Michigan lawmakers are quickly running out time to vote on a proposed bill that would limit abortion coverage in private health insurance plans. The bill would force insurance beneficiaries to purchase separate insurance if they would want abortion coverage.
“Michigan citizens do not want to pay for someone else’s abortion with their tax dollars or health insurance premiums,” Right to Life of Michigan President Barbara Listing said in a release to MLive. “Abortion is not health care; abortion kills a living, developing human being.”
State Sen. Gretchen Whitmer, a Lansing Democrat and minority leader, told MLive it’s one of the most misogynistic proposals she’s seen.
Lawmakers have less than 30 days to take up the bill, or they can send it to a statewide ballot.
Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed a similar bill last year.
“I don’t believe it is appropriate to tell a woman who becomes pregnant due to a rape that she needed to select elective insurance coverage,” Snyder wrote in his veto letter.
Maintaining easy access to abortion clinics not only provides women with health options for unplanned pregnancies, but it also benefits the greater society on a number of levels. Children born into homes that cannot support them financially or emotionally are more likely to be dependent on social welfare programs later in life.
A 2001 study, The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime, by John J. Donohue III of Yale University and Steven Levitt of University of Chicago, argued that the legalization of abortion after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 was a leading cause for falling crime rates in the 1990s. The study was – and still is – controversial.
Supreme Court Justice Blackmun opinion in Roe v. Wade also referenced the social and private problems “of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it.”
Listing’s argument is simple fear mongering, scaring the conservative right against the left-leaning Big Government. Medicaid, a federally and state-funded health care program for the needy, doesn’t offer abortion coverage, and limiting abortion coverage in private health insurance plans doesn’t seem like the free-market mentality typically held by the GOP.
The Supreme Court is to take up a challenge on the contraceptive portion of the Affordable Care Act filed by the openly religious Hobby Lobby. This decisive issue could have far reaching implications that can then be used to counter the GOPs anti-contraceptive stance. The GOP is known for their flip-flopping ideologies, like their fear of big government unless it pertains to women’s rights.
As state lawmakers across the country slowly turn back the time on progress and freedom, the anti-abortion bill our lawmakers are contemplating is a dangerous one. While many see abortion as a destructive and disgusting force that goes against the will of God and the rights of the unborn, providing easy access to it has far reaching and beneficial outcomes for the greater good of society.
