HR 3 means Women Die

Posted: May 4, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights | Tags: | 11 Comments

A wide sweeping bill aimed straight at women’s health was debated in Congress today. HR3 goes way beyond the Hyde Amendment.  All Republicans and 16 Democratic Representatives voted for the bill which basically says that women should die rather than terminate a dangerous pregnancy.

There are other issues here too as pointed out by The Hill.   Once again, Republicans have been shown to violate their basic principles of supposedly being pro-business and anti-big government when it comes to inflicting their personal religious views on woman.

After decades of escalading group health insurance premiums and demands for Congressional action for relief, a little over one year ago many of our small businesses finally were given the opportunity for federal health insurance tax credits.

Now H.R. 3, up for a vote this week, threatens to erase this benefit for small businesses because it would eliminate the health insurance tax credits under the Affordable Care Act for any existing or new plans that provide coverage for abortion.

The problems H.R. 3 would cause for small businesses that are trying to do the right thing and offer health insurance have nothing to do with the ideological intent of this bill. Even if a small business owner agrees with the intent, the cost of passage of H.R. 3 in terms of time, money and continuity of policy is very significant.

TPM has more information on the details of this bill that has passed the house but will probably not make it to the senate floor.  This is yet another example of  Republicans clearly wasting time on bills that do nothing to deal with the pending debt ceiling issue and the jobs crisis.  This is obviously a political ploy to appease religionist radicals in the country to get them to turn out for the next election.

It’s not likely the bill will move along much further past the House. Democrats control the Senate and the Obama administration has promised to veto the bill if it ever land on the president’s desk.

Proponents say the bill will simply make permanent existing bans on using federal money to pay for abortions. But critics say the bill goes much further than existing law, and say it reopens the abortion fight that’s been in detente for years thanks to the Hyde Amendment.

The bill would end tax credits for businesses that provide health insurance benefits if the insurance covers abortions, which Democrats say is both a new encroachment on the rights of private citizens to spend their own money and a huge tax increase.

Earlier on Wednesday, the bill’s author, anti-abortion icon Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), told reporters even he understands there’s a tough road ahead for his legislation, though he said that Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) will be working to get a vote for the legislation in the Senate.

Even if the bill doesn’t make it to a Senate vote, it may have already succeeded in doing its job politically. By making a sweeping abortion restriction the third bill on the House agenda, Republicans were able to dissuade social conservatives worried that the tea party-powered 112th Congress might put their issues on the back burner.

More details on the Bill from Ms. Magazine.

The bill goes beyond the Hyde Amendment, which has banned federally-funded abortions for the past 30 years except in cases of rape, incest or threat to the woman’s life. Furthermore, H.R.3 denies tax credits to small businesses that purchase a health insurance policy that includes abortions–currently 87 percent of private insurance plans do–and enacts strict requirements for private insurance companies that cover abortions.

Additionally, the bill eliminates privately funded insurance coverage for abortion in the health-care exchanges (marketplaces for insurance purchasers) established by the Affordable Care Act. NARAL Pro-Choice America estimates that 13.5 million women who receive health coverage through Medicaid and other government-sponsored programs will permanently lose access to abortion coverage if the bill is made law.

If all that wasn’t bad enough, the bill effectively turns IRS agents into “abortion cops.” The law forbids women from using tax benefits (such as credits or deductions) to pay for abortions. Therefore, to ensure that taxpayer money does not go towards the procedure, IRS agents would have to ask questions like, “Were you raped? Was it incest?”

Finally, the bill includes a provision that prevents women in the military from having abortions on federal property, such as military bases. So if a woman in the Army gets pregnant while stationed in Afghanistan, she would have to find a doctor locally to perform the procedure or return to the U.S.

This is disgusting.  Women’s lives and health are once again collateral damage for craven politics.

The Republican idea of Family Planning

They think they own our Bodies

Posted: February 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, U.S. Politics, Violence against women, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , | 100 Comments

Update:  Women’s Health Outrage of the moment: BREAKING: Appropriation Committee sticks gov’t-funding law that cuts $372 mil in funding for Planned Parenthood/family planning into HR358

The Republican Party is waging a war against American women and is being joined by a few bad Democratic sell outs.  Representatives like Joe Pitts are attacking the rights of women to make personal health-related decisions daily.  HR#3 is just the first of a series of bills designed to narrow definitions of rape, prevention, and what constitutes federal support of women’s reproductive health.  Any one that voted for any Republican under the guise of being pissed at Democrats should take this as a lesson.  Republicans cannot be trusted to do right by women.

This is nothing less than a crusade against the autonomy and adulthood of women. We need to take to the streets again. This is the latest affront: Under Banner of Fiscal Restraint, Republicans Plan New Abortion Bills.

All but invisible during the midterm elections, the abortion debate has returned to Congress.

Invoking the mantra of fiscal restraint that has dominated House action since lawmakers reconvened last month, Republicans began committee work this week on two bills that would greatly expand restrictions on financing for and access to abortions. Another bill, one that would cut off federal dollars to women’s health care clinics that offer abortions, is expected to surface later this year.

“This House is more pro-life than it’s ever been,” said Representative Joe Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania and the author of one of the bills to limit money for abortions.

Democrats in both the House and Senate immediately fought back Tuesday, working closely with reproductive rights advocates. They have appropriated the Republican charge from last year that Democrats were working on a liberal policy agenda instead of on job creation and the economy, and turned it on its head.

We’re fortunate that some Democratic office holders are fighting against this religious crusade against American Women.  Others are not as reported here by StarkReports.  Is HR#3 so overreaching that it could end even the watered down abortion rights that we now know in the US?  Will Democrats like Harry Reid be complicit?  The Youtube above and the quote below cover the recent Democratic Press Conference on Republican attempts to control women.  It makes this important point.  Dozens of Democrats will probably join their crazed Republican counterparts to pass this abomination.  There is one thing in particular that I’d like to point out in bold below that will let you know why no woman that respects her own autonomy can vote Republican period.  This should also increase our skepticism of Democrats too.

Since every Representative in the Republican House majority is anti-choice, and since there are probably dozens of anti-choice Democrats that will join them, HR3 will assuredly pass the House.

In the Senate, Harry Reid is anti-choice and has been rolled by Mitch McConnell and the Republicans at every turn. Moreover, procedure in the Senate is much more amenable to minority priorities. Abortion supporters are hopeful, but nobody is saying with any degree of certitude that HR3 will die in the Senate.

With that in mind, I decided to ask the people in the room if they were willing to withhold their support from the President if he signed the bill if it reached his desk. Nadler dodged the question, saying it was premature. I pointed out that there was a reason he called the press conference: that he didn’t wan’t to see this bill become law. He stayed silent on the President.

The Republican party no longer represents a sane alternative to the Democratic Party.  Still, the Democratic Party cannot be trusted to do the right thing by women either.  Women have no choice but to ensure that any one that is willing to sell us out to religious extremists in the Democratic party does not get our vote.  PERIOD.

HR#3 and its counterparts make women second class citizens.  There is no other personal health decision that the government feels the need to make for any man.  This says that the majority of people in Congress and a good deal of them in the Senate do not think we are adult enough to make a ‘moral choice’.  It also continues the special treatment of fetus fetishists to opt out of paying taxes for women’s health while forcing the rest of us to pay for their bridges to no where, their murderous wars, and their religion-based stupidity like ‘abstinence education’.   The rape redefinition trick is still in these bills too.

One bill, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” would eliminate tax breaks for private employers who provide health coverage if their plans offer abortion services, and would forbid women who use a flexible spending plan to use pre-tax dollars for abortions. Those restrictions would go well beyond current law prohibiting the use of federal money for abortion services.

The bill, sponsored by Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, has drawn fire over language that undercuts a longstanding exemption on the ban on using federal money for abortions in the case of rape or incest; the measure narrows the definition of rape to “forcible rape,” a term that his office has never defined. Democratic lawmakers and others repeatedly hammered on the term, saying it suggested that victims of statutory rape and other crimes could not get abortions paid for with federal money.

While Mr. Smith’s staff said last week that the term “forcible rape” would be removed from the bill, the staff of Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, said that language remained intact as of Tuesday.

Another bill, sponsored by Mr. Pitts, addresses the health care overhaul head-on by prohibiting Americans who receive insurance through state exchanges from purchasing abortion coverage, even with their own money. The bill is essentially a resurrection of a provision in the House version of the health care law but was not in the Senate version.

The bill would also permit hospitals to refuse abortions to women, even in emergency situations, if such care would offend the conscience of the health care providers.

We now have senators whose narrow religious views will be used to define rape and will allow hospitals to let women die.  Many of you have heard this story before, but my daughter has already experienced some of this conscious clause bullshit during her forth year in Medical School while doing a rotation in Michigan.  A resident left my daughter–not a qualified physician at the time–and a nurse to clean up the remnants of a botched abortion that was rapidly going septic in one woman’s uterus.  That’s right.  This woman was left by a doctor to a fourth year medical student and a nurse as a result of an abortion-gone-wrong.  The doctor basically left her to die.  Thankfully, my daughter was a competent and conscientious caregiver and so was the nurse.  This last bill allows entire hospitals to walk away from dying women.

These bills would go no where with out the duplicity of Democrats like Nebraska’s wacko Senator Ben Nelson.  We need to make it loud and clear that we will not contribute to any mass campaign fund that includes support for people who believe women are not adult enough to make moral decisions for themselves.  You need to make sure that your donations do not go to Democratic Politician’s PACS that can sneak money to these culprits.  Lastly, we need a pledge that pro choice Democrats will not sell out women for any reason.  There needs to be an absolute understanding that these bills will not reach the President’s desk and if they do, the President will not sign them.

Woman’s should not be hung on a cross of bipartisanship or kumbaya centrist compromises.  It’s time to make that very clear. We do not want to return to the days of forced pregnancy or wire hangers. We need to know that we can trust each and every one of them to stand by us before they get any form of support from us.  This includes the President.

Rachel Maddow is on the forefront of this fight.  You can follow her efforts and get more information here at The Maddow Blog. Send letters to your congressman via NARAL.  Support Planned Parenthood here.  Read more Feminist bloggers on this.  We are not alone in our fear and outrage.  Here’s the latest from Shakesville:  ‘Take Your Legislation OFF  Me‘.