The Obamacare-Abortion Myth
Even as liberals worry that the justices will strike down healthcare reform, conservatives like Rose are preparing to keep up the fight in case the Court upholds it. If Obamacare stands, she says activists will take to the streets, the courts, the voting booth and the halls of Congress much in the way they have fought legal abortion.
Rose’s invocation of Roe as a parable for Obamacare is emblematic of conservative confusion and hypocrisy when it comes to the law. Roe enshrined a woman’s right to be free from interference from the government in choosing an abortion — a medical procedure. Yet the right to be free from government “tyranny,” as Tea Party activists call it, is the same principle that animates conservative opposition to imagined “government bureaucrats” writing the rules on access to care. You wouldn’t want the government telling you what to do with your body, would you?
The one exception, of course, is the space between a woman’s vagina and her ovaries. Anti-choice activists, like conservatives broadly, argue the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is unconstitutional because it infringes on individual freedom to choose one’s own healthcare, but women’s reproductive care is another matter. It’s not a coincidence that renewed conservative hostility to women’s health has coincided with the movement’s mobilization against Obama’s healthcare reform. In the three years conservatives have been fighting against Obamacare, first in Congress and now in the courts, anti-choice activists also have been using the power of state legislatures to make it more arduous, more invasive and more humiliating to seek an abortion.