Notes from a bitch… how many angels fit on the tip of a pencil?

Confession – I’ve been trying to write a response to Emily Bazelon’s piece “Ben Nelson’s abortion provision in the health care bill sends the issue back to the states” for the past week.
The problem is that I’ve struggled to translate my response into words.
I slept on it, ignored it…set the whole damned thing aside and indulged in several days away from all things news, health care reform and blog related.
I picked it back up this morning.
Shall we?
In her double X post, Bazelon graciously acknowledges that requiring individuals to write two separate checks toward insurance coverage – one for abortion coverage and one for the rest of their health care – is a bad idea and will be bad policy.
“The NWLC complains of “burdensome hurdles,” singling out the rule that would make women who get abortion coverage make two separate payments each month, one for the abortion coverage and one for everything else. This is truly an idea only a diabolical bureaucrat could love. When is it ever a good idea to be punitive by imposing stupid inefficiency?”
But Bazelon then goes on to address the portion of the Nelson compromise that grants states the right to opt-out of offering private insurance plans that offer coverage for abortion services within exchanges.
“But the other just-for-Nelson concession doesn’t seem so bad to me. Under the Senate bill, states can choose to bar abortion coverage in the new insurance exchanges. Or they can choose to allow it. Yes, this will leave some women in conservative parts of the country who enter the exchanges without insurance that covers abortions. But it’s a lot better than the blanket ban in the House version of the bill because of the Stupak Amendment. And Nelson’s opt-out also makes abortion a state-by-state decision, often the best way to prevent the issue from detonating politically. Given what’s on the line, that seems like a compromise the pro-choice side can live with.”
Blink.


And Bazelon wraps it all up with…
“At the same time, pro-choice groups have to protest, because Nelson’s opt-out enshrines in law the geographic reality that has eaten away at the national right created by Roe v. Wade, namely that abortions are somewhere between difficult and impossible to get in swathes of the South and West. Formally speaking, this has nothing to do with constitutional law. But as my colleague Will Saletan points out, it sends a signal that the national reach of Roe isn’t sacrosanct.”
I’ve read Bazelon’s post over and over.
And then I had to do that whole setting aside thing I mentioned earlier.
Something about the post was just painfully honest…brutally so…something that I couldn’t put my finger on until I woke up this morning and read it again.
I realized from whence my disturbance comes…that it is sourced in that space of us and them and of have and have nots…of a movement that will forever carry the scars of past compromises that result in real consequences for some women who live in “conservative parts of the country” and thus live in a different America where the lack of “national reach” translates into a denial of rights.
It’s a place many women and minorities know all too well.
We who know this place know that when shit rolls down hill it picks up speed and mass and that these compromises never stay simple…and that little comfort can be found in knowing that women who live someplace else will have the same health care insurance options they had before reform when we who know this place teeter on the edge of reproductive Jim Crow.
I’m disturbed because of the realness of the piece.
Thinking that folks know full well that this compromise is a big step back with negative repercussions but are prepared to accept it anyway is one thing.
Knowing that shit…reading about pro-choice activists who are willing to live with a geographic denial of reproductive justice they won’t actually have to live with…is a whole different kind of reality.
I don’t know Emily Bazelon or her life.
I do know what it is like to live in a state with a conservative state legislature that regularly moves to restrict access to reproductive health care.
I know women who face “the geographic reality that has eaten away at the national right created by Roe v. Wade, namely that abortions are somewhere between difficult and impossible to get in swathes of the South and West.”
The view is different from here, in a conservative part of the country where privacy and choice are deemed negotiable…where the denial of reproductive justice that is causally discussed in the luckier parts of the country manifests itself in pharmacy denials, sex education curricula designed to perpetuate sexual illiteracy, and waves upon waves of anti-choice legislation fueled, in part, by the apathy of those who either can’t imagine needing the full range of reproductive health care services or know that a proper cushion of money solves pesky little problems like access and geography.
And I’m sitting here wondering how we got to this wretched place where some people who profess to believe in reproductive justice won’t fight to defend it and where other activists struggle to rally support to fight for the status quo…for health care reform that includes the access to private insurance plans that cover the full range of reproductive health care services (for the record – most private insurance plans currently offer coverage for the full range of reproductive health care, including abortion services.)
But here is where we are.
I woke up this morning knowing that a right without access isn’t a right…
…and wondering how many times we the people have to learn that shit before we finally know it…
…but knowing that the real problem is that some folks get asked how many angels fit on the tip of a pencil while other folks convince themselves they never will be asked.

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