure is already not cov­ered by Med­ic­aid in most states is abhor­rent. The fact that we’re argu­ing about whether a uni­ver­sal health care pro­gram should cover basic repro­duc­tive care is embarass­ing [sic].”

Ok, this is just silly. Pro-lifers do not accept the preva­lence of abor­tions as evi­dence that it a legit­i­mate med­ical pro­ce­dure. On the con­trary, they think it’s evi­dence of moral decay/that judg­ment is coming/that peo­ple have become desen­si­tized to the sanc­tity of life/that women who have abor­tions are coerced into doing so/etc. By the same token, they also do not accept that abor­tions are “basic repro­duc­tive care.” Indeed, when pro-life groups pro­vide their ver­sion of repro­duc­tive care, it is often in the form of clin­ics (“cri­sis preg­nancy cen­ters”) which pro­vide coun­sel­ing or pre­na­tal care but no abor­tions. They think that it is the pro­vi­sion, and not the denial, of abor­tions that is abhor­rent. So the author’s point here is uncon­vinc­ing to those who stand in need of con­vinc­ing, the pro-lifers.

Alto­gether, it was just another dis­sat­is­fy­ing fem­i­nist arti­cle on repro­duc­tive issues. Some­time in the future, I’ll try to find a sim­i­lar exam­ple with which to illus­trate my prob­lems with the party line on health care con­science clauses.

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