Abortion, religion and health care

I'm pleased to bring you a new voice today in the form of The Daily Blank's first guest blogger. The post below was written by Ken Whitaker (know to many of you as KGWhit). Given the passage of the health care reform bill last night, it is very timely.

d'blank

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T. R. Reid has an interesting column in the March 14 Washington Post. Of the industrialized nations, the United States is by far the most religious. The number of regular church goers dwarfs the western European Nations.

Yet despite our religious zeal, we have a higher abortion rate than any of the rich democracies. The reason for the lower abortion rates is attributed to universal health coverage. In those countries if a girl is sexually active, she can go to see a physician at no or little cost and get birth control at no cost. She can, if she chooses, carry the baby to term and not worry about the cost. Many young women in the US almost never see a Doctor because they can’t afford it. It is also cheaper to obtain an abortion than to deliver a baby.

You would think with the strong anti-abortion movement in many of the churches in this country that there would be an outcry for universal health care. You want to lower the abortion rate, provide cost free health care to young women. Yet the evangelical churches and the anti-choice movement have been almost silent on the health care debate except for a demand that there be no funding of abortions.

The logical question is why? Germany has only 37% of the abortions per thousand women as the US. Why, if universal health care helps to lower the number of abortions, are the right to life movement and the churches not actively campaigning to create a universal health care system here?

There is no doubt that most of the people who are against legal abortion are so from a heartfelt believe that it is wrong. Yet the leaders of that movement seem to either have turned a blind eye to the impact on abortions of universal health coverage or have only a political agenda.

It is easy to think that the leaders of the right to life movement are more concerned about the politics of abortion than actually lowering the abortion rate. Could it be that because a Godless Socialist is advocating a change in health care that the knee jerk reaction is to be against it or are they just ignorant of the facts?