For ?Pro-Life? Republicans, Human Life is Cheap
For ?Pro-Life? Republicans, Human Life is Cheap
Carole Joffe: For ?Pro-Life? Republicans, Human Life is Cheap
[Ed. note: Update posted below]
What it means for a lawmaker to be ?pro-life? is no longer a rhetorical question. The refusal of Senate Republicans, nearly all of whom identify as pro-life, to support the 9/11 First Responders bill, also known as the James Zadroga bill?a measure that would provide healthcare funding for firefighters, police, and others who became ill as a result of their 9/11-related work?gives this question new urgency.
Anti-abortion Republicans are preventing, as of this writing, even a vote for this measure before the holiday recess, a shameful spectacle that makes clear that this movement has gone beyond its historic valuing of the life of a fetus over that of a woman. Now it is the mainly male 9/11 workers whose lives are apparently expendable, because they cannot afford their own healthcare.
Until now, those opposed to abortion have been able to more or less rhetorically wiggle out of the inconvenient real-world contradictions in their beliefs. For years, pro-choicers have joked that, for the anti-abortion movement, ?life begins at conception and ends at birth.? The taunt refers to the fact that many politicians opposed to abortion have a dismal record when it comes to supporting the social services that children and families, especially those from low income backgrounds, need. (When John McCain ran for president in 2008 on a strict antiabortion platform, it was revealed that the Children?s Defense Fund had named him the Senator with the worst record on the funding of children?s programs). But hardhearted as many of us might find this opposition to needed services, one cannot conclude that these votes represent an implicit endorsement of the idea that poor children should die.
Similarly, years ago people began pointing out that many lawmakers who are anti-abortion also strongly favor capital punishment. The response typically given by such politicians to these allegations of hypocrisy is that an abortion is the taking of an ?innocent? life, while capital punishment takes the life of an evil-doer.
But the refusal to support the First Responders bill really is about a willingness to let people die?people who are not only ?innocent,? but brave and selfless individuals who saved others? lives. The four responders who appeared recently on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart?all white, middle-aged males?did not use euphemisms to describe the health problems that resulted from their work. ?I?m dying,? said one of Stewart?s guests, a policeman who can no longer afford needed care.
Republican Senators? jaw-dropping indifference to the fate of these authentic heroes is but one in a series of deeply disturbing events that betray pro-lifers? willingness to let their fellow humans die. In Arizona, the strongly anti-abortion governor, Jan Brewer, and the predominately anti-abortion legislature, recently cut provisions in the state?s Medicaid program for lifesaving transplants. Unless that policy is quickly reversed, some of the state?s citizens will die, period. And in the latest chapter of the saga that began some months ago, when Phoenix?s Bishop Thomas Olmsted chastised a hospital and demoted a nun administrator because a lifesaving abortion was performed on a young mother of four, Olmsted has threatened to revoke the status of the hospital as a Catholic institution, unless there is a promise in writing that an abortion will never take place there again.
It does not really matter if Republican Senators? opposition to the First Responder bill is based on their professed concern about deficit spending (despite their recent support of extending tax cuts for the wealthiest) or simply on their reluctance to let another Democratic measure pass in this lame duck session. What this sorry incident really shows, to borrow a line from Casablanca, is that human life is cheap in the real world of contemporary pro-life politicians.
Update: On the afternoon of December 22, the Senate approved, by voice vote, the First Responders bill, after the price tag of the bill was reduced from $6.2 billion to $4.2 billion. The bill is expected to be quickly approved by the House, which has already passed an earlier version.
A version of this post first appeared at RH Reality Check.
