When abortion is at issue, poor women's health doesn't stand a chance. On Wednesday, a Florida appellate court upheld a state ban on using Medicaid funds to pay for medically necessary abortions for poor women, even though Medicaid will pay for all needed reproductive health services for men, including providing Viagra.
A questionable policy to be sure, but the issue should never have landed in court. The matter should have been dealt with in a rational way by Congress and the Florida Legislature. But because antiabortion politics rule Tallahassee and Washington, indigent women who suffer a problematic pregnancy are denied the treatment they need to protect their health.
The ruling by the 3rd District Court of Appeal involved Monica Navarrete, an indigent woman who has suffered from epilepsy since childhood. When Navarrete became pregnant in 2000, she started experiencing seizures. She took a prescribed drug to control them, which led to birth defects in her son. The next time she became pregnant, she faced the same choice: either live with severe seizures or risk having another child born with birth defects. Navarrete, who at the time was on welfare, food stamps and Medicaid, decided in consultation with a physician, to obtain an abortion. Of course, that was a medically sensible route for her, but the state refused to pay for the procedure.
Nonetheless, Navarrete was able to cobble together the funds herself by delaying payment of utility bills and securing a contribution from a private abortion fund.
Navarrete's story is not as rare as you might think. Florida's Medicaid program will only underwrite those medical procedures for which federal funding is available. Thanks to the Hyde Amendment - an ill-considered antiabortion stricture passed by Congress in 1976 - federal Medicaid funds may only be used for abortion services when the woman's life is endangered or when the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. Situations where a woman's health is at risk by continuing a pregnancy, but her life is not, fall outside the law.
The Florida Legislature could have stepped in to resolve this dilemma and provide the necessary funding, as 17 other states have done. Instead, Florida lawmakers leave destitute women who are pregnant and in ill health to their own devices. If that results in a child born with birth defects, so be it. If it results in harm to a woman's own health, tough luck.
In court papers, Florida claims that one of its reasons for refusing to underwrite abortion is cost-saving. But the expenses of these complicated pregnancies have to far outstrip any abortion-related costs. In truth, we all know there is only one reason for this unfair policy: the rigid antiabortion views of Tallahassee politicians.
