Abortion proponent Amanda Marcotte blogged last week:
It’s the most common outpatient procedure in the country, and yet we write it off as fringe. There’s only 694,000 open heart surgeries a year on average, 600,000 hysterectomies and 193,000 hip replacements a year – but there’s 1.2 million abortions performed every year.
Marcotte was complaining about something not the topic of my column today but interesting nonetheless, that for only the second time since the controversial animated sitcom “Family Guy” began airing in 1999, Fox was refusing to air an episode – on abortion.
Marcotte didn’t think it funny that Fox didn’t think abortion was funny.
But as I said, I digress.
It is true that abortion is one of the most if not the most common surgical procedure performed in America.
So, objectively speaking, abortion should be covered under Obama’s nationalized health care plan.
As pro-abortion Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., said two weeks ago when opposing an amendment to the health care plan banning taxpayer coverage of abortion, “It’s a legal medical practice. … We’re not talking about having your tonsils out and whether you can or can’t. … Let them have an abortion or not have an abortion based on their needs, not ours.”
Open your eyes to the ugliness inside the abortion industry with “Lime 5: Exploited by Choice”
Exactly. If abortion is the moral equivalent to having a tonsillectomy, and twice as prevalent (tonsillectomies are performed 600,000 times annually), then of course abortion should be covered in nationalized health care.
And if not, why not? If I were in the abortion industry, I’d be making darn sure it was.
But there has emerged a strange and opposite phenomenon. Pro-abortion leaders are going out of their way to reassure the public abortion won’t be a mandated covered procedure in any health care plan.
This makes no sense. But, wrote Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards in Huffington Post August 3:
It was only a matter of time before the right-wing campaign against health care reform began to focus on abortion … now using the idea of expanding access to reproductive health care as their latest target. …
So here are some basic facts to know as the health care debates and misinformation campaigns heat up:
Myth: Taxpayer money would be used to pay for abortions in the public plan. …
Myth: Health care reform would result in the greatest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade. …
Myth: Health care reform would mandate that virtually every American be forced into a health plan that includes abortion coverage. …
Myth: Abortion coverage is mandated in health reform bills unless explicitly restricted. …
Now, why would the head of the United States’ largest abortion provider argue against everything she wants? If these are indeed myths, why isn’t Richards fighting to make them facts?
And if Obama’s socialized health care plan would not force taxpayers to cover abortions in the public plan, private insurance companies to cover abortion, and pro-life health care entities and personnel to commit abortions, why have Democrat-controlled House and Senate committees repeatedly voted down amendments to clarify these points?
And I mean repeatedly. In a July 22 e-mail update, Richards complained (emphasis hers), “They’ve already introduced at least 30 amendments attacking women’s health care – and you can bet they’re not done yet.”
Imagine abortions were indeed like tonsillectomies and Richards was the CEO of the American Academy of Otolaryngology.
Would she be writing op-eds reassuring Americans that public insurance won’t cover tonsillectomies, and private insurance companies won’t be forced to cover tonsillectomies, all the while fighting amendments codifying those supposed facts?
If she did, I’d call Richards a kook, and if I were an ear, nose and throat surgeon, I’d demand she be fired.
But, of course, Richards is crazy like a fox.
Although Obama is on record insisting abortion would be part of his health care plan (Planned Parenthood event, July 17, 2007: “Well, look, in my mind reproductive care is essential care, it is basic care, so it is at the center and heart of the plan I propose.”), he is now pretending to punt the abortion decision to “experts in the medical field,” according to press secretary Robert Gibbs last week.
As if any of Obama’s “experts” would not be pro-abortion, or abortion providers for that matter.
But if for some reason Obama’s experts were to exclude abortion coverage from nationalized health care, Richards et al. would file a lawsuit and the courts, as they have historically done post Roe v. Wade, would determine that abortion is a basic health care need.
And voila, baby removal would be a covered procedure alongside tonsil removal and gallbladder removal.
