In the post for the start of the legislative session, I mentioned briefly a bill that would mandate that insurance providers cover abortions in Washington State. I haven’t seen anything approaching a whip count, so I don’t know if it stands any chance of passing, so feel free to contact your legislators.
Hopefully there are enough votes, because passing this would be a very positive thing. It would make sure that women (and trans men, I assume, but I can’t tell from the press release) who get pregnant have options. Like so much with health care, the goal, one hopes, is to make sure that people have the best options available to them, and that people not be priced out of health care.
Women in Washington ought to have the best access to health care including access to an abortion. And they shouldn’t have to buy a separate rider or pay out of pocket; that’s why we have health insurance in the first place, after all.
Additionally, a lot of people don’t have much choice in their health insurance: they have the choice the company they work for provides. This law will provide that a boss or a union that doesn’t think to provide that care doesn’t negatively affect them. And an anti-choice boss doesn’t get to make that decision for the women who work for them.
Washington state has a chance to do something good when so often we hear negative news from the states on abortion/reproductive rights issues.
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FWIW, I emailed Eileen Cody to see about the likelihood of passage and to confirm that the bill covers trans men, but haven’t heard back.
As insurance companies aren’t charitable organizations, they have to pass mandated costs through to policyholders. This bill would, in effect, force people who oppose abortion to pay for strangers’ abortions. You’re probably going to see Republicans, Catholics, and possibly other groups objecting to that. I’m not saying it’s a good or bad bill, or that it should or shouldn’t be passed. I have no idea whether there are health insurance policies that currently cover abortions, or whether abortion riders are available for those who don’t. In the old days, the guy who got the girl pregnant paid for the abortion out of his own pocket, and the insurance policy was her dad’s shotgun.
Blah, blah, blah, my theological view point should be inshrined into law as part of your secular government…
@2 That’s a bad idea, but the free market crowd will argue theology has nothing to do with it and promote letting the market decide …
@3
Maybe I wasn’t that clear. I’m tired of having people trying to insert their theological views into the running of our secular state.
When it comes to abortion they always default back to the bible.
Abortion is OK with me. It should be covered by personal health insurance like diabetes or high blood pressure.
So we all get to chip in and help support the cost to kill unborn children…..nice.
Why not just practice better birth control and we can avoid most of this shit about abortion in the first place? That does require some personal responsibility, however.
@7
The same folks that want their theological views on abortion inshrined into law in our secular state want their theological views on birth control inshrined into law in our secular state and would greatly limit access to birth control. People had to fight like hell to get the pill covered by insurance and that only happened very recently.
@8
some people are against abortion for reasons that have nothing to do with religion.
thats a fallacy that the left likes keep repeating.
is murder of an adult against the law because of religious reasons?
it doesnt take religion to tell SOME people that shit like this should be illegal.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_hyEC.....ortion.jpg
I dunno, you tell me…..does THIS seem like a “choice” to you?
how on earth that shit is legal is beyond me.
funny though, the same people that support what happens in the picture in post #10, are the same people that cry like pussies about waterboarding terrorists.
go figure..
@9
Probably, but 99% of the time what you hear are arguments that go back to theology. I’m fine with people who argue their case on non-theological grounds.
@11
Career CIA agents came out against water boarding because they felt it was ineffective. A couple of buddies of mine are ex-air force pilots (there’s a lot of pilots in Gig Harbor) and they’re against water boarding because they were water boarded as part of their training and it didn’t work. One of the guys just said whatever he felt the water boarders wanted to hear, but not the truth, and the other guy just got pissed off and stopped talking all together.
@9
And I really am completely fucking sick of people who keep trying to shove their theology down other people’s throats. We have a secular government. End of story.
last I checked, murder or manslaughter laws have nothing to do with theology.
religion seems to be the left’s boogeyman.
Not really, all sorts of people on the left are religious.
I’m not religious, but my favorite aunt was a nun.
Anyone to the left of Dino Rossi seems to the typical asshat’s boogeyman.
[Deleted — see HA Comment Policy]
The problem with making abortions illegal is that it doesn’t work. You still get about the same number of abortions. The rich go where it is legal. The poor seek out a cheaper and much less safe option, often resulting in maiming or death.
@4 “Maybe I wasn’t that clear. I’m tired of having people trying to insert their theological views into the running of our secular state.”
We’re always going to have people like that with us, and the Founders knew this, which is why they put the First Amendment into the Constitution. But some people just can’t read …
@5 I’m personally opposed to abortion on moral and religious grounds, but I’m not into imposing my beliefs on others, or telling them how they have to live.
@10 It’s easy to play on people’s emotions with pictures like that, but quite a bit harder to deal with the issue rationally. Looks like you opted for the easy route. I would argue the issue is not whether a fetus looks like a human being, but whether it is sentient enough to be a human being.
I think most of us would agree that a tree is not a sentient being — it doesn’t know it exists, and isn’t aware that it’s alive. It seems extremely probably to me that a fertilized egg is like a tree — it doesn’t know it exists, it has no awareness, it’s not sentient. A just-born baby clearly is a sentient human being; it feels cold or heat, touch, pain, etc., and cries; but mostly it just sleeps. The problem is figuring out when an insentient cell or cell cluster becomes “human” — and a case can be made that occurs when it becomes at least marginally sentient.
The Supreme Court couldn’t figure this out. Neither can anyone else. There’s no bright light; it’s a gradual process. But if you’re going to make a dichotomy between aborting an insentient cell cluster but not killing a sentient human being, you have to draw a line somewhere. How? When?
I don’t know the answer to that, either. It appears to me that any line-drawing necessarily has to be somewhat arbitrary. Some people draw that line at the moment of conception; it’s my understanding the Catholic Church draws it before — i.e., the Church doesn’t condone contraception.
I do know you’ll never get everybody to agree on a single answer to this problem. But somehow, we have to come up with a rule — a law or legal principle — that applies equally to everyone in our society. That’s what SCOTUS did in Roe v. Wade, and has continued to finesse in subsequent decisions.
Why isn’t the discussion, “how can we get abortions to be legal but as rare as possible”?
Why are we not teaching and advocating birth control for those who cannot wait and abstinence for those who can. Why are we not empowering women to say “No, not without protection!” and “Not till I’m ready!”.
Heck, why are we not teaching our sons to say “No, not without protection!” and “Not till I’m ready to provide for a child if we conceive one!”
How come so many of the same people who are opposed to abortion on moral and religious grounds are perfectly fine with the death penalty?
How come so many of the same people who are opposed to abortion on moral and religious grounds are not foster parents or adoptive parents and or tithing a large percentage of their income to child related charities?
This would require institutions like churches and catholic hospitals to provide abortion coverage, I don’t think the public would agree with that. I mean religious institutions don’t even cover contraception of any form. In general a religious exemption would be key to getting enough votes to pass this (as there is one specifically in the gay marriage bill), however this exemption will undermine the intent of the law. Depending on how this is written it could also have the adverse effect of plans dropping maternity coverage all together so they don’t have to pay for abortion, which ironically would be a big loss for women’s health.
Busta, Would you prefer we go back to the days of the back alleys? Check out this short film my friend and ask if the God of mercy is on your side? http://www.youtube.com/watch?f.....UgZSBc_asc
In general a religious exemption would be key to getting enough votes to pass this
Interesting problem.
Does our society have the right to make churches and catholic hospitals provide abortion coverage?
How about the employer?
Does our society have the right to make a religious employer provide abortion coverage?
Where do you draw the line?
For example: Does our society have the right to make a religious employer provide the same benefits to gay marriages?
@23
So blue balls john now equates unborn children with rapists and murderers……my, how progressive of him.
@23 -> 28. No. That flawed equating is all you.
I would like anti choice people to be consistent, or own up to their hypocrisy.
Either human life is sacred all the time ( know now, “Thou shalt not kill”) in which case, murder of any kind is wrong.
Or apparently for you, human life is sacred until it’s born but then it’s perfectly acceptable to murder so long as you murder the undesirables ( and that depends on however and whoever you, not God, define as undesirable).
Own up to your beliefs.
@29
Sorry bud, I don’t think all life is sacred, so take your strawman and go pump his rear. Rapists. Child molesters, murders gave up threir rights to life in my book…..tell me, how did an unborn child give up its rigts?
You talk about hypcricy..fuck dude, its all from the left. Progressives say no to offing a fucking murderer, but are a ok with killing a viable, 3rd trimester child…oh wait, I guess you think the crime of being inconvenient is worthy of death sentence
Dumbass progressives get owned by their own idiotic logic.
Only in your own mind.
@30 Mook, what I said was…
Why isn’t the discussion, “how can we get abortions to be legal but as rare as possible”?
What part of AS RARE as possible is too hard for you to understand?
I am so glad you are then supportive of contraceptives and sex ed so that every child is a wanted child, you give till it hurts to support foster care and adoptive services and the boy scouts and girl scouts and big brother/big sisters and head start and education levies so that the babies that are born, have a fighting chance for a better life.
I await to hear how you support the children that are born.
Did you notice how Mook became quite agitated when I questioned the support of the death penalty for anti choice people. Nothing else, like supporting live kids, triggered the threshold of interest for him. He seemed quite threatened that if one is adamant against killing potential humans, they should also be against killing born humans.
Um… I’m not sure how it works exactly in regards to your question, but religious employers divide their jobs into secular and pious (I think pious is the right term) positions. I’ve worked for Catholic Charities as a secular employee (called Catholic Community Services for some reason in Western WA) and my job with them was no different than working for anyone else. I was really just a state subcontractor, like any other state subcontractor.
So, how I think it should work moving forwards is that secular positions would be just like working anywhere else, if the law said you had to have abortion coverage in your health insurance, secular employees would have that (no one’s forcing the church to act as a state subcontractor!). But, the state wouldn’t have the ability to mandate things like that for pious positions because those jobs dealt directly with church doctrine.
The state needs to stay out of church doctrine and the church needs to keep it’s doctrine out of state law.
If a “trans man” got pregnant…that would make it a woman.
@35
I was trying to figure that one out too. I don’t think functioning ovaries and a uterus are generally part of the deal.
@30 “Rapists. Child molesters, murders gave up threir rights to life in my book….”
While sentiment urges me to agree with you, I am compelled to point out that Jesus — you know, the forgiveness entrepreneur — would rap your knuckles for saying that.
In case you weren’t aware of this, the only two people Jesus ever promised admittance to Paradise were the two malefactors who were crucified alongside him.
@30 “offing a fucking murderer”
You seem to assume our justice system is infallible and never convicts an innocent person by mistake. A life sentence is reversible; a death sentence is not.
I’m not saying I would never kill anyone. In exceptionally heinous cases where guilt is not in doubt, killing the murderer sometimes can reaffirm the value of the innocent lives that were taken. There’s always been something incongruous to me about the argument that we will never, under any circumstances, kill the guilty who killed the innocent. I don’t buy the deterrence argument; the death penalty deters no one. I’m simply saying there are times when we maybe should kill certain people simply because they’ve got it coming and nothing less serves justice.
I remember reading a news article years ago about a prison warden who opposed the death penalty but after supervising the execution of a serial killer said it was like putting down a “mad dog” and had to be done.
I’m simply saying there are times when we maybe should kill certain people simply because they’ve got it coming and nothing less serves justice.
I agree with this. There are cases where where is absolutely no question that they did it.
I don’t seem myself as a hypocrite like the anti choice people that also believe in the death penalty. I believe both abortion and the death penalty should be legal but rare as possible. There are times, on a case by case basis, where termination is the best thing to do.
If this passes I will never pay for insurance in the State of Washington. I currently get it through my job and do not pay for it. If I lose it however, I will not buy any. I refuse to give any of my hard earned money to help fund pre-birth infantcide. It is bad enough that some of my money goes to fund these worshipers of molech by was of the state medicade.
@42 I still don’t understand why this guy is not advocating hard for increased sex ed and birth control options and female empowerment, so the only time women need these services is when they are medically necessary.
What tipe of Sex Ed someone recieves should be up to the parent. If a parent wants the school to teach wait for marriage or birth control fine. I prefer a third option, No one teaches anything about sex to my kids but me and my wife.
@44
We know from all sorts of experience that if we leave it up to The Parents or teach abstinence only the teen pregnancy rate shoots up, which increases the abortion rate, increases the tax load, and decreases that girls chances of going to college and being able to pay her own way in life.
I think we should end this silliness where one kid in public school gets taught this and another kids gets to opt out of that. We should end opting out, you’re either in 100% or you can send your kid to private school.
@44 He only obsesses over sex ed. He didn’t even touch birth control options and female empowerment. Think he’d be for them?
Why is it that people who are so vehemently anti choice, don’t want people to know the skills and the tools to avoid pregnancy in the first place? That way abortions would only be needed in cases of rape, incest and medically necessary.
@46 If people waited for marriage like they should then abortion and birth control would not be issues.
@47
Actually, married people used birth control and get abortions too.
Why do you think you get to tell everyone what they should do? It’s their lives and their bodies can do what they want.
@47. Only single people get abortions? Nobody needs birth control? Really?
He claims he is against abortion, yet he also against almost every proven effective methods to keep abortion down. It doesn’t seem like he really wants to cut down on abortions, if he rejects almost every method of reducing them.
i·de·o·logue/ˈīdēəˌlôg/
Noun:
An adherent of an ideology, esp. one who is uncompromising and dogmatic.
“If people waited for marriage like they should then abortion and birth control would not be issues”
If wishes were fishes, we’d all be swimming in the sea.