Word: medicaid
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...Justice Thurgood Marshall aptly pointed out in his stinging dissent, the court's ruling will have far greater impact on non-white communities than on white ones. Nearly one-third of the women who received Medicaid funds for abortions in the past were minority group members, a disproportionately high share. Marshall's frank summary of the court's decision is understandably harsh...
...legal system has stepped in again. On June 20, a six-man majority of the Supreme Court held that states need not provide Medicaid funds for elective abortions, or even require public hospitals to perform them. Eight states have already passed legislation along these lines, and several more--including Massachussetts--are moving in that direction...
...majority opinion, "places no obstacles--absolute or otherwise--in the pregnant woman's path to an abortion... The indigency that may make it more difficult--and, in some cases, perhaps, impossible--for some women to have abortions is neither created nor in any way affected by the Connecticut regulation." Medicaid programs are designed expressly to insure minimum standards of health care for the poor, but the court ignored that fact completely. In effect, as dissenting Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote in his opinion, the majority ruling "is almost reminiscent of let them eat cake." Women with higher incomes...
While the ruling may be sound on legal grounds, in practical and moral terms it is an utter disaster. Medicaid funds have paid for about 300,000 abortions since the 1973 ruling; without those operations, there would now be 300,000 unwanted chldren growing up in poor families that would be hard-pressed to provide adequate care for their children...
...court's decision means that in states that cut off Medicaid funds, poor women will have to confront not only the trauma that almost inevitably accompanies the decision to have an abortion, but also the problem of finding enough money to pay for one. Women who cannot scrape up the $150 needed for a typical first trimester abortion are certainly unlikely to have enough money to raise a child under decent conditions. They are far more likely to turn to cheap, unsafe abortions, or to go unwillingly through with the pregnancy and give the child up for adoption. The court...