Judith Warner
November 12, 2009, 9:30 pm
‘Mad Men,’ Maddening Times
“Has Congress become like an episode of ‘Mad Men’?” California Congresswoman Linda Sanchez asked this week, after the House of Representatives approved a version of health care reform that contained what some pro-choice advocates are calling the toughest restrictions on women’s access to abortion since the matter of Roe v. Wade.
Her evocation of the bad old days was well-timed. For this past weekend saw not only the political sleight of hand that stripped millions of women’s abortion coverage from the House’s health care reform bill; it also brought the season finale of AMC’s highly popular pre-Roe-era series, which concluded with the unhappy housewife heroine Betty Draper leaving her philandering husband, Don, for the promise of marriage to another man she barely knows.
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And never was the false conflict between women’s self-determination and the greater good more cruelly staged than in the dilemma that confronted the pro-choice Speaker of the House last Saturday night as she faced the decision of whether to let health reform — desperately needed by children and families — move forward with a such a considerable blow to women’s rights embedded within it, or whether to allow it to die on the vine.
Nancy Pelosi shouldn’t have had to face that “choice.” It is a highly depressing sign of our times that she did.
The Stupak-Pitts Amendment, which passed as the House eked out a vote in favor of health reform, prohibits anyone receiving a federal subsidy from purchasing insurance that includes abortion coverage. As a result,
it effectively prohibits both private health insurance plans participating in the future-envisioned insurance “exchange,” where individuals and small businesses could shop for insurance policies at competitive prices, and whatever public option may come into being, from offering abortion coverage to any woman. Reports earlier this week suggested that under the amendment’s provisions only a relatively small number of women would lose abortion benefits. But that assertion — based on a poorly understood 2001 figure from the Guttmacher Institute — turns out to be wishful thinking.
A solid majority — and perhaps as many as 87 percent — of typical employer-based insurance policies currently offer their subscribers abortion coverage. The Stupak-Pitts amendment, if incorporated into law, could make it impossible for millions of women to purchase insurance policies that cover abortion. Subsidies, after all, will be offered to all women in families of four earning up to $88,000 a year. Those buying individual coverage, those working for small businesses, those working for larger businesses but paying health care premiums that eat up more than 12 percent of their income, will all be eligible to participate in an exchange. And, as the House legislation is written, firms with more than 100 employees could in a few years be eligible to buy insurance via the exchange, too.
“You can really see those numbers growing,” Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families told me of the women threatened by the loss of coverage.
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Abortion access is already all but gone in many states; it has been so for years. Virginia recently elected a governor despite his well-publicized early writing on how working women are “detrimental to the family,” and despite his record of voting against ending wage discrimination between men and women.
Last night, I watched “By the People,” HBO’s new documentary on the election of Barack Obama.
“We’re gonna change our country. We’re gonna change the world,” I heard candidate Obama say.
But we didn’t. And, at this point, I sometimes wonder if we ever really wanted to.
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More at:
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/mad-men-maddening-times/?ref=opinion
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