Your Republican Representatives Are Not "Pro-Life"
For all their talk about being the pro-life party, Republicans in the House of Representatives struck a deathblow to their own anti-abortion platform with the passing of the American Health Care Act (AHCA). The move to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA; commonly known as Obamacare) is the biggest and most egregious affront to a pro-life stance that we’ve seen from this Congress and administration, and it happened at the hands of the Republicans themselves.
I consider myself pro-life, but to me, that does not just mean reducing the abortion rate in this country. To be pro-life means to be pro-all-of-life, not just up until the moment of birth, and it means valuing all of life, regardless of one’s gender, race, income, immigration status, or ability. The Republicans in Congress have routinely failed to grasp this concept, and the health-care vote just reinforces their ignorance or indifference.
Access to health insurance is an explicitly pro-life issue.
For those of us who want to reduce the number of abortions, a good place to start is giving women access to affordable contraception and therefore more control over whether they get pregnant. It’s widely known that access to free birth control reduces the rate of abortions, and since Obamacare was signed into law, more than 55 million women gained access to zero-copay birth control. Birth control, when used correctly and depending on the method, is up to 99.9 percent effective, but without health insurance, birth control can cost around $1,200 out-of-pocket (including the required physician visits) per year, a crippling amount for poor and low-income women. Since the ACA passed, we have seen abortion rates drop to historic lows - the lowest since the procedure became legal via Roe v. Wade in 1973.
But the GOP bill seeks to undo all of these protections and provisions that were put into place in the Obama era. The Congressional Budget Office has yet to grade the newest version of the bill on its fiscal impact, but when it analyzed an earlier draft of the bill in March, it estimated that 24 million people would lose their health insurance with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which includes access to prescription contraceptives. Pro-life, indeed.
The ACA also mandated that insurers cover certain “essential benefits,” including maternity and newborn care and pediatric services, and it’s estimated that 9.5 million previously uninsured women gained access to maternity and prenatal care with the Affordable Care Act. That means 9.5 million women were able to access ultrasounds, gestational diabetes screenings, lab studies, medications, hospitalization, newborn baby care (including NICU services), lactation consulting and breast pumps, postpartum mental health care, and more for the very first time if they became pregnant. This was a monumental achievement for women and newborn children - one the GOP seems content to roll back.
There’s a lot of speculation about what exactly could happen with the GOP health-care bill in regards to preexisting conditions, and there is a lot of false information floating around on social media. But in short, under the Republican plan, pregnancy could deny you health insurance at worst, or force it to be more expensive at best. According to the Washington Post, “Under the GOP’s proposal, states are given the option of dumping an Obamacare rule that requires insurers to provide maternity coverage to all women and safeguards them from fee increases in the event of a pregnancy. In other words, maternity coverage, as dictated by the federal government, would no longer have to be an 'essential benefit.'”
Here's the thing about having babies. It often happens in hospitals, under the direction of medical care. And this medical care can be very expensive if you don’t have insurance - often more than $10,000 for an uncomplicated birth. But when women do have access to health insurance, evidence suggests they may be less likely to seek an abortion. If pregnancy qualifies as a preexisting condition and women can't get coverage, what do Republicans in the House think is going to happen? By making health insurance less accessible to women of reproductive age, Republicans have undermined their own stated goal of eradicating abortion. Pro-life, indeed.
Lastly, President Barack Obama expanded Medicaid, our country’s dual-funded state and federal health insurance program for low-income and at-risk people that covers children, the elderly, the disabled, and people living in poverty who receive federal assistance, and gave coverage to an additional 11 million people. The new House bill would not only end that expansion, it would cut and restructure the Medicaid program, disproportionately affecting the ability of women - particularly women of color - to receive health care. The new GOP health-care bill also proposes to strip Medicaid of its funding by a whopping $880 billion over the next decade, which would make it nearly impossible for individual states to keep providing the same amount of coverage to everyone enrolled in Medicaid, including around 15 million women of reproductive age. In 2015, 20 percent of women of reproductive age in the U.S. were able to rely on Medicaid for no-cost birth control, maternity and prenatal coverage, cancer screenings, and all of their health-care coverage needs.
There are always a lot of moving parts when it comes to massive budget cuts. But if this deep Medicaid cut actually happens, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where there wouldn’t be a significant scale-back of family planning services and critical maternal care (which would only increase our rate of infant and maternal mortality). By slashing Medicaid and remaining strongly anti-abortion, the House GOP is putting women in an impossible position. Pro-life, indeed.
If Republicans had any interest in being truly pro-life, they would work to create a culture in which the lives they so vociferously defend would have a chance to thrive and flourish. If Republicans were truly pro-life, they wouldn’t want to give a woman another reason to choose abortion. But it seems to me that Republicans in the House want to force women to have their babies, but refuse to help give them the means in which to do so.
Pro-life, indeed.
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