The ACLU is known for its support of all issues counterintuitive to our ideas of freedom, despite of their oxy-moronic name. But in a blog post titled: Standing Up For Women’s Health 38 Years After Roe the ACLU urges its supporters to keep their focus pointed in the crucial direction of keeping abortion legal, available, and covered by health insurance. I find the mind-set governing the reasoning behind the push to have abortion on-demand covered by health insurance deplorable.
Here is an excerpt from the post:
Abortion is part of basic health care for women and should be included in health insurance plans along with other pregnancy related care.
We may not all agree about abortion, but we can agree that when a woman discovers that something has gone wrong during her pregnancy, she deserves the peace of mind that she will be able to get the health care she needs. The same goes for a woman facing an unintended pregnancy. She should be able to make the best decision for herself and her family, whether that decision is raising the child, adoption or abortion.
No woman plans to have an abortion, but that is the point of health insurance. It is there to cover our unexpected medical needs.
Abortion advocates have gradually inserted into the debate the idea that abortion is somehow a form of health care. The implication of this language is that it designates pregnancy a negative medical condition in need of a cure. Pregnancy is not a disease, it is a necessary “condition” required to propagate the human race. It is a proper and natural function of all humans and animals alike.
It is this kind of rhetoric which serves to desensitize women and society to accept abortion as normal and necessary. When you can convince women that pregnancy is bad for you by likening it to a disease, it only follows that a remedy is required–and in fact a right and moral thing to desire. I firmly believe this deceptive language is intended to blur the moral compass of women, and deaden their conscience to what is actually happening during an abortion.
Other pro-abortion advocacy organizations use the same tactic. Reproductiverights.org for example says in their mission statement:
We envision a world where every woman is free to decide whether and when to have children; where every woman has access to the best reproductive healthcare available; where every woman can exercise her choices without coercion or discrimination. More simply put, we envision a world where every woman participates with full dignity as an equal member of society.
No one in America seeks to prevent women from deciding to have children. They can have as many or as few children as they wish. However the number of children is wholly dependant on the sexual frequency of the woman, a correlation Reproductiverights.org and the ACLU does not make. Their solution to unplanned pregnancy is to abort the child rather than encourage sexual restraint. Of course this places the sexual freedom of women above and before the life of the children that liberty produces. Reprocuctiverights.org, like the ACLU also inserts the idea that pregnancy is bad for your health, then suggests abortion is necessary in order for women to maintain dignity as an equal member of society. It is hard for me to believe that Reproductiverights.org–or anyone for that matter– is actually implying pregnancy is humiliating and robs women of their dignity.
Of course the actual medical need related to pregnancy is pre-natal care, not abortion. The health care involved with pregnancy includes the preservation of the welfare of the child’s, and the mother’s health. OB/GYN doctors treating pregnant women effectively have two patients, and a responsibility to both to provide care for them. Abortion is functionally the complete opposite of preserving the welfare of the child and the mother. How has it come to be that so many people have allowed themselves to become convinced that pregnancy needs a remedy instead of nurturing? Health care is needed for sickness and disease, pregnancy and children are neither.
_____________________________________
Related Articles: What Gives You The Right?, It’s Not So Bad
Sifting Reality 
Excellent points about it not being health care. Procedures that involve crushing and dismembering an innocent human being are typically the opposite of health care.
Reproductiverights.org is another fallaciously titled group, a la The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. They both get the science 100% wrong in their titles alone. Abortions are done to destroy a human being that has already been reproduced.
Having an abortion is, I imagine, a painful decision for any woman to have to make. However, it might be worth bearing in mind that even in the case of planned or welcomed pregnancies the womb isn’t always a safe place for a foetus. Many miscarriages occur because a woman’s body has spontaneously aborted a foetus that is defective in some way. Or because the mother’s health would be compromised if the pregnancy was brought to term. Nature itself is ‘cruel’ in that it frequently puts the health of the human species and the mother’s health before the survival of the foetus. If we are so concerned about the suffering of an aborted foetus, perhaps we should also hold women responsible for getting pregnant if they are at risk of miscarrying, as I would imagine being miscarried isn’t a particularly pleasant experience for a foetus.
I’ve heard that argument before and find it wanting. It equivocates a biological happenstance with an intentional action. As if taking your child swimming and they drown accidentally is the same as taking your child swimming and holding them under water.
One is an accident of nature, the other is an intentional taking of a human life. Big difference.
Also the amount of stress or pain of decision of commiting an act is irrelevant to whether the act is moral. It doesn’t matter in the slightest how weighty the decision is.