Healthcare Prof:
Because of numerous Republican victories in the midterm elections, abortion-rights advocates are “looking at the most hostile Congress since abortion was legalized in 1973,” with at least 53 new antiabortion-rights members in the House and five in the Senate, columnist Katha Pollitt writes in The Nation. Pollitt also notes that Republicans now hold 29 governorships and both houses of 19 state legislatures.
Some of the newly elected Republican lawmakers are “particularly extreme,” including Sens.-elect Rand Paul (Ky.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Reps.-elect Mike Fitzpatrick (Pa.) and Tim Walberg (Mich.), all opponents of abortion even in cases of rape and incest, in accordance with Pollitt.
“For years pundits have been reassuring pro-choicers that conservatives don’t really want to get rid of abortion,” Pollitt writes, adding that “vows to ban abortion are just theater, in accordance with this view, meant to distract gullible rubes from the right-wing economic agenda.” Pollitt argues that she has “never believed this theory” because it “assumes that elections give voters a clear shot at each problem, that true believers could be controlled once elected, that political debts want never be paid and that promises might be forever postponed with no one the wiser.”
Most antiabortion-rights efforts are “focused on smaller measurers and take place in the states, where some 600 anti-choice bills were introduced last year,” she continues. “Add up enough small victories and eventually you’ve changed the reproductive rights landscape, both as a matter of law and on the ground, without having ever engaging in the type of wholesale ban or fertilized-egg-as-a-person legislation that energizes the opposition and that voters … have consistently rejected,” Pollitt argues.
According to Pollitt, Congress likely will see several antiabortion-rights efforts in the coming months, including an attempt to reinstate the “global gag rule” prohibiting federal funds for international family planning groups that provide abortion services or information with their own money. Lawmakers also could take up issues such as the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act which, among other things, would codify the Hyde Amendment to ban federal funding for abortion services and eliminate tax breaks for employer-sponsored and other private wellness plans that cover abortion services. Abortion-rights opponents will also seek action on the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act, which would ban all federal funds for organizations that perform abortion services or fund organizations that do in an attempt to target the Planned Parenthood Federation of America — the only provider of women’s wellness and family planning services in many parts of the country. Other issues likely to surface in Congress include increasing “conscience” protection for wellness providers, preserving the ban on abortions in military hospitals, banning Washington, D.C., from using its own revenue for abortion services for low-income women, and increasing antiabortion-rights provisions of the federal well being reform law (PL 111-148).
“Note that the official theme here is not the banning of abortion but freeing the taxpayer from having to pay for it, however tenuous the connection,” Pollitt writes. PPFA President and CEO Cecile Richards said the election “was not about choice” but about “jobs and the economy.” She added that “if you look at close races where the pro-choice candidate won, and where females knew the difference between the candidates on reproductive rights, they voted pro-choice and arguably made the difference.”
Richards believes Democrats will realize they need to have the support of pro-abortion-rights women to win, noting that the Senate continues to have an abortion-rights majority. Pollitt writes, “If that’s too optimistic for you, try this: only one of the new Republican senators thinks man-made global warming is real.” She concludes, “So by the time they’ve taken control of your womb, you’ll probably be dead” (Pollitt, The Nation, 11/10).
Reprinted with type permission from http://www.nationalpartnership.org. You’ll be able to view the entire Daily Women’s Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery here. The Daily Women’s Wellness Policy Report is actually a cost-free service of the National Partnership for Ladies & Families.
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