Subject: [SocialistWorker.org] A bill that would let women die
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http://socialistworker.org/2011/11/07/bill-would-let-women-die
Comment: Rachel Cohen
======== A BILL THAT WOULD LET WOMEN DIE =====================================
Rachel Cohen reports on the anti-abortion politics behind a proposed bill
that would threaten women's lives by allowing hospitals to refuse them
emergency care.
November 7, 2011
LET THEM die. That's what House Republicans and Democrats have to say to
women who develop life-threatening complications to a pregnancy and seek
emergency abortion services.
House Resolution 358, cleverly dubbed the "Protect Life Act" by its
supporters, recently passed the House of Representatives. Only the latest in
a record number of restrictions to women's reproductive health care
considered in U.S. legislatures this year, the bill essentially doubles down
on a few of the most dangerous and outrageous anti-abortion provisions
currently in the law.
While the law is unlikely to pass in the Democrat-led Senate, House
Republicans have Democrat Bart Stupak to credit for the framework of the
bill. Stupak's effort to use the Congressional health care debate as an
opportunity to attack abortion rights set the stage for an onslaught of
legislative attacks that seems to grows more extreme by the month.
Much of Stupak's infamous amendment to the 2009 health care reform
legislation was adopted as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act (PPACA). PPACA will already require individuals purchasing insurance
through government insurance exchanges who choose a plan that covers abortion
to write separate checks: one for their overall insurance and one for
abortion coverage.
This "compromise" was as good as telling uninsured women the government won't
stand in their way of riding unicorns into state insurance exchanges, since
the effect of the amendment will strip abortion coverage from most insurance
policies [1], not induce insurance companies to create special abortion
coverage plans.
HR 358 would set this reality in stone by simply requiring insurers to
exclude abortion coverage from plans sold in the state exchanges.
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MORE ALARMINGLY, the "Let Women Die Act"--as pro-choice groups have more
accurately termed the bill--significantly expands laws enabling health care
providers to deny women a variety of reproductive health services.
As Planned Parenthood's website explains [2]:
>Under current law (through the 2004 Weldon amendment), hospitals, health
>care facilities and insurance plans can refuse to provide, pay for, provide
>coverage of, or refer for abortions. The Weldon amendment has no protections
>for patients to ensure they have access to care and information in a timely
>manner. HR 358 codifies this unfair and discriminatory provision.
>
>Worse than even Weldon, HR 358 allows health care entities to refuse to
>"participate in" abortion care. This could mean that a hospital employee
>with no medical training or role in a patient's treatment decisions could
>refuse to process bills, handle medical records, or even set up an
>examination room.
>
>HR 358 allows states to enact sweeping refusal laws that would allow health
>plans to refuse to cover women's preventive services, including birth
>control.
>
But the most staggering threat stems from the bill's attack on the 1986
Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA). EMTALA requires emergency
health care providers to at least stabilize patients regardless of whether
the patient can pay for their care.
HR 358 would allow staff in trauma centers and emergency rooms to deny
treatment to women suffering from pregnancy complications, even if their life
were endangered. Anti-abortion health care facilities wouldn't even be
required to transfer patients hemorrhaging from a miscarriage or suffering
sepsis from an intrauterine infection to another hospital.
In United States, over 80 percent of abortions are performed within the first
12 weeks of an unwanted pregnancy, the vast majority within the first 8
weeks. Later-term abortions are most often provided to very young women, very
poor women, or to women who discover a threat to their health late in their
pregnancy [3].
Women seeking emergency abortion services will most often be women who
intended to carry their pregnancy to term. Denying care to a woman at risk of
bleeding to death would have no affect on the number of women who seek
non-emergency, first-term abortions. It would, however, threaten all women by
eroding the principle that a woman's health is a real and justifiable
consideration in reproductive health care legislation.
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THE SOCIAL conservative right has often championed laws that let the beliefs
of some trump others' civil rights, from the Weldon amendment to attacks on
same-sex marriage. But offering so-called "pro-life" doctors the option to
let women to die rather than end a pregnancy takes the logic to a low only
surpassed by legislation weighed in some states earlier this year that sought
to legalize the murder of abortion providers.
The claim that abortion is never justified is so extreme that even it's
proponents can't avoid hypocrisy. Anti-choice former Senator Rick Santorum,
for instance, has been a vocal opponent of abortion under any circumstance,
except of course, when his own wife's pregnancy threatened her life.
Karen Santorum underwent a second-trimester, emergency abortion in 1996. The
procedure involved inducing labor to expel the fetus--the very procedure the
anti-choice right reviles as "partial-birth abortion." Yet Santorum has
refused to change his position, insisting that anyone else's wife or loved
one caught in the same circumstance should have been denied the care that
saved his wife's life [4].
Unfortunately, threatening women's lives isn't the exclusive province of Tea
Party Republicans. Already this year, state and federal governments have
considered hundreds of laws restricting access to abortion and reproductive
health care. The Guttmacher Institute reports that in the first six months of
2011, a record 162 bills were passed that restrict reproductive health care
[5], more than have ever been passed in an entire year.
And while the "Let Women Die Bill" is unlikely to become law, it is designed
to push the public policy debate farther to the right, testing whether
women's health can be overthrown as the last, irrefutable defense for
abortion.
In fact, all attacks on reproductive rights threaten women's lives and
livelihoods. The more defensive a posture struck by mainstream pro-choice
groups and the Democratic party, the further the anti-choice right will go.
Unless the bipartisan assault on abortion is challenged by a defense of
abortion rights for all women, in all circumstances, politicians of both
parties will continue to compete to propose restrictions that roll back
access to abortion to the vanishing point.
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[1] http://reproductiverights.org/en/feature/the-price-of-healthcare
[2] http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/planned-parenthood-condemns-house-passage-hr-358-38113.htm
[3] http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html
[4] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/16/985393/-Rick-Santorum-is-against-abortion-for-any-reason,-with-one-exception-
[5] http://www.guttmacher.org/media/inthenews/print/2011/07/13/index.html
