Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s plan is to unveil a re-tooled health care bill this week that would require U.S. citizens to sign up through either their employers, government programs or an exchange. This already gives folks a lot to be angry about, but that’s not even the best part.
House Democrats are currently facing disputes over prohibiting taxpayer money for funding abortions. The Hyde amendment, a law in place barring federal funding for abortions — except in the case of rape, incest or endangering of the mother’s life — still stands strong, but after the bill is unveiled, Democratic leaders are planning to resolve their issues with the anti-abortion Democrats with a compromise all sides can live with.
Those in favor of covering abortions for low-income women have an understandable position. Taking all morality out of it, why not help those who can’t afford abortions receive the same service that’s open to every woman. Heck, they’re probably the ones who can’t afford to raise a child properly anyway, right?
Unfortunately, you can’t take morality out of it. And “federally funded” means everyone has to pay for it. Rather than “deciding what a woman can and can’t do with her body,” those crazy pro-lifers will have the decision made for them when they take money out of their own pockets on tax day to pay for what they think is murder.
The fact is most pro-lifers aren’t trying to own anyone’s body. Quite the opposite, actually. They are trying to get the government’s hands off of the other living soul in the situation — the unborn child that can’t speak for itself. It’s not about women’s rights in their heads, but the child’s. They just love and appreciate life, and they believe abortion is putting an end to it.
Religious pro-lifers believe only God should be able to take life. OK, so not everyone believes in God, but even most common day atheists would agree a murder in the street is wrong. Not many think a mother has the right to murder her 3-year-old child because it’s a financial and psychological burden on her life. That’s just wrong.
The big disagreement, then, is over whether abortion is taking a “life” or not. Pro-choice people aren’t all murderers. They just don’t think the growing fetus inside of a mother’s womb is life, or at least they don’t think the government should decide for women if it is or not.
Makes sense. The only problem is we actually don’t have a definition of life. We just have the 1973 definition of viability put together by a tax lawyer on the Supreme Court. So, if we don’t know what’s in there, and we have no solid definition of when life begins (conception, first term, third term, birth, 21st birthday?), then how in the heck can we decide whether a woman has the right to terminate the life/not life of what’s growing in her womb?
Believe what you believe, because the right to an abortion is probably here to stay. But if it comes to the point that taxpayers have to fund what could possibly be murder, there are going to be some problems.
—Frannie Boyle is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. She can be reached at mary.f.boyle@vanderbilt.edu.
