How long have I been making noise for healthcare
reform?  But I just can’t feel like the House "reform" vote is a
victory, though I know it is. Eliminating insurance coverage for abortion
is NOT what I had been looking, hoping, and advocating for. Once again, the
health of women is a political football. It is not about what’s best for us,
it’s about political expediency, and that’s just bullshit. The Stupak amendment
is not about ensuring tax dollars don’t pay for abortions — the Capps
amendment provided for that, along with the notorious Hyde amendment. It is
about restricting women’s access to healthcare.

Here’s what our government says to women:  Making an
intimate personal choice to end a pregnancy? No insurance coverage. Want to
give birth in the privacy of your own home with a midwife and minimize costly intervention?  You may or may not be covered. Pressured into an unnecessary induction, epidural and cesarean because the ultrasound shows that
the baby is big/small/whatever? Where’s the checkbook?  At least in Washington
State, the government is refusing
to pay more for cesareans than for vaginal birth.  At least in Washington
State, poor women can get Medicaid
to pay for a midwife-attended birth or an abortion. 

My tax dollars pay for military action I do not support, and
yet anti-abortion people refuse to allow premiums paid by individual women to go
toward abortion coverage within their health plan. Why is my concern for life
less valid than theirs? Please defund the Pentagon before asking me to give up
my autonomy.  Women (& men) deserve the freedom to make our own best
choices with dignity. Legal, covered abortion & homebirth for all women,
now!