Soapbox: Anti-woman policy not prescribed by economy or social realities

By Tom Loret
Twentynine Palms | Hi-Desert opinion page | Posted: Tuesday, March 13, 2012

As a regular reader of the Hi-Desert Star’s opinion page, I wish to thank Ms. Lawson for presenting the matters of choice, freedom, options and responsibility as they pertain to women’s health care in the way she did (“Women have health care options,” Saturday). With her help, I finally understood why I am so attracted to the topic when she wrote, “The freedom to have sex whenever and wherever (italics mine) a woman chooses carries with it a huge responsibility. That decision is mostly hers to make.” To follow, I can only imagine she extends the same liberality to include with whomever the woman chooses as well and that gives me, as a single man, hope.

Otherwise I never touch women or women’s issues unless I’ve been invited, so leaving aside the ingredients of misogyny, racism and religious bigotry, I prefer to focus on the facts, which have all disappeared in the broad brush strokes used to paint Ms. Lawson’s picture-perfect world.

In the first place, how or why does Ms. Lawson go from health care to contraception and abortion when those procedures constitute no more than 3 percent of the entire spectrum of women’s health care?

The world knows that highly restrictive abortion laws do not reduce abortion, but only make them into unsafe and needless disasters. Why else do 70,000 women die every year from unsafe abortion, five million more require long-term treatment for adverse complications and another three million complications go untreated? Have we, as Americans, chosen to become ranked in the world as 47th in infant survival, 49th in life expectancy, 37th in overall health delivery and 72nd in population health?

In a responsible, people-not-profits-first economy, Congress and Obama would not have cut $54 million from Medicaid, which reduces an already inadequate coverage in half by 2030, when every year in America over 45,000 citizens die from little to no medical care and 150 million more have none at all. It makes no sense when George Washington University research revealed that simply by implementing nationwide community health centers, the emergency room costs to the public would save more than $180 billion in the next 10 years itself.

However, if taxpayers such as Ms. Lawson consider this the price of freedom, then I, as a taxpayer, propose that we cover those same costs with some of that over $100 billion in annual tax exemptions churches enjoy at the expense of the very low-income and uninsured people they prey upon — as the price of decency and fair play.

Nor can Ms. Lawson’s position claim a moral concern for the fetus, since everyone knows that the fetus is 100 percent dependent upon conditions within the womb and how we treat the mother is how we treat the child and the future of society.

So what is the crux of the difficulty if neither economic nor social realities prescribe harsh, anti-woman policy?

I really do not know, because in my world freedom means nothing unless everything and everyone is actually free. And that’s no joke when we sit down with the math and realize it is cheaper to provide for the health, welfare, education and basic human necessities of our population than it is to keep it from them with surveillance, laws, accounting, lawyers, police, courts, prisons, hospitals and all the other institutions that perpetuate the medical, legal, social, gender, racial, sexist and economic discrimination that burdens those who give us all the only love, care and understanding we can ever know.

There is a word for those who do that to mothers.

EDITOR’S NOTE — Tom Loret included links to the sources of his information in his original letter; the links remain in the online post of his Guest Soapbox at www.hidesertstar.com.