Women's Rights and Health Insurance Reform

[zandperl]

An open letter to my senators and representatives.

I am writing to you today regarding the health care reform bill currently before the house and senate

Comments

Re: ...and more about abortion

[zandperl]

Proving it would not be difficult - an amniocentesis can get fetal DNA, that's how they screen for Down syndrome. I'm not sure if they can tell from just fetal DNA and the woman's DNA that the fetus is the product of incest though, they may need to compare DNA to potential fathers. If that's the case, the pregnant woman would have to admit to the incest and ID the man involved. While there are also other circumstances of incest, it's often a subset of rape. Do you think a 13-year-old girl would be willing to admit to being raped by her uncle? Do you think she'd even necessarily understand that it's rape?

I don't know how quick the turnaround is on this sort of DNA testing, I'm guessing faster than Down syndrome screening and that can be done before the baby is born, but I'm not sure.

It may be possible to do routine incest screening on all women seeking abortions, but doing so would solve the problem of "how do we enforce the incest exception and prevent non-incestuous abortions?" it wouldn't solve the problem of "how do we provide access for rape victims?"

I'm still thinking about your other comments. Thank you for your thoughtful and respectful responses.

Re: ...and more about abortion

[lurfmonkey]

In the case of a 13 year old girl, I don't think she has to admit to anything. By definition, if she is pregnant, she has been raped, incest or not. It just gets more difficult after the age of consent. So the only option is to cover all abortions because the burden of proof is often too difficult to ascertain. I totally understand your argument. It's just in my personal opinion, I have a hard time justifying all cases. But if it must be done because it's the only way to cover legitimate reasons, then it's something that I'll just have to swallow.

However, I do understand why the provisions are in the bills. This reform is an extremely difficult thing to pass. The question is if it's worth not passing because not everything you like is in it. The country is split down the middle on abortion, so you will not be pleasing half the people if you go all the way to one side. My belief is that this bill should not have been one bill. It should have been a series of bills that were voted on individually. This all or nothing approach seems too risky and overreaching. If it doesn't pass, a lot of good things don't get implemented. If it does pass, some bad things will get implemented. They should have created a bill with all the things both sides of the aisle agree on and just passed that right away. Then they could have created additional bills to deal with the more controversial stuff like abortion, public option, and immigration that they could have argued about without affecting the core of the reform.