the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jul 16, 2001
On July 5 the Bush Administration announced a new policy which would allow states to define a fetus as an "unborn person."
According to Bush, this will allow more pregnant women to get prenatal health care and care during delivery. In most states, pregnant women qualify for publicly paid care so long as their family income is less than two times the poverty level.
But this restriction, plus others the states have set up, still leave millions of women without access to medical care when they are pregnant.
Obviously, if Bush’s purpose had been to fill this gap, it would have been simple to do so: just extend prenatal medical care to all women without medical insurance.
Instead of that, we are being presented with one more bureacuratic nightmare which gobbles up a great deal of money in adminstrative overhead, while making it so complicated that the people who need help can’t get it.
Just in case you are wondering if Bush dreamed up this complicated approach because he’s not firing on all cylinders, consider this: while Bush talks about extending medical care, he is not asking for more money to fund the program.
Bush may not be playing with a full deck, but he’s also playing to a reactionary right wing which wants to see the government chip away at the rights that women won for themselves–and first of all, the right to decide whether or not they want an abortion.
The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade said, "The unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense."
Under the pretext of extending medical care–without of course providing any funds to do it–Bush is doing nothing but trying to encourage a further attack on Roe v. Wade.
Bush, like all the other reactionary politicians, is ready to condemn a woman to having children she doesn’t want and often can’t support. In the name of defending fetal life, they condemn children to an existence in which not even their most basic needs can be met! This is not respect for human life. It’s playing politics with human life for the personal gain of politicians.