NEWS & LETTERS, Janurary-February 2010
Woman as Reason
Obama's pragmatism betrays women
by Terry Moon
Abortion rights--women's right to control our bodies, without which women are not free--ends up being what Democrats, led by Obama, are willing to ditch to get their "historic" healthcare bill passed. Why couldn't the debate around the odious Stupak-Pitts amendment, and Senator Ben Nelson's anti-abortion demands, be seen by the Obama Administration as an opportunity to educate not only Congress but the U.S. population?
WHEN ABORTION IS ILLEGAL, WOMEN DIE
When abortion was illegal in the U.S., over 5,000 women died from back-alley and butcher abortions each year and thousands more were mutilated. The 1976 Hyde Amendment barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, made it very difficult for poor women to terminate a pregnancy. The new healthcare legislation escalates this attack on a poor woman's right to control her body. Rather than fight this outrage, we're given debates about how this fundamental restriction on women's rights really won't change the status quo because it mostly affects poor women and they didn't have insurance to pay for an abortion anyway. As if that makes it OK!
One can't help but wonder: what, if anything, would Obama fight for? He doesn't seem to get it. One has to fight for principles because they have consequences. The worst consequence of this latest, successful, attack on abortion rights, is that more women, children and families will suffer--especially now when the U.S. population is experiencing almost unprecedented levels of unemployment, homelessness, hunger and impoverishment. For example, because of the worsening economy, abortions in Illinois have reached a 10-year high. Abortions grew at the fastest rate among girls 14 years old and younger. It is these children, many of whom are poor, who will be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, forced to get a more dangerous later-term abortion as they take time to try to scrape up the necessary money, turn to a cheaper back-alley abortion, or try to abort themselves.
Abortion is a legal and necessary part of women's healthcare. It is incredibly demeaning to require us to make out two separate monthly payments--one for all insurance coverage except abortion and one for abortion coverage, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's proposal mandates--if we're lucky enough to even find a plan that will cover abortion with these outrageous requirements. But such a requirement is a bonus for anti-abortion fanatics who see it as one more way to try to make abortion unthinkable.
From the very beginning there has been so much wrong with this healthcare bill that Obama is touting. He began by banning from the discussion advocates of single-payer healthcare, then gave up the public option insurance alternative, and then granted Big Pharma their wish to bar the importation of cheaper drugs from Canada. Big Pharma and the insurance industry spent an unprecedented hundreds of millions of dollars to get what they wanted--and they did, buying the healthcare bill that they wanted, not that we needed.
DEMOCRATS SOLD OUT WOMEN'S LIVES
But women lost out on abortion, not only because of millions spent. The anti-abortion movement did spend millions, as did the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has the Catholic Church's fortunes behind them. Though that is a factor, we are saddled with a punitive healthcare bill because Democrats caved on whatever principles they had, because they played politics with women's bodies as the Democratic National Committee gave the green light to fund the campaigns of highly ideological anti-abortionists like Ben Nelson and other so-called Blue Dog Democrats.
This has always been an ideological battle between those for women's freedom and those who do not believe women are full human beings who have a right to control our own bodies, those who think a fetus has as much or more legitimacy than a woman. That is why Obama's philosophy of pragmatism is such a fatal flaw. He is so busy being concerned with "what works," and busy deluding himself and his Democratic cronies that this kind of halfway healthcare bill is a real victory, rather than a band-aid on a hemorrhaging America, that he has not only squandered the opportunity he did have to push through a healthcare bill that might have actually meant real change, he has set back women's rights and freedom and made our struggle for a truly new human society more difficult.
Women's groups are frantically calling their membership to flood representatives with demands to kill the Stupak-Pitts amendment and vote down Reid's so-called compromise. And whereas it is yet to be finally decided as we go to press, these same groups are already resigning themselves to failure.
As we continue this struggle for the right to control our own bodies--and it will continue--we can learn what is wrong with Obama's philosophy of pragmatism that proclaims a defeat a victory. It shows that our struggle must be grounded in concrete freedom, expressed in a total philosophy of liberation.
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