RI Right to Life – RI Future

March 24, 2016

Millennials rally for repro rights and Planned Parenthood at the State House

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Planned Parenthood of Southern New England held a Reproductive Freedom Lobby Day at the State House yesterday, perhaps coincidentally coinciding with the Supreme Court hearing oral arguments in Zubik v Burwell, in which various religious non-profits and colleges, including the Sisters of the Poor, are arguing that the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate should not apply to them on First Amendment, religious freedom grounds.

Zubik is the reason the anti-choice group RI Right to Life took over the main rotunda, holding what was essentially a religious service in the center of the State House.

Above the Mass being conducted on the rotunda, outside the House and Senate chambers, nearly two dozen millennials in bright pink Planned Parenthood tee shirts held signs and met with their representatives to make the case for preserving their reproductive health care choices. After the House and Senate went into session they marched to Governor Gina Raimondo’s office to deliver a letter encouraging her to support a woman’s right to choose.

Let’s be clear: As the Supreme Court case shows, for those opposed to reproductive rights, the issue is not simply about abortion. It’s about controlling women’s bodies, enforcing gender stereotypes and exerting religious control over all aspects of our healthcare. After the Mass in the rotunda and the Rise of the House, Barth Bracy, director of RI Right to Life, argued in the House Health, Education and Welfare Committee against legislation that would allow terminally ill patients to make important end-of-life decisions and against a bill expanding the duties of physician’s assistants.

There is no area of our lives, no decision we can make, that RI Right to Life and the Catholic Church do not want to control for us.

Fortunately a group of fearless millennials and long time supporters of a woman’s right to choose let our representatives know that our rights are not up for discussion or debate.

2016-03-23 Planned Parenthood State House 009 — Meanwhile…

November 11, 2015November 13, 2015

Raimondo causes thousands of families to lose abortion coverage

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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.

April 15, 2015April 15, 2015

Mother Teresa demands you die suffering

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When Mother Teresa appeared on Firing Line in conversation with conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr., she told the following story in response to Buckley’s question, “Why did God permit pain?”

“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?

August 18, 2011January 10, 2012

What, Exactly, is the Secular Case Against Abortion?

The ProJo today reported that Barth E. Bracy, executive director of the Rhode Island State Right to Life Committee has retained Joseph S. Larisa Jr. to represent the group in “anticipation of challenging the creation of the so-called ‘health-benefits exchange.'” Since the recent session of the Rhode Island General assembly failed to pass any legislation that would have enabled individuals and small businesses to shop for health insurance (a key part of Obama’s health care reform package) many hope that Gov. Lincoln Chafee will Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniel’s lead and sign a health care exchange into existance via executive order.

Bracy’s statement is revealing:

It is tragic that a small group of determined pro-abortion officials is attempting an end-run around the General Assembly and around the Rhode Island Constitution in order to force Rhode Islanders to subsidize other people’s abortions under the guise of health-care reform.

This is a health care issue, but Bracy sees the issue as some sort of conspiracy. Bracy’s inane characterization of the process as a “small group of determined pro-abortion officials” operating “under the guise of health care reform” smacks of paranoia and delusion. The National Right to Life Committe promotes this paranoia on a national level, preventing any sort of rational debate on abortion. The movie they produced in 1984, The Silent Scream, has been criticized as being “riddled with scientific, medical, and legal inaccuracies as well as misleading statements and exaggerations,” which are really just nice words for “lies.”

The truth is that there is no compelling, secular reason to oppose a woman’s right to abortion. Groups such as RI Right to Life are rightwing religious fronts trying to force their views on the general public through misinformation and legal maneuvering. For instance, the entire thrust of their legal challenge revolves around “whether the governor has the authority to create the exchange… without the legislature’s approval” not around the fundamental question of a woman’s right to choose. They are willing to hold hostage any attempt to rework our healthcare system over the issue of abortion.

There is something out there known as the Establishment Clause, sometimes refered to as “separation of church and state.” This was put into the Constitution because religious beliefs and secualr government do not wok well together. The only case that can be made against safe, legal abortion is religious. Religion does not belong in government.

Abortion is a fundamental human right, and it needs to be protected.