When is Rape Not Rape? When the GOP House Wants to Limit Your Right to Choose Posted by McCamy Taylor Fri Jan 28th 2011, 11:59 PM
Pay close attention to the wording of the latest Republican assault on reproductive choice.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) called HR 3 “No Taxpayer Finding for Abortion” goes a lot farther than the Hyde amendment. Under this new bill, if your health insurance covers abortion and you allow your insurer to pick up the tab—you can no longer write off your health care premiums. That means unless you had the forethought to buy special abortion insurance, you are out of luck. And how many women plan for an unplanned pregnancy?
Under HR 3, there is a medical exemption. However, your illness must be “physical” before the federal government will pay for it or will allow your insurer to pay for it. Here is the language.
(2) in the case where the pregnant female suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the pregnant female in danger of death unless an abortion is performed, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself.
This wording gives the director of the Department of Health and Human Services the option to deny abortion funding to poor women with mental illness by claiming that schizphrenia, depression and bipolar disorder are mental rather than physical. Never mind that each illness can be fatal if the sufferer decompensates---and that pregnancy can trigger a decompensation. Note that many people with serious mental health problems are on Medicaid. Note also that mental retardation would not be covered. If a 20 year old with the mind of a child becomes pregnant, the GOP Houses insists that she carry that child to term.
Of course, someone with severe mental retardation can not consent to sex. For her, sex is by definition “rape. Or rather, it used to be rape. HR 3 has a strange way of defing rape.
(1) if the pregnancy occurred because the pregnant female was the subject of an act of forcible rape or, if a minor, an act of incest;
Here is one analysis of the bill:
With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to “forcible rape.” This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. (Smith’s spokesman did not respond to a call and an email requesting comment.)
Given that the bill also would forbid the use of tax benefits to pay for abortions, that 13-year-old’s parents wouldn’t be allowed to use money from a tax-exempt health savings account (HSA) to pay for the procedure. They also wouldn’t be able to deduct the cost of the abortion or the cost of any insurance that paid for it as a medical expense.
http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/...
So, according to the Republican House (which has embraced HR3) statuatory rape is not really rape. If your 9 year old daughter is given drugs and then the three men who live next door have sex with her while she is unconscious, she was not raped. She just had sex---and if she gets pregnant, she has to live with the consequences. If your mentally retarded and institutionalized daugher is assaulted by an employee of her residential care facility, you will either need to scrape up the money for her abortion yourself—or stock up on Pampers, because chances are that she will not be able to testify that the sex was “forced”.
The phrase “forcible rape” is problematic. It could easily be interpreted to mean “rape which a woman has reported to the police as an assault.” In this case, women who do not report being raped---maybe because they are afraid that the assaillent will seek revenge upon them or their family---could be deemed ineligible for a tax payer funded abortion.
Back to the “physical disorder” exemption. Note that the woman must be in danger of death. She can not be in danger of being paraplegic or having her legs amputated or going into renal failure. Some doctor has to assert that she is going to die without an abortion. The doctors who do assert that she will die without an abortion in order to get the procedure covered are then at risk of being sanctioned by the government. Anti-choice medical auditors can “review” the case, claim that death was not eminent---and slap the doctor with a hefty fine or even with criminal charges. The result will be that physicians will tend to wait longer until recommending a pregnancy termination---and women will have more chance of suffering severe medical injury or death as a result.
One other exemption that is missing---abortion in the event of a nonviable pregnancy. Say your baby is anecephalic. It has no brain. It will not survive outside the womb. Under the Republican plan, the mother will have to carry that baby to term and then watch it die.
This is a very sneaky bill, because the GOP can claim that all they are doing is saving the taxpayers money. If the House passes it and the Senate rejects it, they can claim “Democrats want to give away free tax payer funded abortions.” Democrats need to educate the public about how medically irresponsible this bill is.
Poster Comment:
First, note that the only exceptional circumstances that would allow an abortion require a "physical" impairment (not a mental or psychiatric one) and they must put the women in danger of death -- mere danger of, say, crippling side-effects, such as stroke, heart attack, diabetes, etc., don't count. In essence, the woman has to find a doctor who will say "this pregnancy will kill this woman, and I, as a doctor, am utterly helpless to pull her through unless the pregnancy is aborted." You won't find many doctors willing to say that, and when you do, you'll probably find some other doctor who will insist on the opposite - although they probably won't be volunteering to take on her case.
I remember a case, more than a dozen years ago, in Staten Island, NY. A pregnant woman had fallen into a serious coma - apparently the result of a stroke brought on by the physical stress of the pregnancy - and the doctors advised the husband that his wife best chance, perhaps only chance, of recovery required an immediate abortion. The husband gave his consent, at which point several total strangers filed various retraining orders in court to try to prevent the abortion -- on the pretext that the doctors had said merely that the abortion could help the woman, not that anyone would guarantee either that she'd die without it or be completely cured with it (none of these a_holes had ever seen this woman and none was a doctor). After weeks of litigation the husband finally got a court order authorizing the abortion and shortly after the abortion, his wife regained consciousness.
Then the "re-definition" of rape. Must be forcible - use of date rape drugs or other methods don't count. In the case of girls under voting age, no statutory rape, in fact, not even violent rape counts - it only counts if she's pregnant by a blood relative!
And there's nothing here about terminating a pregnancy because it make create complications for a future (and better planned) pregnancy, or because the fetus shows a crippling, even toxic, defect.
It's true: Republicans care about babies - but only from conception to birth.