Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Damn, So Close

Listened to an NPR story this morning on the Catholic Church and health care reform.

Good news: The Catholic Church supports health care reform! Seems like they support a robust public option! The Catholic Church has been in favor of socialized medicine in the United States going back to Harry S. Truman. You know, with Catholic charities and Catholic hospitals, the Church provides around 1/6th of all the medical services in this country! And they would be totally on board with health care reform, but...

Bad news: Even though all the proposed health care bills strongly prohibit any federal funds being used for abortion, there is the remote possibility that one day, theoretically, after seismic shift in political belief on the issue, it's conceivably possible that maybe Congress could change the law, and so, the Catholic Church just cannot bring itself to support any law that might allow for the possibility that poor women might be able to exercise the same legal right that Catholic school girls enjoy every single day.

Let's let asshat Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sum it up it in the asshatiest way possible:
"We want health care reform very, very much, but we cannot do that over children's dead bodies, to put it most bluntly," he says. "There is a fundamental issue here about whether taking life should be treated the same way as supporting and healing life."
Indeed, as we all learned in catechism, Jesus prefers that thousands of people die today for lack of basic health care than to make it possible for even one fetus to be theoretically aborted maybe in the future.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

what is the Church's position on coverage for repairing DIY attempts at suction aspiration that puncture the wall of the woman's uterus, leaving a loop of bowel hanging out of her vagina?

AP

dave3544 said...

I think the Church's position on that is that women shouldn't be having the sex unless they want to have the babies.

Anonymous said...

okay, but in this hypothetical there is no longer any prospect of a baby; there is just a loop of bowel hanging out of someone's vagina.

will the national health plan cover that? if a state is permitted to "opt out," could treatment for this be covered in delaware but not in philly? and if so, would women in philly buckle down and learn to do better DIY abortions instead of stealing others' architectural designs and representing them as their own?

dave3544 said...

I think the Church's position on that is that women shouldn't be having the sex unless they want to have the babies.

Seriously...this was the standard Catholic response to every argument made in the comments about the story this morning.

Your fear of having to perform your own abortion and have the dangling bowel is supposed to stop you from having sex outside of a loving marital bond.

I get what you're getting at, but trying to have a rational discussion with people who claim to really, really, really want national health care, but not a the risk of maybe one day seeing 1/1,000,000th of their tax dollars going to support abortion, then you've already lost.