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Action: Please call your Representative to defeat the Stupak amendment, and to oppose denial of coverage to immigrants (pdf).
After this health financing reform legislation passes the House, it seems the burden for coming up with the costs associated with pregnancy and pregnancy prevention will likely fall more entirely on women afterwards than before. This is nothing new.
For years uncounted and still today, the vast majority of unpaid labor associated with raising children has fallen on women. Just as the career costs, Social Security benefit costs, unemployment eligibility costs, and most of the other opportunity and financial costs associated with two decades of working for helpless people who can only pay you in hugs, fall largely on women.
On top of all this volunteer work they do, society has collectively decided not to give a damn that women are paid less when they are paid, nor that their greater healthcare costs have to be paid for out of either these smaller salaries, or family money whose use they often have to justify to someone with greater social status.
And today, a few too many Democrats are coming out to stand with Bart Stupak and basically say that they're fine with this unpaid labor of love becoming mandatory for women who can't pay to avoid it, nor have the patience of saints to be abstinent.
This seems to me to be an expression of unimaginable hatred for women, who literally risk their lives every time they decide to carry a child a term, and the poorer a woman is, the less access to medical care and good nutrition she has, the truer that is. It might not be politic to talk about, considering that it can't be measured in money, but each of us owes a debt to our mother that can never be repaid and it's a mockery of the sacrifice of every mother to make motherhood a matter of force.
There is no other circumstance in the present-day US in which a human being is forced to risk their life or health for someone else. When it's done in combat or public service, soldiers get medals, firemen and police get commendations. When it's an organ donation, there's praise and thanks for a generous gift. When women do it in pregnancy, it's no less than they owe.
Women are more than half the population, we are 'most people.' A third of us will have abortions in our lifetimes because either our health was at risk or we simply could not afford a two decade commitment to more unpaid work. Yet in spite of that, too many people see nothing wrong with shaming us, marginalizing our concerns, stigmatizing our necessary health care options, and condemning any independent, not-male-approved exercise of our sexuality.
It's unfair, some say, that 'the rest of society', by which they mean men, should have to support any of women's expenses, in any way, because it isn't like they benefit. And after all, they already did all that exhausting thrusting and pumping, and btw, you're welcome. Words fail.
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