APRTW wrote:

I didnt think this was an abortion issue.  Just a government funded abortion issue.  I understand that a party would not support the government funding something they are agaisnt like Planned Parenthood.  Your issue with almost becoming bankrupt if Planned Parenthood has more to do with the state of health insurance in this country then it does abortion.  Correct me if I am wrong.

Without government funded abortion, or some other form of "treatment without guarantee of payment", my wife would be dead and my children motherless.

The first step when we discovered that she had somehow become pregnant during a period in which we had no health insurance, was Planned Parenthood.  There it was discovered that she had an ectopic pregnancy, and the embryo was growing in her fallopian tube.  This is 100% fatal unless the fetus is removed.  This was all funded by Planned Parenthood.  But before the pregnancy was successfully terminated, however, the growing embryo resulted in a ruptured fallopian tube, which causes excruciating pain and death within a few hours if untreated.

We didn't even know what a ruptured fallopian tube was, or that it was a serious and probable risk, given her situation--that was a shortcoming of the system.  But when my wife suddenly experienced intense pain, I waited about 15 minutes before deciding she must go to the emergency room.  The treatment is emergency surgery to remove the fetus (that's an abortion) and somehow seal the rupture to the fallopian tube (either tying it off or sewing it back together).  Afterwards the doctor told me that if I had delayed even one hour, that he probably couldn't have saved her.  This was paid for by Medicaid.

So, the lesson we learned is that a ruptured fallopian tube is like a ruptured appendix, if left untreated it kills you with 100% certainty, but a ruptured fallopian tube does it much quicker.  Not sure about how painful a ruptured appendix is, but death from a ruptured fallopian would be excruciating agony, at least until one slipped into a coma prior to death.  On the bright side, if you are near a modern medical facility, the treatment is pretty routine and you are back to your schedule within a week or so. 

To put the matter even further into the political dialog, my wife was a green card holder, not a citizen, and government funded health care for non-citizens is another issue the Tea Party is harping on.

Planned Parenthood provides a variety of services for women, abortion being only one of them.  As I read the story of the near shutdown, funding of Planned Parenthood was the one stumbling block holding up the latest stop-gap funding bill.  And, yes, reading further it seems that some conservatives (Tea Partiers?) were in favor of forcing soldiers to fight with no guarantee of pay as a means to pressure the system into defunding the service of the Federal government that saved my wife's life.

Draconian budget cuts can sound like such a good idea until they are put into human terms.  And the same people who want to make soldiers work for no pay as a means to defund some humanitarian services of the Federal government are the very same people who just the other day proposed giving the wealthiest Americans a raise, in the form of another tax cut for the rich, dropping their income tax rate from 35% to 25%. 

To paraphrase Shep Smith, the fiscal policy of the right has little to do with sound fiscal policy, and everything to do with enacting their social agenda for America.

I think I know where you are going.  The problem is that the solution is not to fix a problematic government program, but to jettison it completely.  So it truly is on the political agenda of some to (a) ban all abortions, even when the mother's life is in jeopardy, and (b) trim the government at all levels of programs that smack of 'charity' and/or socialism, including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and even minor programs like Planned Parenthood and Head Start. 

I know people out there can say, "Tough luck.  You suffered an emergency, and you didn't have insurance.  You played the hand you were dealt your way and your wife died. That's life."  That's their right, of course.  And they might even think, "well, if we could judge each situation on a case-by-case basis, I'd probably pony up for the money to let your wife live, but we can't do that, and on the whole, these programs are a drain on resources and ultimately lead to dependency on government, a terrible thing."

The fact that the underlying problem is unspeakable is one factor that makes finding solutions so difficult.

-Some people use abortion as a remedy for poor planning.
-Vast social ills, including hereditary dependency on government handouts, seem to be concentrated in a few demographic subgroups that are rife with seemingly self-inflicted handicaps (i.e. high teen pregnancy rate exacerbates high drop out rate which leads to high unemployment and high incarceration rate) and the system of government programs (i.e. handouts) seems to make the situation worse, not better.

These are real problems, real obvious problems, but the thing that makes them unspeakable, in my opinion, is the differences in the solutions we each favor and the ideology that leads us to one set of solutions or another.

To caricature the debate it is either the case that urban blacks and latinos brought these ills upon themselves, they are rooted in a dysfunctional culture, and government handouts make it worse, or that these people are victims of a racist society and that efforts to defund government assistance programs are just more racism disguised as sound fiscal and social policy.  There's probably some truth, and some lie, in both of these caricatures, and as long as it all remains unspeakable, we won't find better solutions, and we run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to the social safety net that we have built over the past 75 years and that worked so well for my family.

Last edited by Max (4/09/2011 6:58 pm)