Representative Thompson has introduced HB 1123 restricting the ability of insurance companies to write policies that provide coverage for abortion services. It was passed out of committee and has gone through second reading and is now ready for a floor vote. A policy of accident and sickness insurance may not provide coverage for abortion except if the woman became pregnant through rape or incest or if an abortion is necessary to avert the woman’s death or “a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” So, substantial impairment of a major bodily function is apparently acceptable if, some day, it can be reversed. Abortion coverage can be offered through a rider or an endorsement.
What is the rational basis for this policy? Abortions are o.k. if you pay for them with cash or through coverage that’s tacked on to the end of a policy with a rider but they are not o.k. if they are paid for as part of basic coverage?
I can appreciate why many people have a dim view of abortion, but what Americans learned from the prohibition experience was lost on many of them. Prohibit something that people want to do, they find ways to do it, and many evils can grow out of that in the process. When the law says nobody can do something that people want to do, then that activity is basically unregulated and anyone do it under whatever circumstances they choose. In the U.S., abortion is about 23 per 100K people, but in South America, where it is strictly prohibited, it’s 30 – 50, and it’s not necessarily safe. Is that where these people want to go? Of course, they could do much better by systematic sex ed and family planning, and bring down abortion to 6-8 per 100K, like Belgium, Netherlands and (even) Tunisia. (See Guttmacher.org for the data.)
“I can appreciate why many people have a dim view of abortion”
Really? Why?
This is an ultrasound:
I don’t understand why it’s always the stick, not the carrot, that’s offered.
If you truly want less abortions, why not offer free pre-natal care and cover the medical costs of women who will bring the child to term and give it up for adoption? (Fine. Tie her tubes after #2 if you’re worried about it being abused.)
If opposition to abortion were primarily about abortion, then we’d have a lot more sex education and more freely available contraception. Because those things actually do reduce the number of abortions. But they don’t reduce the amount of sex and, so, are not generally embraced by the pro-life community.
“If opposition to abortion were primarily about abortion, then we’d have a lot more sex education and more freely available contraception.”
Doesn’t follow, at all, and actually contradicts itself. Your argument takes the form, if you want more Liberty, you have to accept a lot less Liberty.
This is another one of those areas where people think about a problem in a narrow context, rather than the whole picture. Let’s not talk about sex. It’s nasty and makes repressed people uncomfortable. Just abortion.
By the way, the claim that birth control and even abortion are contrary to (Christian) religious tradition, isn’t consistent with the ancient documents. The Mishneh (i.e., Mishneh Torah) clearly supports partial-birth abortion, and many stories in the Old Testament, when you look at the context of the story, show birth control as being widely practiced–effective or not. Historically, the whole abortion debate is relatively recent–within the last 130 years–but has only become an ideological debate since the 1980s.
Just big government interfering with the free rights of businesses.
BIG GOVERNMENT DOESN’T BELONG IN PEOPLE’S HEALTH DECISIONS (except when it stops perfectly legal services that conservatives don’t approve of for reasons that have nothing to do with medical treatment)!