Abortion, indeed, is not Health Care

Bumper stickers with the message "Abortion is Not Health Care" have started appearing around the country. They could also say infanticide and euthanasia are not health care.

Our first child, Therese Marie, was born on September 29th the Feast of the Archangels. While in the hospital I met the mother of a child born prematurely and who had to be treated in the neo-natal intensive care unit. That baby was fortunate to arrive in the USA and not Great Britain.

Sarah Capewell's boy Jayden came prematurely at 21 weeks and 5 days of pregnancy in an English hospital. Had Jayden been born 48 hours later he would have been eligible for intensive care treatment. Instead, following their medical guidelines, the British National Health Service staff allowed him to gasp for breath for two hours before dying in his mother's arms.

Welcome to socialized medicine.

My wife and I saw some of the problems with the US health care system firsthand through the delivery and neo-natal care of our daughter. The fear of lawsuits leads directly to costly defensive medicine, including the ordering of unnecessary medical tests. At times it seems like the whole health care system is oriented towards the convenience of medical staff rather than the best interests of the patients. Costs are indeed very high.

On the other hand, we had no fear that the very best trained personnel and technology were ready and willing to care for the patients. For example, the USA has 27 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, very effective tools for accurate diagnosis, per million Americans. The figure for both Canada and Great Britain is 6 per million inhabitants. One could go on about the things that America's flawed system provides that are simply not available under socialized medical regimes, but the end results of both systems when compared are clear for all to see. Overall cancer survival rates after 5 years for American men are 66% and 63% for women. In Europe they are 47% for men and 56% for women.

"Health Care Reform should be about saving lives NOT destroying them" is the slogan of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' campaign to oppose vigorously the current health care legislation before the US Congress. Abortion providers stand to receive millions of our taxpayer dollars for their deadly work if the bills are not properly amended. The right of medical practitioners to decline to perform immoral procedures because of conscientious objection is not protected in the current drafts. Bureaucrats will be giving the gravely ill and elderly voluntary "end of life counseling" and others will decide who gets life-saving treatments and who won't, as we see already in Britain.

The legislation as it currently stands in the almost 2,000-page House bill is totally unacceptable from a pro-life perspective. Please join us in taking action to inform our political representatives of how you feel about the health care bills that will be voted on in the next few days (click here). We must act and pray, asking for Divine deliverance from this impending disaster.

Joseph Meany writes for Human Life International.