The Daily Pennsylvanian :: Sascha Murillo | Insuring motherhood in Pennsylvania

In the first six months of 2011, Pennsylvania lawmakers spent 30 percent of their days at the Capitol working to pass two bills that would severely restrict access to safe, legal abortion. At the same time, many members of the Pennsylvania State Senate and House of Representatives have declined to support a bill that would provide pregnant women with the insurance coverage that they need to ensure a healthy birth.

While seemingly paradoxical, the Pennsylvania legislature’s stance on these bills has been a testament to the sexism that pervades the policy-making process and presents an all-around assault on women’s health in the state.

Pennsylvania consistently fails to meet the needs of women in this state, particularly women who find themselves pregnant. The state legislature approved a budget for this year that cut funds for the most vulnerable Pennsylvanians, especially women and children.

The loss of adultBasic this year, a subsidized insurance program for working Pennsylvanians, aggravates the situation for pregnant women even more. Over 11,000 women of child-bearing age were covered on adultBasic with over 206,007 women on the waiting list. This means that over 200,000 women in Pennsylvania who wanted to purchase insurance this year could not.

What further complicates the problem is that Pennsylvania allows insurance companies to discriminate against women and their reproductive needs. Insurance is crucial to having healthy mothers and babies by ensuring that prenatal care is both affordable and accessible. Believe it or not, individual and small group health insurance plans are not required to cover maternity in their minimum benefits package. An insurance company can deny eligibility to a pregnant woman based on pre-existing condition exclusions. A woman with a previous C-section can also be denied coverage for a subsequent pregnancy under a new plan. Thus, the insured — as well as the uninsured and underinsured — find additional obstacles to getting the care they need.

Pennsylvania does not have a state law requiring individual or small group employer health plans to provide maternity benefits. The insurance law on the books neglects to mandate maternity coverage in all state insurance products. It also does not stipulate a standard of care, meaning insurance companies can cherry pick the services they offer women, and everything else is left up to the patient to cover.

State Sen. Larry Farnese (D) has introduced legislation that would eliminate pre-existing condition clauses and mandate small group and individual insurance plans cover maternity. SB 1063, or the Insuring Motherhood Bill, is an important attempt to reverse sexist logic in the law books and in insurance schemes.

But why should Penn students care? With the very real possibility that abortion services may become severely limited in this state, this bill will become especially important for young women in the state. Gaps in care often fall upon young adults who are more prone to be unemployed, lose or switch jobs or fall through the cracks when it comes to being insured. Young women in this category who find themselves pregnant and without insurance coverage face serious costs and health risks.

The Pennsylvania state legislature has the opportunity this session to finally meet the reproductive needs of women in this state and address some of the sexual imbalances in access and costs to health care by enacting legislation that eliminates pregnancy as a pre-existing condition and mandates pregnancy coverage in all insurance plans. Seventeen states, including New Jersey and Massachusetts, have already passed similar legislation. A woman’s body is not a pre-existing condition.

Sascha Murillo, a College senior, is a policy intern at Maternity Care Coalition. Her email address is smurillo@momobile.org.

Comments (4)

Well said. I would add that this serves as a nice counterpoint to some of the ludicrously anti-choice spew we’ve seen in these pages in the past week. Thank you, Sascha, for pointing out the hypocrisy and sexism that is inherent in these points of view and the specific legislative efforts that you reference. Here’s hoping PA pulls its head out of its ass and passes SB 1063.

My wife and two children and I live in the state of Illinois. Our current health insurance plan is a Choice Plan that is provided by “Penny Health” . The plan itself is a consumer driven health care plan.

WestCoastQuaker, it’s quite unfortunate that you choose to refer to the thorough, carefully constructed arguments of people who want to protect all human life, from conception onward, as “ludicrously anti-choice spew”. Perhaps you should re-read these pro-life comments and truly think about whether you can continue to defend abortion, a procedure that violently robs the youngest, smallest, most vulnerable human beings of their right to life.

Your claim that we pro-lifers are sexist and hypocritical is simply untrue. I am a woman, and so are the majority of the pro-life people I know. It is insulting to me that you think we are too dumb to know what is good for women, when in reality, we are concerned with the safety of ALL women, even the unborn ones, who can’t stand up for themselves. Do you deny that there are female babies in the womb who are being killed every day? I guess, in your eyes, their rights don’t count.

Please consult feministsforlife.org and paprolife.org for extensive lists of helpful resources all over the country that are offered to pregnant women who choose life. Believing that it is not the place of the government to expand and expand in order to care for pregnant women and their children is NOT the same as not caring about pregnant women and their children. Government programs tend to be very inefficient and riddled with problems, so many pro-lifers, like myself, believe that we should focus on building up the private charities (of which there are several…again, please check out the websites I have posted)whose goal is to help pregnant women with various needs such as prenatal care, finishing their education, finding a place to live, finding affordable daycare, receiving diapers, formula, or any other items they may need, and basically everything else they could need help with. Of course, there is also a degree of personal responsibility required from these women, but why is that a bad thing?

Also, I think people need to stop just accepting the statement that abortion is a “safe” procedure. We can all agree it’s not safe for the unborn child, whose body is literally torn apart or violently expelled from the womb, which is supposed to be the safest place for a developing baby. But there are also several physical and emotional risks to the mother. The whole reason why post-abortion counseling centers exist is because so many women feel deeply psychologically distressed after choosing to end the lives of their children, because they realize the seriousness of what they have done and are devastated that they cannot take this decision back.

Almost fifty thousand women worldwide die from botched abortions every year, while another five million are hospitalized due to abortion-related complications (and this is from a study done this year by the very PRO abortion Guttmacher Institute…here’s the link: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_IAW.html). These include women in the United States, by the way, where abortion is supposedly “safe” for the mother. Not to mention the horror stories like that of Pennsylvania abortion Dr. Kermitt Gosnell.

Also, SEVERAL studies indicate that women who have had abortions are at a MUCH higher risk of developing breast cancer. Here are some links for that:

http://www.lifenews.com/2011/01/17/abortion-has-caused-300k-breast-cancer-deaths-since-roe/

http://breastcancerawarenessnews.blogspot.com/

The second website contains links to several studies and websites that support a strong link between breast cancer and abortion history. It also discusses the cases of studies that claimed there was no link turning out to be fraudulent.

I beg you, please take all of this information into consideration before you decide to belittle the cause of the pro-life movement.

Side note: I think we can generally agree that pregnancy and maternity benefits should, if possible, be covered by insurance in order to keep mothers and babies safe and healthy. Please do not interpret my above comment as believing otherwise. My response was geared towards people who argue that people in the pro-life movement are hypocrites because they may not want to increase welfare benefits and government programs, etc. for poor mothers and children.

Comments are closed for this item.