Here we go again. The Pennsylvania House of Repressives wants to cut down on abortion by making sure that poor women in the state have no access to birth control.
If that sounds counterproductive, you must be new to Pennsylvania politics.
Just as they did two years ago at this time, anti-abortion legislators are trying to push through a budget amendment that would give family planning centers an ultimatum: Slap a gag rule on your doctors when it comes to mentioning the word "abortion" or lose all state funding for all the other services you provide.
Those other services, which the state supports to the tune of $4.3 million a year, include such life-saving procedures as mammograms, pelvic exams, pap smears, screening and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, high blood pressure, diabetes, anemia and, of course, birth control.
News flash to our lunkhead legislators who passed this measure yesterday in the House (and I will try to put this in the simplest language possible for those among them who have trouble with the concept of cause and effect):
Birth control reduces unwanted pregnancies. Fewer unwanted pregnancies reduces abortion. So if you really want to cut down on abortion, you should be making birth control more available, not less.
But of course, the Repressives know this. They're just doing what they always do in an election year: playing to their hard-core constituents by threatening to hurt a population that's already hurting and can't fight back, hoping the rest of us won't notice or won't care.
Note to Harrisburg: Wrong on both counts.
If I didn't know better, I'd suspect that the Repressives were really going after abortion through the back alley route.
They know that in many parts of the state, family planning clinics are the only place for poor women to get all manner of health care. They wouldn't, perchance, be hoping that without all that other medical treatment, more poor women will get sick and die? That'd stop 'em from reproducing better than any old pills or diaphragms!
Not only that, but dead poor women can't very well be giving birth to poor children who are a drain on state resources, what with all their annoying needs for food, housing, child care, health care and education. So this route would have the bonus of assisting welfare reform!
Oh, but that would be too, too cynical, even for Harrisburg and its "family values" crew.
But just in case any of them really were thinking in that direction, I offer a modest proposal. It still takes two to do the pregnancy tango, so instead of going after the women year after year, why not try, in alternating election cycles, going after the men?
Maybe some brave lawmaker could propose forced sterilization for any man who impregnates a woman while he's earning less than the federal poverty income guidelines, married or single.
That would reduce the number of pregnancies overall, which would reduce both the demand for abortion and the number of children born to men who can't support them at above-poverty levels.
An insane idea, you say? Mean-spirited, anti-male, anti-democratic, even anti-American? You betcha, baby. But no more so than its anti-female counterpart. So if our duly elected yahoos intend to keep going down this path every two years, the citizenry should, at the very least, insist that they spread the pain around.
How about this: They could threaten low-income women in years that end with 2 and 6, and men in years that end in 4 and 8. In years that end in 0, they could take a hard-earned rest.
It bears noting, once again, that family planning clinics do not perform abortions, but they do make referrals. And that federal regulations require them to do so, or risk losing federal funding. And that in 1998, the legislators of this very state banned insurance companies from imposing gag orders on doctors when it comes to informing patients of all relevant treatments.
So now it falls to the state Senate to stop this wrongheaded measure. Once again, I remind them that a woman's reproductive organs are not big enough to accommodate both ideology and gynecology. They're going to have to pick one, and it better not be health care.
E-mail this story 
