By Sarah Baker
President Donald J. Trump has followed in suit of other Republican anti-choice administrations and reinstated the Mexico City Policy; banning recipients of U.S. foreign aid from offering abortion- related services as one of his executive actions.
The Mexico City Policy, or as it’s more widely known, the Global Gag Rule, was made U.S. policy through an executive order issued by Ronald Reagan in 1984.
It might not sound like a big deal, but the catch is in the fine print.
The Mexico City Policy refers to any and every organization that offers abortion-related services, no matter how obscure such procedures are in com- parison to other reproductive health amenities.
First of all, the claim that reproductive health clinics are spending too much money or tax dollars on legal abortions is a blatant lie.
According to Planned Parenthood, the government saves $7 in Medicaid-related costs for every dollar invested in publicly funded family planning programs like Title X.
Concurrently, the Congressional Budget Office projects that barring Planned Parenthood, among other feminine health clinics, from being reimbursed through Medicaid would result in a net cost of $130 million to taxpayers over ten years, due to an increase in unexpected pregnancies without the high-quality contraceptive care that these centers provide.
Abortions make up a mere two percent of the services exercised at Planned Parenthood, which goes to show how exaggerated representative opinions are in an effort to disregard any evidence that may threaten their argument.
There is absolutely no line- item funding from any federal budget. It works through reimbursements.
Patients visit to receive birth control, STD testing and pap smears, likely at no cost. The Planned Parenthood health center submits a claim to Medicaid only for the preventive care services they provided, as any type of clinic would do with any type of insurance.
Medicaid reimburses the health center and the state agency sends a bill to the federal government for all reimbursements made to any type of clinic and provider statewide. The federal government then reimburses part of the cost.
Legislation that “defunds” Planned Parenthood immediately blocks millions of people from accessing care from reproductive health clinics. In particular, people of color, people with low incomes, and people in rural communities who already face significant obstacles when it comes to receiving medical care of any kind.
The Mexico City Policy is only one branch of the war wag- ing against female reproductive rights. Politicians harbor such violent opposition to abortion that they’re willing to throw away every other aspect of feminine health to eliminate its legality.
This policy means that a non-governmental organization doesn’t even have the ability to use its own money, not only for abortions but for physician counseling and referrals as well. Patients won’t even have access to condoms to prevent HIV transmission.
This issue is one Vice President Mike Pence is very familiar with. Pence imposed many zealous policies on Indiana when he was governor.
In previous terms, Pence cut HIV prevention programs and at the same time funding for abstinence-only programs rose by hundreds of millions of dollars, without any corroborating evidence of effectiveness.
Not that you need any of that to push your policies in this new age of “alternative facts.”
He was almost single-handedly to blame for an HIV epidemic in his state largely due to his vapid opposition to Planned Parenthood, which provided the counseling and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases in Scott County. Without it, citizens had no way to obtain any kind of prevention or education about STDs.
If that’s not enough, in 2015, Pence tried to get a law passed forcing women to have funerals or cremations for aborted or miscarried fetuses and prohibiting tissue use for research.
As if abortion and miscarriage weren’t traumatic enough already. He didn’t seem to care much about the financial burden either because funerals and cremations are far more expensive than a legal abortion is through any reproductive health clinic.
Pence also signed a bill outlawing abortion even in the case of severe fetal abnormality, like microcephaly from Zika infections.
The Trump administration has made it very clear that feminine reproductive health is secondhand to his fear-mongering, vote-buying agenda.
Who cares if millions of women of color and low incomes are susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases and unaware of potentially cancerous illnesses?
Who cares about an HIV epidemic or gynecology appointments, both of which monitor the possibility of life-threatening infections?
Who cares about feminine health when we can sacrifice it to get rid of safe abortions, something, by the way, that is at an all-time low; around 15 percent lower than it has been for the last fifty years?
They seem to think all a woman needs to function in relation to her reproductive organs — and “tendencies” — are a couple of tampons and a handful of old men preaching about how little she’ll be worth if she has sex before marriage.
Unfortunately for them, that’s not how the human body works and this Global Gag Rule only proves how ignorant they are of that fact.
Denying anyone any type of medical attention because the organization treating them also happens to do an abortion once in a blue moon is absurd. It’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s cherry-picking one medical procedure out of a thousand extremely beneficial and essential ones.
The Mexico City Policy doesn’t benefit anyone. The only “positive” effect it has is that extreme politicians can now smile at themselves; elated that millions of women they don’t know and will never meet are no longer legally permitted to make decisions about their own bodies and receive professional reproductive medical care.