Reproductive Health, Public Health and a Country in Crisis

 

The first wave of reaction to the Supreme Court decision declaring Roe V. Wade null and void--the shock and anger and their articulation in the media as well as on the streets--focused on what seemed to be the central issue of access to medical abortion.  There was also the historical shock of seeing a more broadly granted right taken away--something that hasn't happened in America, and which portends more in the future.  (Other rights have been limited by court decisions, but I don't think any have been just totally taken away before.)

But this week I'm seeing a real health care crisis being described, because of the lengths to which Rabid Right states are taking their anti-abortion lawmaking.  I've heard this abortion debate for decades, but only recently have I heard abortion opponents refuse flexibility and exceptions, such as for rape victims and to safeguard the lives and health of women.  Now ignoring both is standard, and it is leading to an array of nightmarish scenarios, some already being realized, such as the ten year old rape victim who had to transport across state lines for an abortion.  Among those scenarios is criminalizing miscarriage.  There are also medical conditions, some of them fairly common, which threaten the mother's life if she has to seek care that may include an abortion at some distance in time as well as place.

For example, Elizabeth Spiers has detailed some of the medical hazards in her badly titled New York Times opinion piece, "The myth that restricting abortion rights won't affect the rich."  David Hackney, also in the Times, is more direct: "I'm a High Risk Obstetrician, and I'm Terrified For My Patients."  Columnist Jennifer Rubin devoted one of her Washington Post columns to this topic.  I'm not including links because unless you've got a subscription (which I don't, on this computer) you can't access them.  Nor can you access the pertinent if again badly titled Times oped by Pamela Paul: "The Far Right and Far Left agree on one thing: women don't count.")

But accessible to anyone is a rundown of fundamental medical misconceptions that add to the tragedy of these laws in Science News, which ends with a pertinent quote from a doctor, that these laws "place priority of a potential life over the actual life of the person sitting in front of me." It is this prioritizing that completely destroys any semblance of a moral position behind these laws, because they are not only willing but mandating the possible destruction of one life for a potential other life. This is not morality; it is insanity.  Anti-abortion is murder. 

Also: NPR exposes the impact on doctors, and Pew Charitable Trust summarizes threats to health, including public health.  These are direct threats on the lives, health and well-being of pregnant women and women in general, but also real threats to families, especially existing children, as well as fathers and potential fathers, and other elements of society.  And if that doesn't get your attention, also to businesses.

The result of this decision is a marked increase in human suffering, which is also a result of the prior decision on a law limiting guns, and a decision afterwards limiting regulation of climate crisis-causing pollution.  Because of the Court-approved insane limitations on gun laws, a toddler in Highland Park, Illinois, who got separated from his parents at a Fourth of July celebration, will never see them again.  His life is changed forever. They were gunned down by an assault weapon by an unseen shooter at distance.  Who seemingly did it, like the Supreme Court, just because he could.

That in essence is also the outcome of our ongoing failure to fully support a robust public health system in this country, more than symbolized by the ongoing absurdity of simply ignoring the current wave of Covid variant infections, just because we're tired of them, and especially of all the conflict over confronting them.  Now we don't have to worry about people dying of Covid--we're just going to ignore them.

In this case, both parties share blame.  Even here in California, the huge buckets of money sent to the states and then to municipalities because of Covid seem to have been spent on everything except one pertinent place: on public health.  That helps the cowardly process of not dealing with the reality, because if you don't gather the facts, how do you know?  Plausible deniability!  So all the states, red and blue, have turned yellow on Covid.

I always have a focus on the overriding threat of our time, the climate crisis.  And if I were to design a scenario for a society unequipped to address either the causes or effects of globally fatal climate disruption, I would do pretty much everything we are now doing. Within the U.S., I would certainly fracture public health systems so they would be unable to cope with all the challenges--the diseases, the results of excessive heat both physical and mental, etc.--of much hotter summers, of fires, of much more volatile weather--tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, days of downpours, years of drought-- that are already in the cards and in fact happening at this very moment, because for the thirty years we've known about it, we haven't effectively addressed the climate crisis.  And all that is now very likely to get very much worse.

I would further weaken healthcare by giving it impossible yet easily avoidable distractions, like trying to treat pregnant women while staying out of jail.  And of course, impossible if easily avoidable barriers, like the too-often inhuman demands and expense of medical insurance and healthcare for profit. 

I would do all these things and more to create as much societal conflict and chaos as possible, and at the very least force people to devote huge amounts of time, energy, attention and resources on coping with and maybe even fixing these otherwise needless and insanely destructive threats and changes.  Anything to keep everyone's attention away from the single enormous threat to human civilization and planetary life. 

And while a congressional committee lays out the evidence of an insurrection and attempted dictatorship founded upon fraud, I would design an election to put back in power the party that supports that fraud and that insurrection, and happens also to be completely incompetent and uninterested in solving actual problems.  Which is what the polls say is likely to happen.  A lot of this is happening because good people have not done enough, have not voted to maintain the integrity of the Supreme Court, and have not sufficiently valued the future over the conveniences of the present.  But not all of it has happened yet.  There are still votes to be cast this November.