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June 29, 2012

Anti-Choicers Can’t Stop Lying About the ACA

“For one who designates herself “pro-life” (who isn’t?), yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act should be a cause for celebration. After all, actual people with actual lives will see those lives saved, extended, and the quality of them improved. It’s estimated that 45,000 people die a year from lack of insurance, people with families and conscious points of view, who can feel pain and fear. These lives should matter if one wears the moniker “pro-life” to mean that you support life. Even if you sincerely think that embryos and fetuses are “people,” a true pro-life person would support the ACA, because it doesn’t really do anything to expand abortion access. In fact, under the executive order that allows states to bar insurance plans traded on the exchange from covering abortion, it’s quite possible that the ACA will eventually reduce insurance coverage of abortion. Insurance coverage of abortion is pretty common now, and many companies will drop it rather than deal with all the red tape.

Of course, if “pro-life” is just a euphemism for a worldview that is hostile to women’s liberation and fearful of female sexuality and sees reproductive health care as an angle to squash both, you’re probably against the ACA. As Sharon Lerner here at XX Factor explained, while everyone benefits from the ACA, women have even more to gain than men. For those who find vaginas too scary to be mentioned in public, this is especially alarming, because a lot of the reason is that women who use their vaginas for the sex-ing will, instead of being punished by unintended pregnancy and horrible diseases as fundie Jesus intended, will get health care like they’re people.”

Amanda Marcotte for Slate

Tags: Anti-Choice ACA Reproductive Rights Healthcare

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June 28, 2012
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Tags: ACA Reactions Healthcare SCOTUS ACA

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February 03, 2012
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While we’re on the subject…mammograms and racial health inequalities

from Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention

“White women in Chicago are slightly more likely than black women to get breast cancer, but black women are twice as likely to die from it. That is a startling statistic by itself. But what is equally as shocking is that in 1980 Chicago’s black and white breast cancer mortality rates were identical: black and white women died at the same rate.” 

Searching for an explanation, Roberts interviews Steven Whitman, director of the Sinai Urban Heath Institute. Whitman explains, 

“The improvement in the white rate began to take place just as we began to figure out how to do early detection with mammography…White women were able to take advantage of these improvements and black women were not at all. So what you have is a stunningly painful observation that in twenty-five years black women have gained nothing, not one iota, in terms of beast cancer mortality from any of our advances…every week in Chicago, a little more than two black women on average die from breast cancer just because of the disparity. It’s literally a matter of life and death.” 

What prevents black women from getting the kind of cancer care available to white women? As Dorothy Roberts and Whitman suggest, one major barrier is access to mammography.

Tags: Susan G. Koman healthcare race poverty