Medicaid should not pay for abortion. It is wrong to try to eliminate poverty by killed the unborn children of the poor. Congress set up the Medicaid program to equalize medical services between the rich and poor. To deny poor women abortion services while paying for childbirth is unfair. It removes reproductive freedom and defies both common sense and humane public policy. Cutting off Medicaid abortion actually increased poverty by trapping mothers of young children in the poverty/welfare cycle.
The Supreme Court gave the government the right to “encourage” childbirth over abortion by funding only childbirth and not abortion under the Medicaid program. States should use funding to implement pro-life values. If the government has the right to control people’s childbearing that way, then it might, under some other set of pressures (such as reducing the welfare load) choose to fund abortion for the poor but not prenatal care and childbirth. Both kinds of coercion are unacceptable. The choice must remain with the individual, not the government. Both childbirth and abortion should be funded.
Our government can’t afford to give poor women free abortion on demand. The poor aren’t entitled to everything the rich have. If they get abortions, then next they’ll be asking for Cadillacs. Abortion is not a luxury item; it is a necessary component of women’s health care. The government has decided to provide health care for the needy, and should not eliminate any medically necessary care. Since it is less expensive to subsidize an abortion than childbirth and subsequent welfare, the anti-abortion financial argument is invalid as well as inhumane. Another irony is that most anti-abortion legislators vote against funding the health and social welfare programs that make it possible for women to take care of their babies rather than abort for financial reasons.
I don’t want my tax money used for abortion, as in Medicaid. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for what they believe is immoral. We all must support some government spending we don’t like. Pacifists’ dollars support the military; Christian Scientists pay their share of medical programs. The government would be in chaos if each of us could allocate how our tax dollars are us ed. In our representative form of government, our statements are made on election day, when we choose those who decide how tax dollars are spent.
Abortion is mass murder — genocide — another Nazi Holocaust. Six million abortions are the same as six million Jews; a life is a life. Hitler used racial grounds to exterminate Jews and other “undesirables.” The reproductive rights movement has no genocide component — no one is out to kill all embryos. It is an insult to the memory of the alive and conscious human beings murdered by the Nazis to equate them with embryos for anti-abortion propaganda.
In Nazi Germany, it all started with abortion. Sexual freedom was the problem, and look where it led. The opposite is true. Totalitarian leaders Hitler and Stalin believed that the individual should be sacrificed to the state. Both instituted harsh abortion laws, outlawed other women’s rights, and forced women to stay home, bear children, and be subservient to their husbands. Russian women were criticized for treating childbearing “as if it were a personal matter.” Hitler said, “Use of contraceptives means a violation of nature and a degradation of womanhood, motherhood and love….”
Beethoven’s mother was in ill health and the family was poor. Beethoven might never have been born if his mother had been able to have an abortion. If you follow that line of reasoning, then perhaps Hitler’s mother might have had an abortion, too.
Blacks are against abortion because they believe abortion is an instrument of genocide. According to 1982 polls, there is no difference in the attitudes of blacks and whites toward legal abortion. Non-white women, however, have an abortion rate (56.8 per 1000) that is twice that of white women (24.3 per 1000). To quote two black men: Dr. Kenneth Edelin: “I know what genocide is — and it isn’t doing legal abortions. Black women have suffered and died from botched, illegal abortion. That is genocide.” Carl T. Rowan: “(Black) women know that, as long as someone else does not force an abortion on them, it is not genocide.”
In the Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court said that blacks were not persons. In Roe v. Wade, the Court decided that unborn babies were not legal persons. Both decisions were wrong. In the Dred Scott case, the issue was not the personhood of blacks, but whether they were citizens with constitutional rights. The Court consistently referred to blacks as persons. The Dred Scott case is not analogous to Roe v. Wade.
The “abortion mentality” leads to infanticide, euthanasia, and killing of retarded and elderly persons. In countries where abortion has been legal for years, there is no evidence that respect for life has diminished or that legal abortion leads to killing of any persons. Infanticide, however, is prevalent in countries where the overburdened poor cannot control their childbearing and abortion is illegal.
Abortion is being used as a method of population control in underdeveloped nations. Abortion is one way to allow individuals to limit their childbearing voluntarily when a country’s resources cannot support its population. Pro-choice people oppose forced abortion and support freedom of choice for all women in all countries.
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) will be used as a legal basis for abortion and government funding of abortion under the “equal protection of the law” concept. A Massachusetts court refused to use the state ERA as a legal basis for reinstating Medicaid funding of abortions in that state. The right to abortion is based on the right of privacy, not equal rights. None of the 14 state ERAs has caused any change in abortion law. ERA and abortion funding are entirely separate issues.
“If abortion were made illegal again, women would not return to self-induced, coat-hanger abortions or back-alley butchers. Modern suction machines, or even a catheter and bulb syringe, will be available to non-physicians. Prostaglandin suppositories would ’start’ an abortion that would appear to be a miscarriage.” Bernard Nathananson, M.D. in Aborting America This argument is specious and hypocritical. If abortion were illegal, well-intentioned but unskilled practitioners would perforate uteruses, misjudge the length of gestation, do incomplete abortions, and otherwise botch the procedure. Women’s health would suffer and the death rate soar. Further, women would once more be forced to break the law to receive medical care, and once more their dignity would be lost in the process.
Pro-life is pro-family. Pro-abortionists are anti-family. Abortion destroys the American family. Legal abortion helps parents limit their families to the number of children they want and can afford, both financially and emotionally. Anti-abortion laws create new families consisting of a child and her child, living at the lowest levels of society. Pro-choice is definitely pro-family.