To the Editor:
Your article is an excellent reminder of the struggles facing poor women who seek basic reproductive health care in this country. Because of a law called the Hyde Amendment, which was first enacted in 1976 and renewed each year since, women on Medicaid are not covered for the cost of an abortion.
Unlike other basic health needs for men and women, this procedure, which nearly one-third of all women in the United States will have by the end of their reproductive years, is specifically carved out of coverage. For poor women in Washington Heights, paying $30 for a risky and illegal drug is much more realistic than paying several hundred dollars (or much more) for a legal abortion out of their own pockets.
If President-elect Barack Obama is serious about improving the health of poor women, one of his first agenda items should be the repeal of the Hyde Amendment. In the meantime, poor women will, at best, turn to private assistance through local abortion funds, or, at worst, turn to risky medicine that is the modern equivalent of the back-alley abortion.
David S. Cohen
Philadelphia, Jan. 5, 2009
The writer is an associate professor at the Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law and a board member of the Women’s Medical Fund in Philadelphia.
Note from KBJ: The legal right to abort a fetus is a negative right, not a positive right. Most Americans do not want to be complicit in what they consider to be murder.
