Saturday, 15 March 2014

The ultimate hypocrisy of being anti-abortion and anti-Obamacare

I feel the need to get something off my chest on what is just about the liveliest third-rail topic in any country's politics.

One of the things that has bothered me for a very long time (amid a very long list) about those who scream from the rooftops that the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") is going to destroy civilisation and America's health care system ("the greatest in the world" unless you use pretty much any metric used to measure the quality of health care systems) is the fact that very, very many of them identify as being anti-abortion (or "pro-life" as they would like to put it).

Watch The Daily Show's Asif Mandvi render a Fox News correspondent speechless while covering "the greatest health care system in the world (if you are outside the US you are going to have to Google the video and try and find it yourself this time!)




Now, there are of course all sorts of arguments to be had about when life begins and if and when abortion should be an appropriate option for a woman to have, but we don't need to go into that here.  What we do need to do is to take, at face value, the beliefs of people who call themselves pro-life, that they believe that abortion is murder.  Not only murder, but the most wicked and nefarious form of murder: the murder of a totally defenceless child (so defenceless that it couldn't even survive outside its mother's womb).  And to make matters worse, the person instigating this heinous act, is none other than the child's own mother.

Viewed from that perspective and holding those views, abortion really is a very wicked thing.




So, in that context really, you would have thought that Obamacare's mandatory inclusion of contraception coverage, the expansion of access to health insurance coverage that must include pregnancy coverage, and the expansion of Medicaid (which includes access to contraception), would be welcomed by those who believe that abortion is murder.

After all, the cost of an uncomplicated natural delivery in a U.S. hospital is about $10,000, and can be two or three times that.  If you can't afford health insurance, the chances of you having that sort of money on hand are not high.

What's more, studies have shown that access to contraception, such as Obamacare provides, could reduce the abortion rate ("murder", remember, to many "pro-lifers"), by 50% or up to 70%.

So if Obamacare had a successful roll out, and all the states expanded Medicaid, there is the potential to reduce the abortion/infanticide rate in the United States by maybe up to 75%.  That's huge.

That's up to 750,000 "babies not being killed" in the United States each year.

At what cost to you pro-life/anti-Obamacare people?

What non-existent to small-scale disruption to your own healthcare plan are you prepared to undergo to save the lives of 750,000 babies per year?

What is the true price of your pro-life convictions?

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