Malarky's Pond: Yes, Altoona, There Can Be Pro-Life Liberals

The following letter appeared in the ALtoona Mirror on September 23, 2009. I am reprinting it here, preceeding my own response:

As the father of a recent college graduate who now has no health care coverage, I can empathize with those who thought they could make a difference by turning out for a candlelight vigil in Altoona (Mirror article, Sept. 3).
They should have had the opportunity to voice their views without threat of intimidation or violence.
It is clear to most people that the uninsured do need help. But H.R. 3200, the bill set to come before the entire U.S. House of Representatives, is not the answer to that prayer. The Capps Amendment to this bill (passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee) would explicitly authorize coverage of all elective abortions under the giant new "public plan."
In addition, it would also allow federal subsidies to flow to private insurance plans that cover elective abortions.
Move-On.org, the radical left extremists which organized the nationwide candlelight vigils, didn't bother to tell citizens that part of its agenda on its Web site.
But you can be sure that those who want to use health care reform to expand abortions nationwide have been knocking on the doors of Congress saying, "Look at all the support we have for this legislation!"
The majority of Americans do not favor unrestrained abortion on demand for any reason during all nine months of pregnancy.
And the vast majority do not want government money to pay for the killing of preborn babies and the lifetime of physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual damage abortion causes women.
Yet, that is exactly what we'll get if health care reform is passed without restrictions on abortion coverage.
Don't let MoveOn.org and like-minded radical groups get away with this. Tell your U.S. Representative and Senators Casey and Specter now: "Oppose any health care reform that does not explicitly exclude abortion coverage."
Michael V. Ciccocioppo
Executive Director
PA Pro-Life Federation
Harrisburg

Mallarky's Response to the PA Pro-Life Federation:

I am also the father of a recent college graduate who lost health care coverage. In fact, as my family and I left the driveway, headed for Penn State on the day of my daughter’s graduation, I walked through the rain to pick up the day’s mail. There among a small handful of letters was one from Blue Cross, announcing that as of that day -- the day of her graduation -- she was no longer covered under my policy. They didn’t waste any time -- not a single minute longer than necessary -- to drop her. They had obviously done the math far in advance. I fully expected she would be terminated upon graduation. These were the terms of our policy. It was the cold, impersonal swiftness with which they acted that reminded me that the private insurance companies care nothing for the people they insure.

They care about cash, not health. And they will not spend a single penny beyond that required by the law on patients, despite the cute, perky, warm empathetic sounding commercials they pump out at us in the media like ham salad out of a meat grinder. It’s not about the welfare of people or their health. It’s about money.

Realizing the Extinction of the Great American Middle Class

About a week before graduation we had received news from a local neurologist that my daughter, who had been having repeated bouts of migraines and visual problems of late had a rare brain disorder and would possibly need brain surgery. In the days following graduation I was busy looking into our options. Under COBRA we could continue her on my policy, but the premium was an additional whopping $570 per month just for her personal coverage. I looked into alternative policies with lower premiums only to learn that since she now, suddenly had a “pre-existing condition“, her coverage would not kick in for a year on the brain condition, so no related services (including surgery) would be covered. I had just pumped a total of $69,000 from my retirement account into her 4 year degree at Penn State to cover tuition, room, board, books etc.

We hadn’t qualified for economic aid, not because of income, but because I had unwittingly made that money an “available resource” (as the financial aid departments call it) by taking it and setting it aside in an account for her education. So, I was looking for some economic relief from the previous 4 years of college costs that was clearly not going to materialize. The only option was to pay the monthly premium so that coverage would continue.

She was already busy with the process of job interviewing, and after about a month she had secured a social services position (at close to minimum wage) with health coverage. Of course, the coverage would not be effective until after 90 days of employment. In the meantime, she had continued to job seek and secured a second job at twice the wage of the first, and with better career advancement prospects; so, of course, she took it. However the new employer’s health plan had the same restriction and she again had to begin a new 90 day waiting period.
So, many months passed, with the prospect of brain surgery hanging over her and the only health care option being my $570 monthly policy. Even having doubled her minimum wage social work salary to $15 per hour on her new job, their was no conceivable way she could have afforded that premium. That is the economy that Ronald Regan and George Bush had bequeathed us. One where families, even after exhausting much of their personal savings on a child’s education, would see that child enter a labor market where employers paid as little as possible in compensation, and the cost of health care is so prohibitive and inaccessible that even with a college degree it is next to impossible to support oneself.

The Pro-Life Enigma

So, of course, we were one of those families to whom the idea of national public health care made obvious sense. But, like Mr. Ciccocioppo, we were also a pro-life family. We had marched in Washington DC on the mall of the Capitol. We had stood in protest lines on the streets of our own town in pro-life rallies. We had marched at abortion clinics in various cities to protest the dehumanization of the pre-born. We had been shoved by police and shouted at by “in your face” angry pro-choice advocates. I had participated in the founding of a local professional organization of human service workers committed to the pro-life cause. We were, and are, in short, as committed to the cause of respect for life as Mr. Ciccocioppo.

But we are not of the mentality that life begins at conception and ends at birth. Being pro-life means assuming one's responsibility during every stage of the process of living. And that includes supporting human dignity by enabling all citizens to participate equally in the resources of our society -- including that of access to affordable health care.

We also understand that the diversity of America will be reflected in its laws. And that those laws will at times, as in any pluralistic democracy, inevitably conflict with important individual personal values; even longstanding ones that have evolved from traditionally held beliefs that have seemed to predominate from the early days of the republic. It is exactly this sort of social evolution that has given rise to today’s disputes over creationism and evolution and women’s privacy versus the right to life prior to birth. It spawned these conflicts just as the debate over abolition and slavery had at an earlier chapter of our history. And the emotions they trigger are just as fierce on either side.

There are many reasonable people who disagree with the idea that “life begins at conception” or that a fetus represents a complete human being at every stage of its development. And many of us who are pro-life base our notions of the rightness of our cause on religious values that are not shared by other citizens. We have, of course, a right to free speech and to try to argue and persuade others of the correctness of our beliefs.

But we don’t have a right to impose our personal or religious values on the moral decision making process of others any more than they do on us.

Tempering the “Everything or Nothing” Arrogance of the Political Right

Nor are we wise to sacrifice an historic opportunity to enable guaranteeing all our citizens the basic right to health care, simply because we cannot successfully extract from the proposed legislation the abortion option that already exists in our health care system. One can both support an imperfect national health care plan and, at the same time, continue to faithfully maintain a reverence for life. It simply requires tempering the arrogance that comes from believing that this fight boils down to an “everything or nothing” situation. It doesn’t. And those who insist that it does will ensure that we end up with just that -- nothing -- no national health care, and an inevitable continuation of abortion policies already firmly in place. That is simply a nonsensical lose/lose situation.

All of the years I have been involved in the cause of promoting respect for human life, something has bothered me. It’s the practice of reductionism on both sides of the dispute -- the boiling down of an extremely complex issue to an almost simple minded set of slogans like “pro-life” and “pro-choice“. Those phrases mean nothing. Life always involves an unfolding progression of discrete, and uncertain, moral choices. In fact, common sense tells us that none of those who call themselves “pro-life” can be unfamiliar with the necessity of making morally imprecise situational choices any more than those labeled “pro-choice” are somehow incapable of respect for the living, born or unborn. What nonsense. The purpose of those mouse-trap-like catch phrases is simply to block out from our field of view inconvenient parts of the picture. They were invented, on both sides, to prevent us from thinking outside someone else’s narrow focus of vision.

And I find the appeals of people like Mr. Ciccocioppo when based on their supposed sensitivity to women’s issues to be less than genuine. It is no secret that the majority of pro-life activists unfortunately lean far to the political right. Or that the political right has worked tooth and nail to discourage the advancement of women’s rights. So, when he mourns “the lifetime of physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual damage abortion causes women,“ it can’t help but sound disingenuous.
And the fact that most right leaning activists are also vigorously involved in supporting the private insurance industry’s drive to maintain control of the health care market, means that anything said by people like Mr. Ciccocioppo needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt by those of us -- the majority of the population -- who are both opposed to uncontrolled abortion and in favor of universal health care benefits for every citizen.

That’s why he not so subtly linked “Move-On.org” to the candlelight vigil: so that he could attack the notion of national health care by setting up a sort of “gilt by association” in the minds of those of us opposed to unrestrained abortion. There were, in fact, suprissingly many of us who are actively pro-life who numbered in the ranks of those attending that candlelight vigil and fully support national health care because it is simply another aspect of the movement for respect for life. By listening to Mr. Ciccocioppo we are once again risking being politically manipulated by a small group of self serving and short sighted demagogues, and loosing out on what is arguably the most important domestic political issue of our times.