National Health Care and Abortion (was Re: Class Politics)

Tom Condit tomcondit at igc.apc.org
Fri Jul 3 22:40:51 PDT 1998


At 01:20 PM 6/4/1998 -0500, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

[snip}
>A struggle for national health care is a necessary, worthy, and practical
project that we should be doing. And if people would like to enjoy the material benefits of universal health care, I don't think that people would reject national health care simply because it includes coverage for abortion. Max talked about elevating class over cultural politics. A good point. Moral condemnation of aboriton is a cultural question, which shouldn't be elevated over class politics: struggles for material benefits of national health care. If anti-abortionists reject national health care because it includes abortion, it will be just another instance of the anti-abortion side's use of 'abortion as litmus test.'
>
>On the other hand, I am quite certain that pro-choicers will endorse a
single-payer national health care, with or without abortion. ..[more snip]

It will give you an indication of how far behind on keeping with e-mail I am that I only now have read this post. Yoshie is, of course, right in the first paragraph quoted above. Unfortunately, she's wrong in the second. Four years ago, NOW came out in opposition to Proposition 186, the California single-payer initiative. Their excuse was that it didn't explicitly cover undocumented immigrants (or Oregonians either, for that matter), but the reality was that the dominant powers in the Democratic Party, including NOW's "pro-choice" candidate for Governor, were opposed to any attempt to infringe on the profits of the insurance industry.

Tom Condit



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list