Hanna Rief wishes she’d been more proactive: “I could have asked more questions,” she says. In late 2013, barely a year before the “ten essential health benefits” mandated by the Obama administration were signed into law, Reid and her boyfriend found she was pregnant. Working as a dental hygienist in Colorado, Rief didn’t have employer-sponsored insurance, but figured the first order of business was marrying the father of her child, who was also uninsured.
She had the baby. She married the father. And now she has this bill:
A full year and three months after she gave birth, Rief received an invoice for $8,996 for her delivery. When she called Blue Cross Blue Shield, they told her she’d been denied for the low-income program, and too much time had passed for her to appeal. She still doesn’t understand what happened, even after spending months on the phone. She called the hospital so often she says they started to recognize her. A few months later, they stopped working with her and sent her debt to collections. Rief is still paying off the bill.
So maybe some curiously well-funded advocacy group working out of a strip mall in Sheboygan could pony up for bills like these, instead of mailing plastic fetuses to politicians or whatever the fuck it is these garbage dickholes are up to now.
God, this pisses me off. And before you’re all cynical up in the comments like OF COURSE THIS SUCKS, THEY DON’T LOVE BABIES THEY HATE WOMEN, I actually did not hit my head when I fell off the turnip truck yesterday. I do know this. I just think we need to point out that if Mary, Mother of God showed up on their doorstep and was all, “knocked up by Yahweh but I’m seeing it through, can I have a glass of water and maybe a chair to nap in” they’d tell her to GTFO.
Of course the Professional Pro-Lifers aren’t concerned about people like these. But it’s important to note that people like these listen to them, and think, I should keep this baby, I should marry the father, I should try to make this work, and then they’re left utterly out in the cold.
Maybe some of the money spent making two-story pictures of people’s miscarriages and photocopying state legislation that mandates the width of hallways in Planned Parenthood clinics could be spent LITERALLY PAYING FOR A NON-ABORTION by covering a mother’s labor and delivery, and the baby after it’s born.
I’m not getting crazy up in here. I’m not asking them to feed all the kids they want brought into the world or anything. Let’s not go wild this morning.
Let’s just say that the cost of your average March for The Unborn could easily pay off the hospital bills of all those women who made the decision we’re told is the only morally defensible one. Maybe print a few thousand fewer T-shirts and fund that instead.
A.
Great post, and I completely agree with all your points. I’m not ‘pro-abortion’ – I don’t think anybody is ‘for’ abortion, as in a perfect world there would be no need for them – but I am definitely pro-choice. Most pro-lifers are single-issue hypocrites, screaming holy hell about the rights of unborn babies, but not giving a single fuck about the mothers, their familial or financial situations, nor what will happen to or care for the babies once they enter this world. Conservatives ARE ALL FULL OF SHIT!!! And don’t get me started on all the old white Christian hypocritical asshole men in Congress who should have ZERO say in how women make decisions about their bodies. Sorry for my rant.
I’m really coming around to the thought that almost EVERYTHING about our economy is screwed up. That people’s priorities are hopelessly askew. How much GOOD could be done with realigning the focus and purpose of some things, exactly as you describe here.
The effing Puritans, between their moralistic assholery and their suicidal work ethic, have been a cancer throughout our culture, and now our oligarchs use it to bludgeon people, basically saying the poor, POC, LGBT, women, etc., etc., don’t DESERVE food, shelter, health care, innocuous necessities of modern existence like phones and microwave ovens and refrigerators, and on and on.
Meantime, the people who chase hideously outsized fortunes the way the rest of us chase Pokemon don’t care what they do to the environment, to children, to families, to education — nothing else matters, so long as their cronies and sponsors are swimming in green.
Although it sounds like it, I’m not in the market for a Utopia just yet… but I’d really, really like a less adversarial relationship with our own government.
Those who call themselves “pro-life” must also (by my definition) be pro-socialized medicine and anti-death penalty. Otherwise they are hypocrites.