It took less than an hour last week for the Michigan Legislature to introduce and pass one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation.
The law — which arrived via “citizen initiative,” a petition drive — bars insurance companies from paying for abortion procedures as part of standard health insurance. But it included legal innovations that shocked even battle-scarred veterans of the abortion wars.
“People are angry and in complete disbelief that they live in a state that has this much disregard for women and their health care. ... it’s clear that the Legislature has crossed a line,” said Desiree Cooper, spokesman for Planned Parenthood of Southeastern and Mid-Michigan.
On the new frontier: No exception for the health of the mother — as opposed to the life of the mother. Under the new law, doctors can intervene in a pregnancy to protect the fetus — but not to protect the health of the mother. Until recently, protecting the “health and life” of the mother was standard language in all such bills. This new law values fetal health above maternal health, at least for insurance purposes.
The proactive insured woman who buys a special abortion rider doesn’t have to worry: Her physician can opt to protect her health. (That assumes insurance companies provide such a rider.) But the woman who doesn’t buy up front could be in trouble: The state can fine doctors $10,000 for performing a procedure that saved the mother’s health — but not her life — and billed insurance.
No exception for rape. The absence of this clause infuriated Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer, who called the bill “rape insurance” in the run-up to its passage.
As the bill was introduced last Wednesday, she revealed the reason why in an emotional speech to her colleagues: She had been raped 24 years before as a college student.
Knowing that day that she might publicly share her experience, she called her father to tell him about a traumatic event in her life, one he’d never heard before. “He was blindsided,” she says.
Whitmer’s revelation brought sudden quiet to the chamber but it resonated around the world. What she first noticed, though, was a sad, empty feeling. “I went home knowing that I didn’t change a single vote,” says Whitmer.
On Thursday morning, she felt blue and unsure of herself.
“But by the time I got to the office,” she said, “there were thousands of Facebook and email messages. It was amazing.”
But she remained “horrified” that “my colleagues never listened to women testify or to doctors or other health providers or even to clergy members,” she says now.
That’s not as horrifying, though, as another reality. The Republicans chose to pass a restrictive, ill-conceived, vaguely understood bill last week because Right to Life of Michigan — perhaps the state’s most powerful lobby — wanted it done, right then.
Whitmer’s decision to personalize the debate may not have affected the immediate outcome. But it injected real-life ambiguity and vulnerability into an otherwise predictable legal wrangle. Whitmer’s passion, and vulnerability, dramatized how a decision blithely made under political pressure can, and likely will, intrude into the most intimate aspects of our lives and those of our children.
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