Here’s the prob­lem with H.R. 3: No Tax­payer Fund­ing for Abor­tion Act that is pend­ing in the U.S. House. Alright, arguably there are many prob­lems with this, but here’s the big one:

[H.R. 3] dis­al­lows any tax ben­e­fits for amounts paid or incurred for an abor­tion or for a health ben­e­fits plan that includes cov­er­age of abor­tion (my bold), includ­ing any med­ical deduc­tion for such amounts or any credit for such an employer-sponsored plan.

First of all, abor­tion is a legally estab­lished pro­ce­dure that the bill spon­sors seek to penal­ize. Sec­ond, to exclude or limit fund­ing for all health­care ser­vices if the tar­geted orga­ni­za­tion lists legal­ized abor­tion as one of them, whether used or not? No reim­burse­ments for mam­mo­grams, pap smears or other basic services?

That goes way beyond human decency and in my view, way beyond the abor­tion debate, regard­less of which side of the debate you’re on. It’s one thing to per­se­cute a spe­cific action (in this case legal abor­tion) and quite another to pun­ish or ruin an orga­ni­za­tion for offer­ing a legal pro­ce­dure that one doesn’t per­son­ally agree with.

If H.R. 3 man­ages to pass, my heart goes out to those pre­dom­i­nantly fright­ened repub­li­can men who have no busi­ness leg­is­lat­ing women’s per­sonal health choices. If it gets that far, I hope the fed­eral courts very quickly smack down H.R. 3 as the truly mis­guided piece of leg­is­la­tion that it is.

Ref­er­ences

• H.R. 3 — Sum­mary: No Tax­payer Fund­ing for Abor­tion Act (GovTrack.us)

Posted on February 14th, 2011 by Sky
Filed under: Politics