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Must-Read on Stupak

Jill

Katha hits it out of the park.

You know what I don’t want to hear right now about the Stupak-Pitts amendment banning abortion coverage from federally subsidized health insurance policies? That it’s the price of reform, and prochoice women should shut up and take one for the team. “If you want to rebuild the American welfare state,” Peter Beinart writes in the Daily Beast, “there is no alternative” than for Democrats to abandon “cultural” issues like gender and racial equality. Hey, Peter, Representative Stupak and your sixty-four Democratic supporters, Jim Wallis and other antichoice “progressive” Christians, men: why don’t you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?

For example, budget hawks in Congress say they’ll vote against the bill because it’s too expensive. Maybe you could win them over if you volunteered to cut out funding for male-exclusive stuff, like prostate cancer, Viagra, male infertility, vasectomies, growth-hormone shots for short little boys, long-term care for macho guys who won’t wear motorcycle helmets and, I dunno, psychotherapy for pedophile priests. Men could always pay in advance for an insurance policy rider, as women are blithely told they can do if Stupak becomes part of the final bill.

President Obama, too, worries about the deficit. Maybe you could help him out by sacrificing your denomination’s tax exemption. The Catholic Church would be a good place to start, and it wouldn’t even be unfair, since the blatant politicking of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on abortion violates the spirit of the ban on electoral meddling by tax-exempt religious institutions. Why should antichoicers be the only people who get to refuse to let their taxes support something they dislike? You don’t want your tax dollars to pay, even in the most notional way, for women’s abortion care, a legal medical procedure that one in three American women will have in her lifetime? I don’t want to pay for your misogynist fairy tales and sour-old-man hierarchies.

Read it all.

10 thoughts on Must-Read on Stupak

  4. I love that article.

    Now, what do we have to do to get it moved from “reproductive rights” to the “human rights” section where it belongs. I’m just about sick of “reproductive rights” sections as a whole because I see pitiful little about men’s “reproductive rights” being discussed in those categories. If forced birth isn’t a human rights issue then I’m a virgin.

  5. Superb article, right from the “Whose Team Is It” headline. Because if women, feminists, and pro-choicers have to “take one for the team” by pandering to anti-choicers, then it simply isn’t “the team” – it’s another team, and a demand that we switch our support to it.

  6. Many of us didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary because the goal of electing a woman seemed less important than the goal of electing the best possible president.

    Hey, how’s that working out for ya, Katha?

  7. TH, give her a break. She caught a lot of flak from her fellow Obama supporters when she called out sexism that was directed at HRC.

  8. And, I also want to say, there’s an awful lot of classism as well as sexism in the support for this amendment. McCaskill didn’t think the amendment wasn’t “that bad” since, you know, abortion would still be legal and available (if you were a woman who had money, apparently). Ostensibly pro-choice reps voted for this thing thinking that it “only” affected an allegedly small number of people–people who need financial help. Which is odd, since last time I checked, the economy was reaming an awful lot of people and poor people are still human beings who deserve the same access to healthcare as everyone else.

    Instead of Monday morning quarterbacking and theorizing about what life would be like in an alternate universe that had HRC as president, let’s just move forward and hold these jackasses accountable.

  9. I’m just going to throw out there that having a kid because you couldn’t come up with the money to abort it has got to be one of the SUCKIEST reasons to become a parent out there.

    And sucks for the kid, too. And the rest of society too. As maternal income is closely correlated to age at first child and number of children, and children’s income closely correlated to parental income– throwing out this money now to people who *actually want it* is going to pay so many dividends in increased taxes as these families move towards middle and upper class, and that’s just talking money and not increased standards of living. Way more than the cost of the abortion today. These women don’t want kids and happen to be poor. It seems to me that if someone *doesn’t want to be a parent* than probably they *shouldn’t be a parent* and society should probably care that most children get to grow up with good parents, at least when the solution is so damn SIMPLE.

    I’m so confused at the logic against it.

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