Health Care Victory

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

I know that it sounds a little weird after Saturday's health care vote on the House floor, but if Speaker of the House can claim victory after losing two gubernatorial races because of beating one third-party candidate, then I can claim victory on the passage of a massive health care bill that may impact millions of Americans.

Particularly those directly affected by the pro-choice political machine.

The power of pro-life choices stood tall as the deciding factor in moving any legislation forward towards health care reform. Granted, I believe that this direction towards government-run health care is not the best direction to provide more Americans with quality health care. With that said, seeing that Democrats and Republicans can come together in a bi-partisan protect of elective abortions on the taxpayers' dime.

Those opposed to this development can look towards one of two sets of facts in order to see why this is the best move for America, particularly if we continue towards this public-funded option.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute did a study a few years back that concluded that only 13 percent of abortions in the US were covered under private health insurance. The Kaiser Family Foundation's findings conclude that roughly half of those women that have employer-based insurance have abortion coverage included.


Most would not argue the procedure on the grounds of danger to the women's well-being, but the polarizing rhetoric from the left concerning the insistence of a public option that includes carte blanche abortion accessibility was misleading as it was slanderous of those that opposed this use of public funds. It is bad enough that President Obama already made public-funded abortions possible (by way of this January 2009 executive order - his very first presidential executive order - to fund overseas abortions with American tax dollars.) What would be worse would have been our willingness (through a political supermajority, not a majority of American citizens, by the way) as a nation to extend this practice of elective state-run genocide on American soil.


And let's call many of the elective abortions what they are - genocide. Many African-American leaders continuously point to the numbers of abortions endured by Black women as a sad sign of the times for Black people in the USA, a cycle that keeps many Black women in fiscal and spiritual poverty and despair. Other communities within the Christian realm note similar findings from their experiences providing counseling and support for women survivors of abortion.


Do we really want to dip the hard-earned money of Americans into - at the very least - a well of controversy and divisiveness? At the worst, do we put it towards a perceived cesspool of depression and destruction?


People can put this argument in a frame of their personal choosing (just as I did), but there is a slew of complicated facts that transcend the abortion issue past considering it a mere women's health care issue that should be included in federal funding. Even if Congress collectively got it wrong on Saturday, they got the abortion aspect right. Perhaps that was the bi-partisanship that the White House was looking for.


Then again, after again looking back to January and throughout the record, perhaps not.