| By Clem Guttata
When you, your wife, your daughter, your partner, your neighbor, your co-worker, your friend, or any one else you care about faces a life-threatening health issue, you expect health insurance to cover it. No questions asked.
Unfortunately, for too many people in too many situations, that's not the case. Natasha Chart shares a personal experience in Pregnancy: Health and Human Rights:
I remember the day in 1997 when I listened to my doctor tell me that I had a very large ovarian cyst, also, that I was likely to have a miscarriage. She said it was good that my body seemed to be taking care of things on its own, because the cyst could rupture and hemorrhage and they couldn't operate if I was pregnant because it was a Catholic hospital.
My doctor wasn't mean about it, she just couldn't give me this operation that she'd told me about a minute previous I needed to avert a threat to my life.
I was lucky that I miscarried. As the hormone-induced changes in the cyst caused pain that made it hard to stand upright in a matter of days, it's a good that I didn't have to go through the trouble of finding another hospital covered under my insurance. I went quickly from the terror of waiting to know if I could get that operation to the grim realities of going through it and recovering.
It turned out all right, but I've always remembered since then that I once sat helpless in a doctor's office watching her eyes slide away from mine to the floor as she refused to say anything when I pressed her to tell me what would happen if there wasn't a natural miscarriage. She just skipped ahead to how someone with my blood test results wasn't going to be pregnant much longer.
Opponents of abortion like to center their arguments around the fetus and talk about whether it's a person. Which basically means to me that they don't think women are people with the basic right to determine the conditions of their lives and what will happen to their bodies, who can be forced to suffer or die because it will make someone else feel better.
Click through to her post, she's got a ton of informative links there.
One in three women will be abused in her lifetime, as I was, which is about a sixth of the US population. I daresay there's some overlap there with the one in three of us who will decide that she needs to have an abortion in her lifetime.
There's nothing equivalently risky that men can legally be forced to do, or are even likely to be asked to do, aside from being on the front lines of a war zone.
If a woman's right to decide that she just can't handle this ridiculous level of risk at a given time, or that her body simply can't take anymore, or that she can't outlast the depression it may trigger, is regarded as irrelevant, then no one really has any inalienable rights (via) at all.
If you're a Democrat who doesn't get that all restrictions on abortion are human rights violations, we aren't on the same team.
Well said, Natasha. |
