Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Standing Against Abortion Restrictions in the Healthcare Bill

As the House and Senate hash out their versions of the sweeping healthcare reform bill in the coming weeks, several crucial women’s health issues hang in the balance. The most high-profile, and controversial, is abortion — the Stupak-Pitts amendment in the House and the Managers Amendment in the Senate would both severely restrict abortion coverage nationwide, even among private insurers — but coverage of other women’s health procedures, such as mammograms, are also written specifically into the bill (those are, fortunately, required to be covered).

That the health of millions of American women being tossed around like so many political footballs has inspired some very inspiring metaphors, sports and otherwise. Sick of being told that “prochoice women should shut up and take one for the team,” Katha Pollit wrote in The Nation, “Whose Team Is It, Anyway?” A Mother Jones blogger went with a financial metaphor, asking whether abortion rights are “the price of healthcare reform.”

Now a new campaign called Not Under the Bus “calls on all women and men who support women’s equality to take the initiative and start driving the bus right down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

The campaign held a day of action on January 13, in which 700,000 supporters blogged, tweeted, and otherwise spread the word about the campaign, which seeks to defeat the restrictive abortion measures in the new healthcare legislation. A new video released by the campaign features Jane Fonda saying, “it’s time to demand that all basic healthcare for women be safe, fair, and covered.”

Or, in the words of the campaign’s Web site, in a splendidly metaphorical flourish, “Women are the backbone of this country and cannot be thrown under the bus!”

Watch Jane Fonda’s video on healthcare:

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.