Cornell law professor Sherry F. Colb argued against a new law that protects Texans from paying for the abortions of others through their tax dollars and health insurance premiums.
Writing at Newsweek, Colb basically said the government has no business interfering in a woman’s “right” to abort her unborn baby and have insurance pay for it.
“So long as there is a right to abortion, however, no state should be able to forcibly ghettoize health insurance that covers its exercise,” Colb wrote.
Texas House Bill 214 protects people from subsidizing abortions through their tax dollars or their private health insurance payments by prohibiting abortion coverage in private health plans, state insurance plans and Obamacare plans. Pro-life Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill into law earlier this month.
Texas is not alone. Currently 25 states prohibit abortion coverage in the Obamacare exchange plans and 10 restrict abortion coverage in private plans, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Colb made several points against the law, one being that health insurance companies benefit more financially by covering abortions (the killing of unborn babies) rather than months of prenatal care and childbirth.
“To cover the first and not the second, thereby discouraging the less expensive option, would make no sense for an insurance company that is pursuing its financial best interests rather than obeying the Texas law,” she wrote.
Colb continued:
The law therefore mandates that insurance companies do something that is against their financial best interests in order for the state to pursue some agenda. And what is that agenda?
Hostility to abortion and a desire to make it difficult for women who want to terminate their pregnancies to do so, either because the women have to take more bureaucratic steps to acquire abortion coverage or because women decide to forgo the extra coverage because it is too much of a hassle or too expensive and then later feel pressured to remain pregnant because they lack the insurance for an abortion.
She went on to reiterate the tired old argument that pro-lifers should not complain about taxpayer funding for abortion because lots of people oppose things that their tax dollars go to.
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Interestingly, Colb seemed to support the slaughter of unborn babies in abortions, but she said she is opposed to “the exploitation and slaughter of animals.”
She wrote:
For people like me who oppose the exploitation and slaughter of animals, the government’s subsidies to people who farm animals (and to people who grow corn and soy specifically to feed those animals) force us to participate in evil at least as much as a Blue Cross-Blue Shield policy that covers abortions does with pro-life customers. Yet we cannot stop paying some portion of our taxes for that reason.
But her primary argument against the law was largely a libertarian one: that the government should not compel private businesses or individuals to deny women coverage for a legal procedure.
“Insurance is how people fortunate enough to have it pay their bills,” she concluded. “And if they choose to pay for a constitutionally protected procedure like abortion, the government should not be allowed to erect barriers to that choice.”
But the law is not stopping women from buying insurance that covers abortion. If any Texans do want abortion coverage, the law would allow individuals to purchase coverage for elective abortions in separate, supplemental plans. This legislation would protect the freedom of all Texans to abide by their consciences.
The problem is that nothing short of full support of abortion on demand up to birth and complete, taxpayer-funded coverage of the deaths of unborn babies will satisfy abortion activists.
