Fearless on my breath...

All your uteruses belong to us:

Today the United States Senate is considering a bill that would have a serious and damaging impact on health coverage for women across the United States. The Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act (HIMMAA), introduced by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) would allow insurance companies to ignore nearly all state laws that require insurance coverage for certain treatments or conditions, such as laws that require them to include contraceptives in their prescription plans.

[...]

For years, many insurance plans covered prescription drugs, but refused to cover birth control pills and other prescription contraceptives for women. In the past decade lawmakers in 23 states have remedied this inequity and enacted contraceptive coverage laws. Under HIMMAA women will lose contraceptive-equity protections currently guaranteed by state law.

Ok, a little TMI here, apologies to the easily squicked. I take birth control pills. Is it because I'm a flaming slut whoring her way through the male population of the Bay Area? No, though you'll have to take my word on that. Why do I take them? Well see I've got this little problem, if I take them everything's fine and my body works like it should. If I don't I tend to start bleeding every two weeks and then become anemic. And you know what? I'm not the only woman with this problem.

So if this bill were to pass my insurance company and that of many other women too, could well decide that as the meds I'm taking are just contraceptives that they don't need to cover them any longer. Me and a whole helluva lot of other women would be seriously screwed...and not in a fun way either.

Here's your multiple choice question for today:

Was the Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act (HIMMAA) created to...

1) Screw consumers and rake in even bigger bucks for the insurance companies

2) Clamp down even further on female sexuality

3) All of the above!

Digby says 3:

They deliver for their primary masters, the insurance companies by "streamlining" the state laws that require the companies to cover certain health needs. This mandated coverage is often aimed at women's reproductive health. Insurance companies prefer not to be required to cover anything they can get away with not covering --- and the theocrats in the republican party want to make birth control more difficult to obtain if not against the law all together. This is one of those times when the interests of the big money boys and the bedroom police can work comfortably together.
[...]
But more than anything else we must accept the fact that these people are serious. They want to outlaw abortion and they want to curtail people's access to birth control. They aren't lying. And as they've shown with gun rights, they are in it for the long haul. We must be just a stubborn as they are and seek to wear them down rather than let them wear us down.

This is not an issue for tweaking. Let's tweak on the Ten Commandments or public funds for parochial schools or something else if it is necessary to adjust for this family values crap in order to win elections. State mandated forced childbirth and denial of access to birth control cannot be negotiated or finessed. This one's going to have to be fought out head to head, day to day to a final reckoning. That's what they are going to do and if we don't recognise that and act accordingly, we will lose.

I have to say I found Lance Mannion's latest post on the abortion debate both interesting and decidedly frustrating. I was trying to put my own ideas together to respond, but then Rana in the comments said it far better than I ever could:

I hate to say it, but for me the personhood of the fetus is beside the point. Presumably one of the rights of human beings is the right to control their own bodies. This is why we do not legally require people with O-negative blood to donate blood, why we do not legally require parents to donate kidneys to their children, why we do not legally require children to donate marrow to their parents, why we do not legally require anyone to give up any of their body in order to support someone else's.

It is true that a fetus, especially one that is more pre-term than one that is nearly ready to be born, lacks the ability to live without the biological contribution of the woman in whose womb it exists. So why should its need for a woman's uterus trump the woman's right to control her own body, given that a need of this kind carries no legal compulsion for any other category of person?

Now, there may be moral or ethical obligations that devolve upon the mother -- or the blood donor, or the organ donor, et al. -- in a situation like this, but those are the purview of churches and individuals, not government. I especially do not approve of the legal imposition of the moral code of a belief system I find to be vicious, rigid, and anti-woman, as if my own moral code was not good enough.

I personally would be reluctant to have an abortion if I became pregnant, because I _do_ believe in that fetuses are more than just clusters of cells, but that decision to give over my body and health to the support of another human being should be MINE. Not my partner's, not the fetus's, and certainly not that of judgemental, self-righteous people who know nothing about me or my life and couldn't care less about what happens to me during the pregnancy or either me or the child after birth.

So whether the fetus is a pre-baby or a clump of parasitic cells is not decisve to me. Either one believes that women have the same right as men, children, and fetuses to control their own bodies, in which case one must reject restrictions on abortion of any kind, or one is choosing to see women as legally inferior to the rest of humanity.

We may wish that adult female human beings behave in selfless ways, but I find it morally repugnant to single them out for legal coercion when they choose to exercise the same rights to bodily integrity that the rest of humanity can exercise unimpeded.

Yeah, that about sums it up for me.