Demonstrators pro and anti lined the sidewalks. I chose a pink sign for drivers speeding by, ‘I Stand With Planned Parenthood’. The antis had their own signs in the same color and typeface, ‘Stop Planned Harvesthood’. Although the allegations against Planned Parenthood were unfounded and the makers of the ‘sting’ video are facing charges true believers are not letting go. You can’t argue with faith.

As I stood by the curb, a procession approached- a tall man with white hair and a woman wearing a bandanna adorned with marijuana leaves. They were carrying banners with the Virgin of Guadalupe and the man was blowing loud blasts on a long curly rams’s horn. I recognized them from Facebook. “Are you the Church of the Holy Herb?” I asked. Yes, and they were here to add their voice to the anti-abortion side. Strange bedfellows.

Although it was hard to hear the antis on the other side of the busy street they did their inevitable co-opting of the Civil Rights struggle, singing ‘This Little Light of Mine.’ I doubt they know that Dr.King was given the Margaret Sanger award by Planned Parenthood in 1966.

An anti-abortion protester had a body camera on his shirt. He said it was in case he was “assaulted again”.

A woman was carrying a sign that said, ‘I regret my abortion’. A consequence of making choices is the risk of choices you regret. Tell me about it. I would support her right to join in a moral debate but not to try to make abortion illegal for all women.

A man was carrying a sign that said, ‘Hillary Kills Babies’. You really don’t get used to words like ‘baby killer.’ As a mother, as a nurse, as a woman who advocates for the rights of women and children, especially those with disabilities, it is painful to be labeled as a supporter of baby killing. This whole bizarre performance was happening within blocks of Women&Infants Hospital and Hasbro Children’s Hospital where lives are saved every day. The Catholic Church in RI has some good people and charities, but their leadership reliably supports politicians who undermine vital services for women and infants because they are PRO LIFE.

As I left the demonstration for a darkened room and some Motrin I saw the woman from the Church of the Holy Herb nose to nose with one of the prolifers shouting about sperms and eggs. You guys deserve each other, I thought (no offense to The Herb).

That afternoon, Hillary Clinton was scheduled to speak in Central Falls, a miniature city famous for Viola Davis. I wanted to see for myself what crowds Hillary could draw. My Facebook friends were posting pictures of hordes for Bernie and dismal empty function rooms for Hillary.

The line outside Central Falls High School 45 minutes before door opening was long but I figured I had a shot, they said that 1,200 would get in. Major politicians, like rock stars, are always late, and I had nothing much to do except look at the crumbling Victorian house across the street fantasizing how I would renovate it if I won the lottery. There were a lot of people in line wearing union t-shirts and we had some friendly words, but I was facing an hour at least just standing there. Some nice looking young men were handing out tracts. I eagerly accepted the reading material.

Such 16-page, glossy 8×10 4 color doesn’t grow on trees, and headlines like ‘Fugitive Pope’,’Sodom and Gomorrah’ and ‘Brace Yourselves’ did not disappoint. Apparently the Vatican, the CIA, the IRS, Nazis and The Illuminati are working in close coordination. I’d love to know how they manage that when Progressives de-friend each other over who to vote for in November. Anyway, Tony Alamo or his disciples are still finding money to print these tracts in 2016, despite the fact the the Reverend himself is said to be a grifter. and serving time for sexual abuse of children.

Who were these guys, and why are they in Central Falls?

Having been dragged sideways in my teens through a Pentecostal church I respect the power of the non-rational. Great ideals can bring out the best and the worst in us. The anti-abortion protesters at Planned Parenthood really believe they are defending children. They claim the righteousness of Martin Luther King, not knowing he was a pragmatist who had to minister to real people in the world we live in. As his power increased the moral complexity of decisions he had to make increased as well.

My friends who support Bernie have many valid points to make for why he is the best candidate and legitimate criticisms of Hillary Clinton. But some of them have casually re-posted junk from Right Wing sources whose only goal is to divide and conquer.

I don’t have to be psychic to predict that the same people who claim the Pope is chugging beers with The Illuminati will declare that Hillary is the Whore of Babylon. It’s only a crackpot few who will state it in those terms, but there is a Christian majority in this country that will hear the dog whistles. And they just ‘wont trust’ Hillary.

The Providence Journal said Hillary got about 1,000 supporters though the gymnasium with a capacity of 1,200 was packed like sardines (I was there). Bernie got 7,000 at Roger Williams Park the next day, to the credit of his message and hard-working and dedicated supporters.

I am hoping that the Democratic Party will offer a unified and powerful message to voters in November. It’s a certainty that the non-rational will have a strong voice in this election. It’s not only hearts, it’s brains we will have to win.

I was preparing to give testimony at the annual RI House abortion / choice exercise (hearing) last week when two facts or arguments occurred to me that happen to support my pro-choice position. The first is that a potential-father’s contribution to the mass of a fetus just before birth is miniscule, so he has no say in what the woman decides to do. The second is that forcing a woman to give birth is a form of rape.

Hear me out.

To my first point, we can see that the man’s contribution to a potential birth is about nil by looking at the science. A sperm cell weighs about 4.9 x 10^-14 lbs (mass = 22 picograms). The weight of a just pre-birth fetus averages about 7.5 lbs. So the father’s ‘part’ of the fetus versus the Mother’s part is about one in 155 trillion. Put another way, about 99.999999999999% of the fetus is from the mother. Therefore it only makes sense that the man should have little to say about anything having to do with the fetus. Note: spousal consent is no longer required nationally, but a Rhode Island state law to that effect is still on the books. Should the national ruling be overturned by the US Supreme Court, the RI law would take affect.

To my second point, that forcing a woman to give birth is a form of rape, what else can we call it? The state would be forcing a woman to create human tissue against her will. And then forcing her to expel it via the vagina. The state would force something through a woman’s vagina? Doesn’t sound too good to me; sounds like rape. Either the creation-of-tissue aspect or the expulsion part is anathema to the nation’s fundamental sense of personal freedom.

Similarly, any attempt to aid in a forced birth makes someone an accessory to rape or guilty of attempted rape. This means that any regulation or law aiding or abetting forced birth makes the state complicit in rape. For example any law requiring “informed consent” before an abortion falls into this category.

No, it really wasn’t all that funny.

Uhtime No. 3

Brien was all over the place, and having a tough time coming to terms with his “small government except for abortion” views. Guess what John Brien? You sound pro-choice.

RI Future’s Bob Plain just had to let Brien talk to win the day.

Bob and Bill Rappleye spend most of the episode getting Brien back onto the subject.

When I was at Hendricken, there was something called the Irish Club, a group of students and faculty that engaged in an after-school celebratory discourse about Celtic Catholic spirituality and culture. We would from time to time touch on the tremendously fraught issue that is the Irish Republican Army. The overwhelming opinion was that, even though the IRA was right in its aims, they were wrong to launch attacks in a fashion that resulted in civilian casualties. Leaving aside my own further intellectual development since I discovered the works of Frantz Fanon, the reality is that one can and should apply this logic to the murder of people at a women’s clinic.

Anything less than a full-throated rejection of an act of religiously-influenced domestic terrorism on par with the violence of 9/11, including modifying phrases that condemns the activities of the victims, is the stuff of cowardice. If a school should be involved in such acts of cowardice, their ability to be serviced by taxpayer-funded free school bussing should be revoked, as should the supply of taxpayer-funded text books in math, science, and other subjects. If we are going to have some individuals harping and howling over whether President Obama was taught in a radical Muslim madrassa in Indonesia, we are going to hold Catholic education to the same standards while remembering that Osama bin Laden was also opposed to abortion rights.

One of the lessons that I took from 9/11 that I think very few others likewise took was understanding why that event happened. Some would call this a Left position, others an anti-American position, but I call a logical and educated position. Those attacks were not random acts, they were a violent climax of events over decades involving American military force in the post-colonial world. From the bloody vistas of Vietnam to Jimmy Carter’s idiotic policies in Afghanistan and beyond, America planted hateful seeds abroad that blew back onto our shores and killed civilians.

We should be wise and apply this logic herein. This violence was not random, it was a violent and bloody culmination of years of a coordinated series of anti-choice actions that the media has refused to cover or failed to properly dissect in the name of their farcical ‘objectivity’. Clinics nationwide have been closed over the past several years with a series of Kafkaesque building codes. For months, there have been arson attacks on women’s healthcare clinics that have not been front page news on the Providence Journal (do not even get me started with their misogynist coverage of this violence). The farcical and utterly transparent videos produced by anti-choice scoundrels this summer are now confirmed to have fueled this madman’s violence and that vanguard of objectivity, Edward Achorn, printed letters and columns in his editorial pages that furthered those lies. I would not hesitate to show him as much contempt as some of his colleagues have shown for Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning (though the fact is that they were telling the truth whereas Achorn was promoting lies). The trail of tears leads to many doorways, including his. No longer can he talk of concerns about promoting terrorism in the Arab world without having this held over his head.

Let us consider for a moment the odious Bishop Thomas Tobin, whose war against women included his Know-Nothing rally at the doors of Planned Parenthood last summer. I would respect Bishop Tobin if he was actually serious about protecting children, but considering how he continues to give soft glove treatment to Bishop Emeritus Gelineau while the man has reams of testimony against him regarding sexual abuse of minors (here, here, and here), I would trust Charles Manson to protect a youth before I trusted Bishop Tobin. What is more, he is a publicly-registered Republican and actively opposed the Affordable Care Act, a law that provides the very contraceptive care that can prevent unwanted pregnancy and therefore abortion. If the Church opposes contraception, fine, that is the realm of moral instruction of membership. But when you get into actively lobbying against public policy, that is a wholly different realm. The Providence Diocese for a long time now has ceased to be a purely religious body and become the politically lobbying Grand Old Diocese, or GOD. This is such a transparent farce that the Three Stooges would blanch in embarrassment.

But there is plenty blame left. What about our allegedly pro-choice Gov. Gina Raimondo, who threw women under the bus this year at the whims of the aforementioned Republican Diocese? Can we call this rolling over for both the opposition party and the Church that took her picture off the walls of LaSalle Academy anything but a terminal lack of backbone? Why is our democracy allowed to be controlled by a body that fails to pay taxes, shelters child abusers, and supports terrorism? Are all the women of Rhode Island worth a quickie compromise with these fools? The precedents she has created are deadly and fed into this madness.

Yet the ultimate amount of guilt lies with ourselves. We failed women. We were unable, unwilling, or uncaring enough to take these warning signs serious enough. We should have been more full-throated about this than a bickering fest about a baseball stadium. In the days before 9/11, the record shows that a select few government employees were running around Washington like their hair was on fire, begging the Bush administration for attention. Were there such figures in the Ocean State landscape I missed? Steve Ahlquist has been one, his coverage of the Raimondo legal moves have been admirable and is going to be used as primary sources by future historians. But was there a Richard Clarke on hand telling we alleged feminists to watch out? Why were we not like he was? To quote the Bard “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but ourselves.”

After this, every reproductive healthcare center should be under the same level of protection that T.F. Green Airport is. After this, we should quit worrying about Syrian Muslim terrorism and start worrying about American Christian anti-choice terrorism. After this, we should be more vocal and saying that abortion accounts for only 3% of Planned Parenthood medical care and the rest is focused on low-cost healthcare for men and women, including contraceptive, cancer, and STI testing/treatment care, medical care that would otherwise be unavailable for many of their patients. We should vocalize that, prior to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, the largest killer of women of child-bearing age was septic abortion, more than car accidents or cancer.

If moral absolutists are going to argue that they do not want their tax dollars funding abortion, they should be as vocal about funding our murderous, child-killing military-industrial complex and be pro-life regarding Palestinian children. Yet the only religious group I know of that does that is the generally pro-choice Quakers. Are Catholic Bishops willing to use the same condemnatory tones used towards those who help procure abortions with Catholic soldiers and threaten automatic excommunication for drone killings, especially since the revelations by The Intercept and other publications reveal the targeted assassinations program has killed so many innocent children?

I write Hendricken ’05 on my pro-choice petitions to our Congressional delegates because Jack Reed is a Catholic and James Langevin went to Hendricken. I write Hendricken ’05 on my pro-choice petitions because, once you void the privacy of the doctor’s office, you create a slippery slope that could void the privacy of the Catholic priest’s confessional due to the fact clergy and medical personnel are protected by the same statutory logic. I sign Hendricken ’05 because I oppose terrorism. I sign Hendricken’05 because I believe women know better than anyone else what medical care they need and that the patient is always the best advocate for their care, not priests. I sign Hendricken ’05 because I respect the female teachers at Hendricken. When I was a student, there were instances where male instructors would sometimes talk about the ‘morality’ of regarding why some of these teachers did not have a large number of children, behavior showing of a lack of respect for these women that screams Human Resources complaint. But I also sign Hendricken ’05 because I believe in sanity, secularism, feminism, and maturity and do not believe in governance by religious fundamentalism. It was John Adams who said “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Finally, I sign Hendricken ’05 because all Hawks are quality one, even if they are pro-choice. By pro-choice, I do not mean I push my sexist nose into the doctor’s office to observe all the activities therein. Rather, it means I respect when that door closes and do not dare open it ever lest I have the same be done to my mother, aunt, grandmother, sister, or female friends. This is the kind of respect I also express for the Seal of the Confessional.

Those who tell you that being pro-choice automatically means being in favor of abortion are lying. It is the complete opposite. Being pro-choice means not being in favor of anything a woman chooses to do in her doctor’s office because it is none of your business, period. Being pro-choice also means opposing state-mandated abortion, such as the Chinese one-child policy, because a law like that strips a woman of her agency and intrudes on the relationship she has with her doctor. Men are not subjected to the level of regulation and scrutiny when they choose medical care that I might not agree with, ergo a woman is due that same level of respect. Refusal to grant that is defined by an SAT vocabulary word, misogyny.

Thousands of HealthSource RI subscribers lost medical coverage for abortion this year, and most had no idea this was happening.

Under new policies mandated by Governor Gina Raimondo, insurers must now offer one plan that does not cover abortion at every level in which they offer a plan that does. As a result of the Governor’s actions and a minor change in the law that allows insurers to re-enroll subscribers into new health plans if their previous plan no longer exists, 9,000 out of 32,000 families have lost this crucial coverage.

Raimondo made two decisions earlier this year that lead to this crisis. First, she settled the Doe v. Burwell lawsuit when she didn’t have to. Doe, who chose to remain anonymous because of his HIV+ status, claimed that he was unable, due to his religious beliefs, to contribute money to any health plan that covered abortion, and that his needs as an HIV+ man meant that waiting until 2017 for the one plan that does not cover abortion mandated under federal law was not practical.

Doe was represented in his lawsuit by the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and supported by both RI Right to Life and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence. It was far from certain that Doe and the ADF would win the suit since HealthSource RI was operating fully in accordance with Federal law and accommodations had been offered to Doe.

But Raimondo caved, and caved hard. After settling a case she did not have to, she went further than existing federal law and submitted legislation mandating that insurers offer multiple plans that omit abortion coverage. Every insurer was forced to offer a plan at every tier of coverage. Federal law mandates that at least one plan on a state exchange offer no coverage for abortion. Raimondo insisted on what amounts to nine plans.

All insurers on the HealthSource RI exchange had to roll out new plans. Two insurers decided to modify existing plans as well, which meant that many health plan subscribers had to be moved to whichever new plans were deemed most similar to their old plan. Whether or not the new plan covered abortion was not a consideration.

According to the Providence Journal, “Out of HealthSource’s three insurers, two mapped subscribers into plans with limited abortion coverage — Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island and Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island. United Healthcare did not.”

Now, 9,000 families are without abortion coverage, unless they change their enrollment by December 23. Many more people, when looking at the new plans on offer, may switch into plans that do not cover abortion – not because they are anti-choice, but because some of the anti-choice plans might appear to be cheaper.

Figuring out which plans are cheaper is a difficult, if not impossible task. There is the monthly fee to consider, but there are also differences among plans in terms of deductibles, medication costs and co-pays. Ultimate cost may depend more on usage than monthly contributions. Figuring out how much a family saves by choosing an abortion free plan may be an exercise in futility, even though the law requires such plans to be cheaper, if only by a few cents.

Nobody plans on having an abortion, so abortion coverage is often not a big consideration when choosing a healthcare plan. Those who may find themselves most at risk of discovering they are suddenly out of pocket for abortion expenses are young adults covered under their parent’s healthcare plan until age 26. Others at risk include couples who might want to have a baby, but encounter a crisis at a late stage. Costs associated with additional testing and termination of a nonviable late term pregnancy can be in the tens of thousands of dollars and require a hospital stay.

As a result, some families will face the kind of financial ruin that Obamacare was instituted to prevent.

This is the kind of information that may have been revealed had Raimondo introduced her legislation openly, as a bill submitted to the General Assembly to be debated and commented on by the public. Instead, the governor slipped these changes into the budget as an eleventh hour amendment and with as little fanfare as possible. It worked: the measure passed with little outcry.

Just before Governor Raimondo signed the budget into law, mandating the changes that have resulted in thousands losing abortion coverage, Barth Bracy, executive director of RI Right to Life, said, “Due to the complexity of Obamacare, and its implementation in Rhode Island, neither the media nor our opponents at Planned Parenthood and in the pro-abortion caucus of the General Assembly, yet appear to understand the extent of our victory.”

I guess now we do.

If Governor Raimondo is truly a pro-choice candidate, she has a strange way of showing it. No recent RI governor has been nearly as successful in stripping families of their reproductive rights.

We counter-demonstrators stood across the street from the prohibitionists. They had signs made up in the same shade of pink used by Planned Parenthood. They had pictures of fetuses from which the woman was disappeared. They had a sound system, which mercifully did not go up to ’11’. It was a nice, sunny day and standing on the sidewalk for two hours gives you time to think. I thought about how I would really like to be standing with the people on the other side of the street, talking about how to help young people learn about, as former Surgeon General David Satcher put it, responsible sexual behavior.

I’d like to talk to the prohibitionists about the benefits of sex education, and not just for young people. We could be grateful together that access to reliable contraception through the Affordable Care Act is helping to reduce the rate of unwanted pregnancies. I could tell them that their crisis pregnancy centers could be a real force for good if they came clean about their intentions and committed to really helping women who wanted to have a baby in difficult circumstances – help that would be needed even more after the baby is born.

But the Catholic Church is fighting in court to remove contraception from their employee’s health insurance. The prohibitionists redefine contraception as abortion, claiming that a sperm might meet an egg and contrary to science and without any Biblical basis define that as pregnancy. And when the demonstrators across the street started a chorus of ‘We Shall Overcome’ I knew that the prohibitionists had redefined themselves as abolitionists. Somehow they co-opt the appalling suffering of millions of innocent women who labored in the agricultural prison camp known as the Old South. They casually appropriate the history of women who had no legal protection for their own bodies, whose fertility was a commodity and whose children could be sold away or abused in any way with no recourse. We have not even begun to repent as a nation for those sins, but let’s not dwell on that when invoking Dr. King as if he would have endorsed the prohibitionist cause.

In fact, Dr. King was given the Margaret Sanger award by Planned Parenthood in 1966. Dr. King was not able to attend, so Coretta King accepted the award on his behalf and gave his speech, Family Planning – A Special and Urgent Concern.

Rosa Parks, whose political activism has been downplayed in the popular story of her bus protest was a supporter of Planned Parenthood and served on its Board of Advocates.

Margaret Sanger has been characterized as a racist, and some prohibitionists put out the appalling slur that ‘The most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb.’

What does this say to black women, whose rights have so often been denied, who have been blamed for every social ill that inequality brings? Misogyny, racism and social discrimination complicate what is already a crisis- an unwanted pregnancy.

The writer and activist, Angela Davis, affirms the right to contraception and abortion “when necessary,” while holding our society accountable for forced sterilizations and other abuses inflicted on women of color. The label, ‘pro-choice’ goes both ways, including supporting women who want to continue a pregnancy and supporting the right of women to be fully informed and free of coercion.

Faye Wattleton, past president of Planned Parenthood, was the first African-American, the first female and the youngest president of the reproductive health-care organization.

In 1966, Wattleton moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, where she pursued a master’s degree in maternal and infant care. But it was also in New York City that, while completing an internship, she witnessed firsthand the suffering—and sometimes fatality—caused by illegal and unsafe abortions during an internship.

The womanist writer Audre Lorde, in her autobiograpy Zami-A New Spelling of My Name, tells her own story of the crisis facing her as a college student pregnant and abandoned.

Cheap kitchen table abortions. Jean’s friend Francie had died on the way to the hospital just last year after trying to do it with the handle of a number 1 paintbrush. (p.107)

She was fortunate to find a competent nurse who safely terminated that pregnancy and she later married and had two children.

When I attended CCRI school of nursing in the late 80’s the nurse lecturer recounted the desperate lies women told in the ER to try to get a D&C. She played it for laughs. No compassion there, but later in class a woman quietly spoke of her friend who injured herself so badly trying to terminate a pregnancy that she was left sterile.

Unsafe abortion is a major cause of injury and death to women worldwide. This was our past and we should not re-create it.

No freedom is absolute, but prohibitionists claim a moral right to override the conscience of the pregnant woman and impose their ideas of right and wrong.

The prohibitionists, in their mix of religion and politics, try to block access to contraception for the least privileged women. They are trying to shut down promising programs that are showing results in reducing unwanted pregnancy and abortion. Who profits from this situation, except politicians looking for an issue to inflame the base?

And the good people across the street in their zeal to outlaw abortion ally themselves with politicians who tax the poor to profit the rich. They may sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ but overcoming the inequality that actually does kill babies- with our shameful infant mortality rate, is not on their agenda.

It’s no contradiction that Dr.King supported Planned Parenthood. He knew that blocking access to contraception prevents women and men from having agency over their lives. Prohibitionists are not the spiritual descendants of the abolitionists but the opposite- a regressive attempt to subject women to the dictates of the church using the power of the state.

When Governor Gina Raimondo signed the budget on Tuesday, she officially signed into law language that stands as the most extreme anti-abortion language passed in Rhode Island in two decades. And because it was slipped into the budget as part of the language that codifies HealthSource RI, the state’s highly successful Obamacare insurance exchange, and not submitted as a bill, this new law was passed with no legislative debate and no chance for any input from the public.

Shockingly, this end run around democracy and against reproductive rights came from Rhode Island’s first woman governor, Gina Raimondo, who sailed to victory with the endorsement of Emily’s List and Planned Parenthood, and with the help of a putatively Democratic majority legislature.

How did this happen?

In Rhode Island, support for the right to abortion polls at 71 percent, surprisingly high for a state that hosts by percentage the greatest number of Catholics in the country. Former Governor Lincoln Chafee, a stalwart defender of reproductive rights, vetoed a “Choose Life” license plate bill, a bill that would have split the money for the vanity plate between the state and right wing Christian “abortion counseling” centers that offer false hope to women dealing with crisis pregnancies. Rhode Island stands as one of the few states to have defeated these license plates.

Simply put, in Rhode Island, reproductive rights are only controversial among a small group of right wing activists, fronted by the Rhode Island State Right to Life Committee and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, who use the issue to advance their narrow political objectives.

It was this small group of activists that helped concoct two lawsuits, with the help of the right wing religious advocacy group the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Doe v Burwell  and Howe v Burwell were brought against HealthSource RI because there no plans offered on the state’s health exchange that did not cover abortion.

Doe, who chose to remain anonymous because of his HIV+ status, claimed that he was unable, due to his religious beliefs, to contribute money to any health plan that covered abortion, and that his needs as an HIV+ man meant that waiting until 2017 for the one plan that does not cover abortion mandated under Federal law was not practical. In addition to his health concerns, Doe claimed he was liable for fines fines levied against him for not selecting one of the plans currently available on the exchange.

The government’s reaction to the Doe lawsuit was swift: They completely caved. The state agreed to dismiss Doe’s fines, enroll him into a special plan that satisfied his moral objections to abortion, and require that the Rhode Island Office of Health Insurance Commissioner issue a mandate that there be a plan offered on the state’s health exchange that did not cover abortion at every tier of coverage.

In return, the ADF withdrew their lawsuit. Ten days later, on May 29, Governor Raimondo added the agreed upon language to her proposed budget as an amendment.

Under federal law, at least one plan that did not cover abortion had to be made available on all state exchanges by 2017. The settlement the state agreed to went far beyond that mandate.

In Rhode Island, adding new language through the budget process means that there will be no opportunity for public comment or meaningful public debate. The budget is submitted by the governor and re-crafted by the RI House of Representatives in a process that is conducted mostly behind the scenes. John Marion, executive director of Common Cause RI, a government accountability group, has called it “transactional politics.” When the budget comes to the House floor for a vote, specific parts can be debated by legislators, and amendments can be added, but the public gets no chance to directly comment.

The language Raimondo added is problematic for businesses. James Rhodes, director of public policy & government relations at Planned Parenthood Southern New England, asked, “How does a small employer, whether a religious organization or not, claim a religious exemption from covering abortion? Do they have a form to fill out to submit to the Office of Health Insurance Commissioner to declare their objection in order to get a new plan variation from an insurer? Is there any requirement to notify insured employees that their insurance does not cover this service, which is standard coverage in the small group market?”

The new language provided no process by which employers declared their objections and no process by which employees were to be notified of their employers decisions. This is important because a woman might think her health plan covers abortion, only to find out that her employer has decided, on personal religious grounds, not to cover the procedure without informing the employees.

“It is worth emphasizing that the federal health care law already imposes significant restrictions on abortion access through health care exchanges,” Steve Brown, executive director of the RI ACLU. “The additional burdens that passage of this budget article could impose, particularly on unwitting employees, is deeply troubling.”

As I tweeted at the time, “Gina Raimondo’s budget addition may allow a thousand Hobby Lobbies to bloom across Rhode Island.”

Immediately after Raimondo’s amendment was submitted, rumors began to swirl that the language was inserted as some sort of backroom deal to save HealthSource RI at the expense of women’s reproductive rights. Indeed, Speaker of the House and right wing Democrat Nicholas Mattiello had been vocal about his desire to turn the state health exchange over to the federal government.

Language that limited women’s access to abortion was rumored to be the price paid for keeping control of the health exchange in Rhode Island. However, it has been impossible to source this rumor. Rather than being concerned with limiting women’s abortion access, Mattiello’s public statements were all about the high cost of administering the health exchange on the state level.

For instance, Mattiello said that, “he would not have signed on [to including HealthSource RI in the budget] unless HealthSource administrators had significantly reduced their cost projections to the point where the surcharge could be “at or below” the level it would be if the state handed the exchange over to the federal government…”

On the House floor, during the strangely curtailed debate on the budget, an amendment was approved that somewhat mitigated the damage done by Raimondo’s abortion language. This new language, crafted with the help of Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, required any non-religious employer, as defined by the IRS, that elects to not include abortion coverage in their employee health plan, to allow employees to opt out of the company plan, and select any other plan, paying any additional costs.

This makes Rhode Island the first state to build language into its state exchange that protects those who want a health care plan that provides abortion coverage. A minor victory, considering that this imposes additional health care costs on women. If an employer elects not to cover abortion in their health plans, women pay additional fees out of pocket.

Additionally, women may find themselves in a difficult spot when it comes to dealing with employers who choose not to cover abortion. Opting out of the employer’s health plan may serve as a signal to employers that the employee is pro-choice. This may have an effect on a woman’s ability to secure raises, promotions or other workplace benefits if an employer chooses to act on this assumption in a biased or bigoted manner.

The Planned Parenthood amendment was supported by an unlikely coalition of legislators, including long time pro-choice Representative Edie Ajello and long time abortion and LGBTQ rights foe Representative Arthur Corvese. But behind the scenes, no one was happy with the compromise. A source confided to me that Barth Bracy, executive director of RI Right to Life, Providence Catholic Diocese lobbyist Bernard Healey and conservative Democratic Representative John DeSimone, were railing against the compromise language during last minute backroom negotiations.

The amended amendment passed and the entire budget passed unanimously and in record time.

After the budget passed the House, both sides declared victory.

Bracy explained in a newsletter that the “victory” was “the fruit of six years of intense legislative, political, and legal battle.” (Bracy did not explain how the seeds of this victory were planted a year before Obamacare became law.) Bracy further explained, or rather, did not explain, that, “Due to the complexity of Obamacare, and its implementation in Rhode Island, neither the media nor our opponents at Planned Parenthood and in the pro-abortion caucus of the General Assembly, yet appear to understand the extent of our victory.”

Bracy promises to explain the completeness of his victory after the Governor signs the budget.

Meanwhile, James Rhodes of Planned Parenthood claimed partial victory, dinging Raimondo for choosing “to widely expand the number of plans that do not cover abortion beyond federal minimum standards” while doing “nothing to protect abortion access for employees of small businesses in Rhode Island.”

Rhodes went on to say, “In the wake of the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision, we were surprised the Governor did not seek protections for employee access to comprehensive reproductive health care. It is clear that leaders in the House and Senate recognized this budget loophole. The passed budget includes an invaluable amendment that will allow employees of small businesses that claim an objection to covering abortion, to enroll in the HealthSource RI Full Employee Choice program.”

In the end, the right of some women to access reproductive health care has been eroded in favor of the fake right of employers to not provide such healthcare on religious grounds. For her part, the Governor’s office has refused repeated requests for clarification.

Given the transactional and punitive nature of RI politics, no one in the legislature seems willing to go on record about this debacle.

This new assault on women’s rights is the spawn of the odious SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision, based on the Religious Freedoms Restoration Act (RFRA), writ small a thousand times. I’ve argued before that it’s past time to repeal or at least seriously amend Rhode Island’s RFRA, and just recently the ACLU seems to have reached the same conclusion.

Meanwhile, those who supported Gina Raimondo’s bid for Governor of Rhode Island might want to seriously reconsider their support. She has revealed herself as no champion of reproductive rights.

Language on abortion nestled into the 2016 Rhode Island State Budget dealing with HealthSource RI may have far reaching consequences for workers whose employers may want to claim a religious exemption from covering the procedure. As reported on RI Future yesterday, Governor Gina Raimondo inserted an 11th hour amendment into the budget that goes far beyond what Federal law mandates as regards abortion access under the Affordable Care Act. Several local organizations have now spoken out about the Governor’s actions.

James Rhodes, director of public policy & government relations at Planned Parenthood Southern New England, said, in a statement,

Planned Parenthood was surprised to see these proposals in the Governor’s budget when it was unveiled last week, and we were not consulted about the new policies contained in this article. Additionally, since there was never a hearing on this language, we have not been able to get clear guidance on the intent of these policies.

“Specifically, there is a fundamental question on which the budget article the House Finance Committee passed on Tuesday night is silent: ‘How does a small employer, whether a religious organization or not, claim a religious exemption from covering abortion?’ Do they have a form to fill out to submit to the Office of Health Insurance Commissioner to declare their objection in order to get a new plan variation from an insurer? Is there any requirement to notify insured employees that their insurance does not cover this service, which is standard coverage in the small group market?

“Fundamentally, Planned Parenthood believes that employers should not be making health decisions around abortion coverage or contraception for their employees. Rhode Island has an opportunity to protect employees by including specific language that would require, at a minimum, notification, to the Insurance Commissioner and employees, that the insurance an employer is offering does not include the full range of reproductive health options, including abortion.”

Steve Brown, executive director of the RI ACLU, also expressed concerns, saying in a statement,

We are extremely disappointed in the Governor’s introduction of polarizing abortion language into the health exchange budget article. Protecting access to abortion is an essential component of comprehensive health coverage, but Article 18 undermines that access.

“It is worth emphasizing that the federal health care law already imposes significant restrictions on abortion access through health care exchanges. The additional burdens that passage of this budget article could impose, particularly on unwitting employees, is deeply troubling.”

As a candidate, Raimondo was happy to accept campaign money from the pro-choice PAC Emily’s List and to accept the endorsement of Planned Parenthood Votes!. Raimondo once said that “women are ‘smart enough’ to make their own health care decisions without interference from government or their employer,” according to a ProJo piece by Katherine Gregg.

Laws that allow employers to make unilateral decisions about a worker’s reproductive healthcare options cut against candidate Raimondo’s claim.

Sam Bell, executive director of the Progressive Democrats of Rhode Island, said in a statement,

For folks who criticized me during the campaign season for saying that Raimondo would be less than fully committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose, this is what I was talking about.

“Restricting insurance coverage of reproductive healthcare is one of the most dangerous ways to erode a woman’s right to choose. The fact of the matter is that wealthier women will always have access to abortions. They can go to another state and pay for the procedure out of pocket. They may have the procedure delayed. They may face institutionalized shaming. But with enough money, they will always have access, no matter how restrictive Rhode Island’s laws get.

“That’s why this new policy is so damaging. It will force lower-income women to choose between carrying a child they don’t want and financial ruin.”

The 2016 RI State Budget, approved by House Finance late Tuesday evening, included language on abortion coverage in its section on HealthSource RI funding that goes far beyond what is required under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This part of the budget, inserted at the request of Governor Gina Raimondo on May 29, replaced article 28 of her original budget which the General Assembly changed to Article 18 in its final version.

The part that pertains to abortion coverage reads:

(3) Any health plan that delivers a benefit plan on the exchange that covers abortion services, as defined in 45 CFR section 156.280(d)(1), shall comply with segregation of funding requirements, as well as an annual assurance statement to the Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner, in accordance with 45 C.F.R. sections 156.280(e)(3) and (5).

(4) At least one plan variation for individual market plan designs offered on the exchange at each level of coverage, as defined by section 1302(d)(1) of the federal act, at which the carrier is offering a plan or plans, shall exclude coverage for abortion services as defined in 45 CFR section 156.280(d)(1). If the health plan proposes different rates for such plan variations, each listed plan design shall include the associated rate.

(5) Health plans that offer a plan variation that excludes coverage for abortion services as defined in 45 CFR section 156.280(d)(1) for a religious exception variation in the small group market shall treat such a plan as a separate plan offering with a corresponding rate.

The ACA requires, by 2017, that a Multi-State Plan not covering most abortions be offered on every state-based health exchange. The language above mandates that every insurer operating on HealthSource RI offer multiple plans that do not cover abortion. The budget in its current form does not require that insurers offer plans to cover abortion, so any insurer not interested in offering nearly identical plans may decide to drop such coverage altogether.

The federal mandate that requires at least one plan that does not cover abortion should more than adequately cover those with a well-founded religious objection to abortion so that they can find a health plan to cover their needs.

I have made two requests to the Governor’s office, asking for clarification of the amendment’s intent and the reasoning behind the language, but these have gone unanswered.

Gina Raimondo has always maintained that she is staunchly pro-choice. That she would be behind some of the most audacious anti-choice legislation in decades, and that the language should be inserted into the budget without any public debate or comment may come as a surprise to her supporters.

After receiving the endorsement from the Planned Parenthood Votes! Rhode Island PAC, Raimondo said, ‘The Catholic Church has a clear position and I have a clear position…I am clearly pro-choice.”

But Raimondo’s Budget Article 28, by mandating that every insurer offer multiple plans that do not cover abortion, undermines the accepted medical and legal standard that abortion is a safe and legal procedure. Just as individuals do not get a choice about whether their health insurance covers blood transfusions, erectile dysfunction, or vaccinations, abortion coverage should be treated as an essential health benefit, not an outlier “variation” for which every insurance plan must make an exception.

“Once I met a lady who was in terrible, terrible pain of cancer and I told her, ‘This is but the kiss of Jesus, a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you.’ And the lady, though she was in great pain, she joined her hands together and said, ‘Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me.’”

Mother Teresa, the audience and Buckley all laughed at this story, reveling in the suffering that their God had inflicted on this woman. For Mother Teresa and her adoring followers, suffering is seen as a purifying gift. To them, the suffering of others has become fetishized, the pain filled deaths of our loved ones a spectacle through which God reveals himself.

Those who do not believe in a God that doles out the gift of soul cleansing suffering reject the terrible “mercies” of Mother Teresa, yet our rejection of her wisdom does little to deter her followers from imposing their views on our lives, dictating how we are expected to live our lives and die our deaths.

During last week’s House hearing on the Lila Manfield Sapinsley Compassionate Care Act, a bill that would allow those facing a terminal illness filled with suffering and loss of dignity to end their lives, opposition was almost entirely organized by the Catholic Church and Barth E. Bracy of RI Right to Life.

• Why I support the Compassionate Care Act – Peter Nightingale
• Our right to die is our right to live – Steve Ahlquist

Bracy admitted to organizing the opposition to this bill when he said to the committee, “We’ve submitted written testimony from many of the people who have testified, we submitted 23 copies around four o’clock…” Some testifying against the bill also regularly testify with Bracy on reproductive rights issues.

Representative Arthur Corvese, a conservative Catholic social warrior famous for the Corvese amendment, an eleventh hour addendum to the now defunct “civil unions” bill that essentially allowed anyone to discriminate against couples who joined in civil unions based on their religious beliefs, was quick to tell Bracy, “I think it’s obvious, Barth, you and I go back a long way, that this bill and others like it across the country are basically nothing more than the philosophical outgrowth of the continuing culture of death that began in 1972. Where abortion kills the young these bills provide a rationale to kill off the old.”

Too often it seems as if Corvese sees his job, legislating in the General Assembly, as little more than a way to impose his Catholic theology upon the entire state. This is a Catholic theology that sees suffering as something to be embraced, not avoided.

Mother Teresa saw suffering as a way to bring the terminally ill closer to God. “It depends, sometimes, what is in their own hearts. If they pray, I think [suffering] is very easy to accept because the proof of prayer is always a clean heart. And a clean heart can see God…”

Father Christopher Mahar, Rector of the Seminary of Our Lady of Providence, seems to agree with Mother Teresa, saying that, “…at the end of life, there are many beautiful choices to make. Choices to reconcile with loved ones, choices to reconcile with God and prepare for eternal life, if one believes in that.”

Representative Robert Lancia was inspired by Mahar’s comments to ask about Pope John Paul II, who, at the end of his life, says Lancia, “could have chosen to end his life.” This is an odd claim, given that assisted suicide is legally forbidden in Italy and that the Catholic Church is against death with dignity legislation worldwide. Of course, Lancia was really seeking to give Mahar a chance to expound on Catholic theology in regards to assisted suicide.

Mahar brought up Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio. According to Mahar, John Paul II was “always a proponent of caring for people not just based on religious principles, but also upon reason.” This is a bit disingenuous, since what John Paul said is that reason, by itself, is incomplete without faith. In other words, reason by itself is not sufficient, religious faith is a requirement.

This is a religious idea, not shared by everyone. Even many of those who embrace the idea of the necessity of faith do not believe that it follows that suffering must be endured and death must always come naturally. This is not even the belief of all Catholics. 52 percent of Catholics polled in Colorado support death with dignity laws like the one under consideration in Rhode Island.

“I was just so impressed by Pope John Paul and how he ended his life,” said Representative Lancia, embracing the story of his Pope’s heroic ordeal, “It was such a positive. When he could have ended his life but didn’t, he went through the suffering and ended in a positive, dignified way.”

“If you come to our house here in Washington,” said Mother Teresa to William Buckley in 1989, “You would be surprised to see on the suffering faces the beautiful smiles. Through the terrible suffering they are content.”

Maybe for the believers, Mother Teresa’s words ring true.

But what of the rest of us?