The Republican Party claims to be pro-life and to support "family values" yet one aspect of its war against the Affordable Health Care Act is the requirement that health care policies include maternity coverage. To me, it's yet another example of GOP hypocrisy much akin to the rabid "pro-life" crowd that love fetuses until they are born after which they don't give a damn about poor children. It's one reason I hold these people in open contempt. They don't practice what they preach and while they claim to be concerned about the unborn, all concern evaporates once children are born. The same holds true with this opposition to maternity coverage which would help improve the odds that children are born healthy. Here are highlights from a Washington Post column that looks at this GOP/Christofascist hypocrisy:
If you’re a conservative strongly opposed to abortion, shouldn’t you want to give all the help you can to women who want to bring their children into the world? In particular, wouldn’t you hope they’d get the proper medical attention during and after their pregnancy?
This would seem a safe assumption, which is why it ought to be astonishing that conservatives are positively obsessed with trashing the Affordable Care Act’s regulation requiring insurance policies to include maternity coverage.
[C]ritics of Obamacare apparently think there is something particularly odious when a person who might not have a baby pays premiums to assist someone who does. It’s true that men cannot have babies, although it is worth mentioning that they do play a rather important role in their creation. In any event, it is hardly very radical to argue that society is better off when kids are born healthy to healthy moms.
Yet the conservatives’ ire over this issue knows no bounds. “And so what if a health policy lacks maternity care?” wrote Deroy Murdoch on National Review’s Web site , the italics on that impatient “so what” being his. “Not all women want to bear more children — or any children at all. . . . And how about lesbians who do not want kids, and are highly unlikely to become pregnant accidentally?” It’s touching, actually, to see such concern for lesbians in a conservative publication.
On “Fox News Sunday” this month, host Chris Wallace was very worked up as he pressed Zeke Emanuel, a former health-care adviser to President Obama, over how unfair it is that a single woman with a 24-year-old son would be forced to pay for such coverage.
Who knew that supporting motherhood was suddenly controversial?
All of which ought to present members of the right-to-life movement with a challenge. In the name of consistency, they need to break with their conservative allies and insist that maternity coverage be included in all health-care plans. Shouldn’t those who want to prevent abortion be in the forefront of making the case that a woman will be far more likely to choose to have her baby if she knows that both she and her child will get regular medical attention?
For too many politicians on the right, what they say about abortion is at odds with what they say about so many other issues. They speak with great concern and compassion for the unborn, and I respect that.
[C]onservatives would make abortion illegal and leave it at that. Thus we have the spectacle in Texas of right-wing politicians trying to make it as difficult as possible for a woman to obtain an abortion while proudly blocking the state’s participation in the expansion of Medicaid to cover the near-poor. Does it serve the cause of life to keep more than 1.8 million Texans from getting health insurance?
If health coverage — yes, including maternity care — isn’t a right-to-life issue, I don’t know what is.
Greed, hypocrisy and indifference towards others - if not open hatred - are key attributes of today's GOP and its supporters among the "godly Christian" folk.
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