Bart Stupak Thinks He Knows What I Can Do With My Body

And Congress is voting to let him make that choice.

The amendment, which you can download and read in full here, would do three things.

First, it would codify the Hyde Amendment provisions in the bill so that the ban on federal funds being used for abortions besides those resulting from rape or incest, or in cases where the mother’s life is endangered would remain intact regardless of Hyde being reauthorized. As it’s currently written, the bill’s restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion coverage would end if the Hyde Amendment, which has been reauthorized by Congress on an annual basis since 1976, is not reauthorized.

Secondly, it would not allow individuals purchasing insurance at least in part with federal affordability credits to buy a plan that covers abortions. The bill as currently written would allow individuals to use affordability credits to buy insurance that includes abortion coverage, but it requires any such plan to segregate the credits from individual premium payments and ensure that only the premium payments are used to fund the abortion services portion of the plan.

Affordability credits are available under the bill to people who don’t get insurance from work and earn between 150% and 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. The Stupak amendment would bar all people in this income bracket from purchasing insurance that covers elective abortions unless they can afford to pay for a separate abortion coverage plan on their own. People earning below 150% of FPL would already be ineligible for abortion coverage because they will be on Medicaid, which does not cover abortions under Hyde. There are no concrete numbers for how many people would be denied an abortion-coverage option under the amendment, but it would likely be at least 20 million.

Thirdly, the Stupak amendment would dictate that the government-run public option does not provide abortion coverage. The bill currently leaves the decision of abortion coverage in the public option up to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Allowing the public option to cover abortions would not violate the Hyde Amendment because the public option is not government funded; will be entirely financed by individual premiums, just like the private plans.

You better be contacting Congress and letting them know that you're pissed. This is ridiculous. This is NOT what we voted for in giving the Democrats huge majorities and this is NOT what we wanted in health care reform.

Honduras Bans Morning-After Pill

And now, some non-coup bad news from Honduras:

A new law has taken effect in Honduras prohibiting the consumption and marketing of the morning-after pill in the Central American country.

The law was passed by the Honduran Congress at the beginning of the year with backing from the Medical College of Honduras, which pointed out that the pill has an abortifacient effect making it unconstitutional.

The Honduran Congress argued that the drug would “gravely endanger the health of the Honduran population, especially women who are able to get pregnant.”

Though the law's origin pre-dates the Micheletti regime, this is still some pretty bad timing. Taking away reproductive rights from women is always a major step backward, and especially in a law like this, when women's options on birth control are already limited (and abortion is illegal).

Perhaps the worst moment comes at the end of the brief article, when the Latin American director of the Population Research Institute and general chauvinist pig Carlos Polo commented that the law is helping Hondurans in "freeing ourselves from an inoperative and costly method that has grave adverse effects for women." Yes - those evil feminists are out to destroy women's bodies through vague "grave adverse effects" and repress them with things like freedom of choice in reproductive rights. Classy.

Improving Access to Birth Control in Brazil

In the wake of the Pope's visit to Brazil (though the timing is unintentional), Brazil began to subsidize birth control pills to all of its citizens this week. Scott at LG&M has touched often upon how efforts to undo abortion rights in the U.S. are a direct assault based as much on class-based notions of gender as anything else. Now, certainly, while the issues of abortion in the U.S. and birth control in Brazil are very differnt, one issue that still has similarities is the access, and lack thereof, to reproductive rights among the poor. Just as abolishing Roe in the U.S. would only make abortion illegal to the poor who couldn't afford safe, secret abortions, so in Brazil birth control pills have been available mostly to the minority number of middle- and upper-class women right now. As the article correctly points out, the enactment of this government program is huge - it will make birth control accessible to all, regardless of income. This in itself is vital towards any effort to leveling the social field in Brazil.

Certainly, the program does not do much in the way of making abortion a legal option for women in Brazil (and, as would be the case if Roe were stricken down in the US, abortion is only illegal in Brazil to those who can't afford to have a safe, private procedure. Despite it's illegality in Brazil, thousands of women still die every year in clandestine abortions, reminding us once again that the illegality of abortion does not lead to its disappearance). Still, by making birth control affordable on the state-subsidized program, Brazil has taken a huge step in improving reproductive rights for women and for the poor.