Two Unspoken Future Consequences of Universal Healthcare

I wrote recently, here, about the coming Democratic legislative assault on private sector healthcare. As I discussed the post with a friend today, I realized that two important aspects of the debate have been missing so far.

They are, of course, state-directed abortions and euthanasia.

Let me explain.

Once all healthcare is insured/provided by the government, all ability to de-politicize the use of scarce medical resources be gone. Elected officials will appoint the overseers of the program, and those overseers will become the allocators of healthcare dollars and resources.

How long will it be before those overseers note that some births will be more problematic, using more resources, than others? Or that, given genetic information from pre-natal testing, some babies may be born with a higher probability for disease or expensive medical conditions?

Because the healthcare system will have become focused on allocation, rather than an individual's choice for his/her own healthcare, there will be no defense against these developments.

Expect the same at the other end of the age spectrum- euthanasia of the old. It will occur by weighing the expected contribution of older people to society, versus what we all know to be increasingly-expensive late-life and -disease care.

Ironically, a party that thinks it is for the individual, the "little guy," the liberal Democrats, will, in the end, create and operate the machinery for treating individuals as consumers of societal resources, to be denied those resources when deemed too expensive, individual desires be damned.

Will this not be the ultimate intrusion of the state into personal life? Of course.

This is the logical endpoint of the much-desired liberal single-payer healthcare system. Control over who is born, and who dies when.

Wonderboy, The Kennedys & The Vatican

There is good news concerning the Vatican's position on abortion and stem cell research, and those who would seek to be an ambassador to it.

Our First Rookie has further embarrassed himself, and the daughter of a previous president, Caroline Kennedy, by having the latter rejected as the US ambassador to the Vatican.

According to news sources, add the typically clueless John Kerry into the mix for dreaming up the crazy idea in the first place.

Apparently Wonderboy either didn't know, or didn't care, that the Vatican has explicitly made clear to all nations that it will not accept ambassadors who are actively for abortion and/or stem cell research. Kennedy is, of course, stridently in favor of both.

Maybe Kerry is just to stupid to realize that the Vatican has the only version of Catholicism that counts. So Kerry's idea of what should pass for sanctioned behavior is essentially moot.

As a conservative, though, you have to love how the year has begun for Caroline. First bounced out of consideration for Senator from New York, to replace Hillary Clinton. Perhaps because of her tin ear for local politics, or perhaps for the credible stories describing her affair while married.

Now she's been hung out to dry for being an unacceptable Catholic in the eyes of the Vatican.

Looks like the administration can't seem to get anything right. Not even a simple ambassadorship to one of the world's smallest countries.

Unless, of course, Wonderboy wants to flaunt his differences with those who oppose abortion.

Some Insights on Birth Control and Abortions

For years, liberal acquaintances have informed me that the Repubican party has been captured ny the religious right. Apparently, all issues boil down to abortion, in the eyes of these liberals, especially for their arch-nemeses, the aforementioned rightist splinter group.

I'm not an active Republican by any means. I'd rather not register with either party, but, in order to vote in a primary, I am forced to do so. Thus, my identification as more conservative than partisan.

Recently, Kudlow & Company, Larry Kudlow's week nightly program on CNBC, featured the results of a Gallup poll which found nearly-identical percentages of Democratic and Republican voters would cast their vote for President on the single-issue of abortion. If memory serves, that percentage was roughly 18%. Thus, not only was the Republican party not 'captured' by these single-issue zealots, but the Democrats were hostage to the opposite sentiment, to the same degree.

Thus, a column in a recent Wall Street Journal caught my attention. Ms. Riley, the article's author, cast the piece through the eyes of Dr. Atul Gawande, who recently guest-wrote an op-ed piece in the People's Daily (a/k/a New York Times). It discussed the widely-available knowledge about birth-control methods, and their usage. How then, it asked, to accuont for the 1.3 million US abortions, over half of which were performed on women over the age of 25?

According to Ms. Riley, surveys record that 75% of American women,

"think abortion is morally wrong in at least some circumstances. The most common exceptions- rape, incest and life of the mother- are in fact the least common reasons women have abortions. So what gives?"

Riley quotes Kay Hymowitz, author of "Marriage and Caste in America," as writing,

"There isn't really a bright line between wanted and unwanted pregnancies."

Ultimately, Ms. Riley comes to a rather chilling conclusion,

"Whether they're suburban professionals with two sons who really want a daughter or poor inner-city women who hope their boyfriends will stay around if there is a child in the picture, women will often subvert their better judgment to fulfill a biological urge.

This is not the sort of sentiment that sits well with feminists- or with anyone, for that matter, who believes women are the ones thinking with their heads instead of their hormones."

It turns out that six in ten US women who have abortions are already mothers, and more than half intend to have more children. As Riley points out,

"These women know exactly how one gets pregnant, and how one does not."

Which leads Ms. Riley, and us, to the logical conclusion. Abortion has become an expensive, morally questionable form of birth control used by women who hope things will develop, over nine months, into a situation in which they feel comfortable bearing a child. But when circumstances do not comply with their hopes, they opt to terminate the pregnancy instead.

When you depart from the purely emotional arguments about "a woman's body," etc., and look at the facts, you rapidly realize that the issue is not about young, inner-city, uneducated women who have accidentally 'made a mistake.' Rather, it appears that our moral retreat on the question of how our society views the sanctity and right of each life to be protected has resulted in many women callously choosing to become pregnant, realizing that they can wait quite a few months and simply abort the child.

I'm not a single-issue voter, and I certainly don't intend to begin now, with this issue. However, I find the facts troubling. As part of a broader loosening of moral consistency in America, beginning in the late 1960s, our current dilemma vis a vis abortion, when electively used as birth control, seems to me to send entirely the wrong signal in a society which, in so many other areas, alleges to value life and protection of the weak. Of what value are so many governmentally-financed aid programs for surviving children, when our society actively supports the ability and means of women to abort other children before birth for no more reason than inconvenience?