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Jane Fonda on Stupak/Pitts healthcare add-on: Anti-choice isn't pro-life, it's just a power play
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Jane Fonda says the Stupak/Pitts amendment violates women's healthcare rights. (AP Photo)
Jane Fonda is not surprised that the House approved the Stupak/Pitts amendment to the Affordable Health Care for America Act passed on Saturday. In short, she says, right wing stealth beat out women's health.
She writes in her blog.
People are often surprised that we are still fighting this battle for freedom of choice after so long. I’m not. I’ve come to understand that anti-choice and opposition to contraception has nothing to do with pro-life or pro-fetus; it has everything to do with power and who has it. It represents a mindset that values women mainly for their services as wives and sexual partners to men and as producers and rearers of children.
She also says that in allowing the amendment, Democrats joined Republicans in violating the underlying principle of health care reform articulated by President Barack Obama, that “no one will lose the benefits they currently have.”
Truth is that under the Stupak/Pitts Amendment, millions of women would lose benefits they already have and millions more would be prohibited from getting the kind of private sector health care coverage that most women have today.
Why would Democrats let that happen? It's not about a moral commitment for or against abortion, Fonda says. It's about power. For more than a century, politicians and religious zealots have fought to keep the power of reproductive decision-making in the hands of the men who decide the law and run the churches rather than in the hands of pregnant women, Fonda says.
It reflects a mindset that believes that women cannot be trusted to make decisions that will be good for their families and society; that what is good for a family and a community and a society or even a woman’s own health is something that must be determined by others who “know better” and then imposed on her.
What Fonda didn't say -- and what should trouble conservatives about the amendment -- is that it represents exactly what they hate about goverment playing a big role in health care: dictating to citizens what medical procedures they may or may not have. It is the ultimate case of politicians interfering in matters that would otherwise be left to doctors and patients.
It seems totally obvious.
But conservatives are blind about that when it might possibly further their anti-choice agenda.
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