‘Rape insurance’
Health insurance restriction is just the latest scheme to deny women access to abortion.
Our state lawmakers can’t figure out how to cut our property taxes or fix our broken method of financing public schools. But when it comes to devising new ways of harassing women who want to end pregnancies, they’re as inventive as Thomas Edison.
Witness one of the few pieces of legislation they managed to pass in Austin this month, a bill mandating that standard health insurance plans no longer cover abortions performed outside of medical emergencies. So any woman in Texas who wants abortions covered as part of her health insurance would presumably have to pay a premium for a supplemental policy.
Unlike many other anti-abortion laws, this measure does not include exceptions for rape survivors, incest victims or mothers who discover they’re carrying fetuses with terrible abnormalities. Texas becomes the 26th state to ban health exchange plans from providing abortion coverage, but only eight other states impose this additional burden on rape and incest victims.
Legislators who supported the bill touted it as “economic freedom.” They argued that abortion opponents have basically been forced to pay premiums into insurance pools that fund procedures for women who want to end their pregnancies. The bill’s lead author, Rep. John Smithee, R-Amarillo, said “if you want to buy this coverage, you can buy it.”
But the economic reality is that Texas women actually may not be able to get that coverage. That’s because insurers may not offer it, for the simple reason that there won’t be much of a market for it because people generally don’t plan to have abortions.
“Women don’t plan to be raped,” said state Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie. “Parents don’t plan for their children to become victims of incest. Asking a woman or a parent to foresee something like that and buy supplemental insurance to cover that horrific possibility is not only ridiculous, it’s cruel.”
That’s why opponents of this legislation call it the “rape insurance” law. Surviving sexual assault is not only traumatic, it can also be expensive. Carly Mee, a rape survivor who’s now an attorney representing victims of sexual assault, recounted in The Washington Post earlier this year the myriad expenses she racked up in the wake of her attack, from moving costs to therapy bills to pharmacy payments. Imagine, in addition to all those expenses, being a rape victim who also has to pay for an abortion because of the legislation Gov. Greg Abbott just signed into law.
Meanwhile, a couple of other anti-abortion bills harass clinics with a requirement they keep more detailed records and file more paperwork with the state government. One of these bills gives physicians just three days to send state officials detailed reports on patients who undergo abortion, revealing everything from their marital status to the date of their last menstrual cycle. Another law requires doctors performing abortions on minors to document how their patients obtained authorization for the procedure.
All of this fits a calculated pattern of anti-abortion legislation in Texas. Our state’s elected leaders couch it in all sorts of arguments about public safety and protecting women, but they clearly want to do whatever they can get away with to hassle abortion providers out of business and make it as difficult as possible for Texas women to end pregnancies.
Our governor, lieutenant governor and state lawmakers need to accept that Texas women have a constitutional right to end their pregnancies. It’s the law of the land guaranteed by the U.S. Supreme Court. And there’s no reason why the state government should forbid insurers from offering it as part of their standard health insurance plans.
Our governor, lieutenant governor and state lawmakers need to accept that Texas women have a constitutional right to end their pregnancies. It’s the law of the land guaranteed by the U.S. Supreme Court.