Re: “Stumping for Stupak”

To the editors:

Mr. Lewine’s arguments against the platform of the Harvard Stop Stupak movement are illogical and unrealistic. I would like to start by addressing his two refutations of the Stop Stupak Amendment.

First, he claims that the amendment “in no way makes abortion illegal.” Perhaps Mr. Lewine is naïve enough to believe that policymakers never try to conceal their agendas in technical wording. The fact that the Stupak-Pitts amendment does not explicitly illegalize abortion means very little when we look at the sector of the population that the amendment will most seriously affect. For the low-income women who have no hope of getting access to supplemental insurance, much less $372, and have not planned their pregnancies, Stupak effectually will render abortion illegal, forcing them to seek illegal, unsafe abortions.  Mr. Lewine also underestimates the difference between splurging on an iPod and paying for an abortion. Having an abortion is not an easy choice, whatever anti-choice proponents might say—even outside of the certainly devastating realization of the gravity of her decision, a woman going through an abortion faces relentless attack, including the onslaught of insults and eggs as she walks to the entrance of a clinic.

As for the supplemental insurance: There won’t be any. While Stupak claims private individuals will be able to purchase a plan that includes abortion—as long as these individuals are not receiving any federal funding or affordability credits—insurance company executives have admitted that with no incentives to provide supplements, they will be “impractical” and unlikely (Jodi Jacobson, RH Reality Check). Insurance companies seem to understand what many Stupak supporters do not: Abortion is a solution for an unplanned pregnancy. President Obama has also indicated that Stupak goes too far (Planned Parenthood).

The claim on our rally fliers that Stupak will force women into unsafe abortions comes from data collected in the U.S. Before abortion was legalized, 1.2 million illegal abortions occurred every year—and, regardless of whether these abortions were sometimes safe, low-income women would almost certainly not have had access to potentially safer abortions that their higher-income counterparts might have chosen. Is Mr. Lewine really trying to argue that simply because illegal activities in developed countries are relatively safe, we don’t need to worry about making a medical procedure accessible legally? Whether abortions are legal or illegal, low-income women will NOT have access to safe abortions unless the federal government makes a commitment to help them.

Mr. Lewine makes an interesting point in his second argument that “if a choice is made based on economic necessity, it is not a real, truly free choice.” Certainly, the choice to have an abortion is often made based on economic necessity. But once the option of abortion is no longer open to a woman, there is no other choice. The natural course of this situation runs inevitably toward childbirth and child-rearing (adoption, if it is an alternative, only becomes one much later; Child-rearing carried out by an adopted mother still occurs after the biological mother has undergone a long, difficult pregnancy).

Let us discuss also the women “for whom the Stupak amendment would make abortions prohibitively expensive.” We are not talking about women with iPods, but rather those whose medical conditions may make pregnancy dangerous, yet not sufficiently life-threatening to warrant insurance; women whose partner relations do not qualify as rape but are almost as far removed from free choice; women who prior to the passage of Roe vs. Wade died every day after botched illegal abortion procedures. For these women, the choice to have an abortion may be the only free choice they are able to make for the sake of their unborn fetuses.

Health care without comprehensive reproductive coverage for women will not be universal. It will be a betrayal of the rights that millions of women currently have to an abortion, and that under Stupak (or Hatch for that matter) will be stripped from them.

Taylor Poor ’12 is an East Asian studies concentrator in Eliot House. She is a member of HarvardStudentsStopStupak.org and Harvard Students for Choice.