Being Pro-Life While Killing Reality

Senator Ben Nelson (Corporate Shill-Nebraska) is the latest senseless impediment in the Senate to passing something, anything called healthcare reform. His objections stem from the possibility that poor people might be able to obtain access to abortions if healthcare reform passes. He is adamantly pro-life, as if that means anything anymore. Perhaps the corporate-friendly senator can explain how denying health insurance to poor children or denying prenatal healthcare to pregnant women would be considered pro-life. It's not as if poor children need health insurance, even though a study by Heather Rosen, MD, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, determined uninsured children are over three times more likely to die from their trauma-related injuries than are commercially insured children, even after adjustment for other factors such as age, gender, race, injury severity and injury type. What Nelson is referring to as a compromise is absurd and blatantly discriminatory, and it just so happens that poor people will bear the brunt of such discrimination. Poor women are already discriminated against by the status-quo (the Hyde Amendment). Middle-class women are able to pay for abortions out-of-pocket. The unfairness should be obvious. Women that can afford to have abortions (as well as access to birth control in general) are able to exercise control over their lives while poor women will continue to suffer in a cycle of poverty and desperation as they are forced to provide for children that they can't possibly afford. Is that pro-life?

This only illustrates the dishonesty and callousness of the Fox News enthusiasts. The voting public is constantly being bombarded with proclamations by hysterical, angry, conservatives wielding pictures of fetuses, demanding that America embrace the pro-life position because they are the only people that truly value life, just like they are the only people that truly display patriotism, as well as being the only people that accurately reflect the views of real America (rural, white, poorly-educated, bigoted, angry about the 21st century). Somehow, promoting tax cuts for the wealthy that bankrupt the entire nation, waging endless wars against impoverished brown people that result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and refusing to provide basic social insurance (access to healthcare for example) to poor people qualifies a person as being pro-life.

I suppose it's similar to those other well-known truths. Conservative, hysterical, angry, bigoted white people are the only true patriots in this country because they listen to Toby Keith and demand that Mexicans be deported on sight. By the same token, conservative, hysterical, angry, bigoted white people must be right when they say that real America didn't vote for Barack Obama and that means that he doesn't really deserve the title of President Obama, because he's not really the President. The truth is as self-evident as can be.

Now that I think about these matters, the more it makes sense. I believe that conservatives believe the assertions commonly repeated on Fox News. In the mind of the average red state voter, I'm sure that he/she believes that patriotism is best defined by Toby Keith's music, that Barack Obama didn't really win the election, and that being pro-life means denying basic opportunities for a better quality of life to poor/brown people, waging endless war against non-English speaking, non-Christian brown people, all while defending the imaginary rights of fetuses. Clearly, I've been confused the entire time.