Noli Irritare Leones

A song about a mad scientist “in love”:

I’ve been trying to get a little more information about what’s going on with the Stupak Amendment. Amid wildly varying accounts of what the amendment would do, Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo tackles the question of Who Would Be Most Impacted By The Stupak Amendment?

Of the 21 million people in the exchanges, 86 percent are expected to be receiving direct federal subsidies. It would be an oversimplification to say that this means 86 percent of women in the exchanges would be blocked from insurance coverage that includes abortion (it will almost certainly be more than that). But it is safe to say that the vast majority of, if not all, women in the exchanges will not be allowed to have abortion coverage in their benefits packages. These will be almost exclusively poor and middle-class women.

And their ranks are likely to grow. Over time, the reform packages under consideration allow ever larger employers to participate in the exchange, which will happen if the exchange keeps premiums down….

There’s other stuff in there about how many women have health insurance that covers abortion now (conflicting figures), and how many abortions are paid for directly vs. by insurance, but I don’t want to steal too much of Beutler’s post, so for that you can follow the link. Salon magazine has an article on What’s Happening with Health Care Reform that discusses the question of how much of the Stupak language is likely to remain in the final bill.

That’s a very good question. At this point, it seems inevitable that some sort of abortion restriction will be included if and when the legislation makes it to President Obama’s desk. It also seems likely that the exact language in the Stupak amendment won’t make the cut.

House Democratic leaders, like Clyburn and his deputy, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, have said they believe the Stupak amendment will be removed from the legislation when the House and Senate iron out the differences between their bills in committee. Separately, Obama has indicated that he thinks the language needs to be changed. Plus, 41 House Democrats have signed a letter to Pelosi in which they promise not to vote for the final bill if it “contains language that restricts women’s right to choose any further than current law.” Beyond that, pro-choice groups and activists are extremely angry about the amendment, and are fighting hard against it. And given the pivotal role the movement plays in the Democratic Party, not to mention the party’s reliance on winning a majority of women’s votes, it’s hard to believe there won’t be at least some concessions.

There’s an “on the other hand” here, though. First of all, Democrats still need those 10 votes in the House. Then, too, there’s the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid can’t afford to lose any votes if he’s going to defeat a Republican filibuster….

Meanwhile, the Republican National Council, when it was pointed out that abortion coverage had been part of its standard health insurance policy since 1991, quickly dropped the coverage.

For those of you who care about behind the scenes legislative maneuverings, David Waldman at Congress Matters has A look back at the House health bill fight (hat tip to Centered Politics), including the story of what happened to single payer:

On the single payer front, things have got to be even more frustrating. An embarrassing series of surrenders marked an already uphill battle as the process moved forward in the House, beginning with Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY-09) agreement not to offer his single payer amendment in the Energy & Commerce Committee in exchange for the promise of a floor vote on that amendment. And, well, we all saw what happened on Friday, when Weiner again miraculously agreed not to offer his single payer amendment on the floor, either.

The tragedy (or dark comedy, depending on how you look at it) is that Weiner allegedly withdrew his amendment again when he heard that the leadership would be disallowing all amendments across the board, so that they could block Stupak without having the political mess of picking and choosing between amendments individually. That, of course, worked out spectacularly.

Meanwhile, Sharon Lerner at DoubleX ponders how birth control came to be a politically toxic issue.

The best example is birth control, which was also recently thrown under the health-reform train. So far, none of the three reform bills has required insurers to cover contraception, although it is almost universally used by heterosexually active women. Other preventive services, such as some counseling about sexually transmitted diseases and pelvic exams, didn’t make the cut, either. Nor have the bills protected these services from “cost sharing,” which means that women may well end up paying for much of their birth control out of their own pockets.

Women’s health advocates reported that some Democrats cited a fear of igniting controversy when asked to insert birth control and other preventive services for women into the minimum benefits package. What’s the controversy, exactly? It seems birth control has become a suddenly loaded political issue, a toxic sister to abortion, somehow resonant of irresponsible sex and women’s bodies. And this time around, no one wanted reform to collapse under the weight of special interest groups’ requests, as the Clinton effort did in 1993….

But there was certainly no medical justification for excluding contraception from a list of services to be covered without co-payment, which included newborn care and pediatric vision services. Surely fertile women don’t represent a “special interest group,” since the overwhelming majority of women—including more than 80 percent of Catholics—use birth control….

Most doctors understand the importance of birth control: Women who use it have lower rates of infant and child mortality, more time to nurse their children, and a smaller likelihood of high-risk pregnancies and anemia. More than 38 million women are currently using some form of it, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which conducts research on reproductive health. And almost all sexually active women use birth control at some point….

On the one hand, I can understand why birth control wasn’t included in the minimum benefits package. When you’re making a big change, and not including birth control simply leaves the status quo (rather than actively making the status quo worse), it’s easy to run from the least whiff of controversy, just to keep your bill intact. On the other hand, it’s discouraging that birth control, of all things, which practically everyone uses, should be controversial. I’m personally doubtful that excluding abortion from the health insurance exchanges will actually result in any fewer abortions; the cost (financial and personal) of carrying a pregnancy to term is just so much higher than the cost of abortion that, for anyone who wants that abortion and doesn’t have any other objections to getting it, the answer to not having the money is going to be to beg or borrow it somewhere (I personally know of two bloggers who say they’ve paid for abortions for pregnancies they had no part in starting). Birth control is a different matter; as with other preventive services, it’s just enough removed from the thing it’s preventing that if there are barriers (like lack of money) in the way, you might cross your fingers and take your chances for a few months till you have money again.

And being able to space your pregnancies does have a real health impact. One of my sisters had a first pregnancy that resulted in a stillbirth, and a second pregnancy that resulted in a premature daughter born at just past 24 weeks gestation, one pound six ounces (on Christmas Eve nearly ten years ago). My niece really is a Christmas miracle; she not only survived, but thrives, without the long term health problems that affect many who were born at her level of prematurity. But with that pregnancy history, my sister was at extra risk for any pregnancy that might follow. One factor that would have increased the risk of a repeat of either the stillbirth or the way too premature birth would have been not spacing the pregnancies enough (not to mention, becoming pregnant again while caring for a particularly fragile newborn has its own set of issues). As it stands, my nephew was born, with the extra care you’d expect in a pregnancy that was known to be at higher than usual risk, but full term, several years after my niece. I’m doubtful his chances would have been as good, without birth control to space his birth out.

Another Centered Politics link is this story on what is the “Plan B” in the works for the public option, if Harry Reid can’t round up the votes he needs for the opt out version of the public option. And, a post I should have linked in yesterday’s health care reform post, Beutler at TPM discusses the six swing vote Senators that Reid has to get on board to beat a filibuster, and what they want.

Other links:

J. Peter Nixon at Commonweal (who way back when had one of the blogs that most inspired me to start blogging myself), in When Bigger Is Better. How Not to Argue Against Health Care Reform, discusses health care reform, Catholic social teaching, and when and how to apply Catholic teaching on subsidiarity.

Hector in particular may find Eve Tushnet’s Heaven Can Wait article in Inside Catholic interesting.

Cathleen Kaveny at Commonweal on Jobs and Families.

Chris Blattman on What to read about Ethiopia?

DaisyDeadhead on Wordless Wednesday: Giving Statue.

A Mormon (Feminist!) Image: A Room of My Own.

Sophia on The Lesson of the Fig Tree.

Karen Street on What Can I Do At Home? to reduce carbon emissions.

Tomorrow I’ll have another African news round up for you. I think I’ll focus it on the five countries of the East African Community.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 8:16 am and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.