Health Care Reform -- or Abortion

Killing is bad.
Abortion is killing.
So abortion is bad.

So if a health-care reform bill would in any way pay for -- or even condone -- abortion, it should not be passed.

But wait a minute: is abortion worse than other forms of killing? If your family is penniless and your child dies of malnutrition, is that not a form of killing? If you have a treatable disease but die because you couldn’t afford treatment, haven’t you been killed just as surely as if someone shot you?

How many women have abortions in a year? How many people die because of inadequate health care?

Some experts are saying that some 15,000 people die yearly because they lack access to health care. Either they don’t seek treatment because they can’t afford it, or they are turned away from hospitals or doctor’s offices for lack of insurance.

The counterargument has been that uninsured people can always go to an emergency room and receive treatment. Now there are studies that show that such people have a higher death rate than insured people with the same ailments. Why? Because the uninsured have not received the early interventions -- in the beginning stages of the disease -- and go to the emergency room only when the disease is far advanced. And they do not receive any follow-up after they leave the emergency room. So let’s add these numbers to those who die for lack of access.

And here’s something that perhaps should not be brought up here, since it would be hard to attach numbers to related early deaths, but here it is anyhow: It is well documented that about half of all bankruptcies -- and that’s several hundred thousand a year -- are medical related. Typical scenario: You have a job, and you have health insurance. You come down with a catastrophic illness -- perhaps a cancer that requires long and expensive treatment. You are out of work so long that you lose your job. Soon the health insurance expires or reaches a maximum pay-out level, and the insurance company tells you your treatments will no longer be covered. You borrow, you re-mortgage your house, eventually you declare bankruptcy, and you and your family are penniless. We have read -- anecdotally -- or people who have committed suicide in despair when they find themselves in such a situation. Obviously, there is a heavy economic and emotional cost to this scenario, and undoubtedly a cost in lives as well, even if we’d have trouble attaching numbers to it.

About abortions: I agree with the way Hilary Clinton phrased it: “Abortions should safe, available -- and rare.” Instead of banning abortions, it makes more sense to me to try to remove the conditions that cause unwanted pregnancies. Let’s teach young people -- male and female -- about human dignity, about respect for themselves and their partners, about sex as an expression of love and respect and dignity. And while we teach young people these things, let’s also teach them that if they insist on having sex without the intention of creating babies, they need to take precautions so as not to create babies. If we as a society could succeed in doing these things, there would be very few abortions in any case.

I would urge the anti-abortion opponents of health-care reform to save lives by working on eliminating the need for abortion, and to save more lives by supporting health-care reform.