Anti-choice crowd should be cheering for healthcare reform

Image from Wikipedia

Opponents of a woman’s right to choose — let’s call them Stupakites — claim they scream at a clinic-bound, terrified teenage rape victim for the sake of her fertilized egg. They’re cellular sentinels, so to speak.

But if these embryo enthusiasts were really serious about saving the children, they should be the loudest cheerleaders for healthcare reform. The US is currently experiencing an uninsured and under-insured epidemic affecting millions of children.

Arizona:

struggling with a projected $2.6 billion budget shortfall, took the drastic step of scrapping its Children’s Health Insurance Program. That left nearly 47,000 low-income children with no coverage at all. Gov. Jan Brewer is also calling for an increase in the sales tax. She said, “Arizona is navigating its way through the largest state budget deficit in its long history.”

California:

One fourth of the adult and children population of California have no access to insurance.

[snip]

UCLA Researchers also found that among the population over 18 nearly one third had no insurance for part or whole of 2009. When all adults and children under the age of 65 were taken into consideration 24.3% were found to have no insurance or whole or art of 2009.

The trend continues in Pennsylvania, Oregon, and so on. These children are being left behind, and yet Republican obstructionists, and certain Catholic Democratic allies, couldn’t seem to care less about these grown-up fetuses.

Ironically, if men like Bart Stupak could pull their head out of their asses and slightly widen their myopic view of the world, they would see that healthcare reform might lessen the need for abortions.

As one of Klein’s readers points out, childbirth is tremendously expensive (averaging around $25k to preserve the sanctity of life). Many women choose abortions simply because they can’t afford that price tag. Imagine how many abortions might be prevented if women didn’t have to worry about getting a second job just to pay for the precious miracle of life.

Many Conservatives claim to be pro-life except for the part between cradle and grave. They’re all about defending the rights of a cluster of cells, and refusing to allow a catatonic woman’s family to remove her feeding tube, but the part in between called “Life” doesn’t concern them.

Millions of children are without healthcare and adequate schooling, but those are the children that the Conservatives don’t mind leaving behind. Also, child rape is acceptable as long as it’s the Pope’s peeps doing the a’rapin’.

Stupakites are pro-life in the AmeRepubliCatholic fashion. They care about life only until the child needs something, in which case the little leech is sent to a quiet area to be handled by someone else — maybe a nanny or a priest, who may or may not rape them. Really, who can keep track of the details?

The child grows into an adult, during which time the AmeRepubliCatholic ignores them especially if they develop some kind of unsavory genetic flaw like Parkinson’s and start asking for handouts “to live.”

Then, in the final years of life, as the adult creeps closer to the grave, and they slip into a coma or lose the ability to communicate, the good AmeRepubliCatholic rushes in to prolong the period of suffering for as long as humanly possible, knowing that somewhere Jesus is watching the circus, smiling.

But that period in between — called “Life” — doesn’t concern the AmeRepubliCatholic. Pro-life means caring about non-living children — not the orphans in Africa, or Haiti, or even the orphans in America. Pro-life doesn’t mean bettering the lives of millions of Americans by granting them affordable healthcare, living wages, and dignity in life.

To a AmeRepubliCatholic, “pro-life” means shoving dogmatic dribble down the throats of fellow citizens, terrifying and oppressing women, and generally acting like obstructionist lunatics whilst shouting about Socialist takeovers and Hitler.

And when the few good Catholics — 59,000 genuine nuns – demanded the passage of the Senate healthcare legislation, Bart Stupak actually said, “When I’m drafting right to life language, I don’t call up the nuns.” Stupak confers with the other AmeRepubliCatholics in Focus on the Family, and The National Right to Life Committee, two organizations that subscribe to the Pre-cradle, Post-grave preservation of life strategy.

I always wonder when the “pro-life” crowd are going to be called on their hypocritical bullshit. I do think people are starting to realize they don’t really care about life. What they really care about is preserving the illusion that they care about life.

As Americans continue to  lose their homes and jobs, and that social safety net isn’t strong enough to catch everyone, it’ll become very clear, very quickly just how much the AmeRepubliCatholics don’t care about poor Americans, including children.