Of Babies and Boners: Boxer Compares Access to Abortion to Access to Viagra

I have very, very few friends who share my pro-life abortion views – and those who do tend to agree with me on nothing else. So when I see someone I like as much as I do our colleague Ria Misra (and Barbara Boxer, for that matter) comparing access to abortion to access to Viagra, I am reminded that it's as if we have been issued a different set of glasses for this one thing, and can never really see what the other does.

I'm not sure anybody who views "reproductive rights" – a euphemism if ever there was one -- as a basic human right could fathom why that's an offensive comparison to those of us who support human rights for the unborn, too. But even from a pro-choice point-of-view, isn't comparing funding for ending a pregnancy to funding for pharmaceutical erectile enhancement a little bit off/facile/reductive/unfortunate?

What Senator Boxer said about an amendment that would have had the effect of limiting access to abortion was this:

"The men who have brought us this don't single out a procedure that's used by a man, or a drug that is used by a man, that involves his reproductive health care and say they have to get a special rider. There's nothing in this amendment that says if a man some days wants to buy Viagra, for example, that his pharmaceutical coverage cannot cover it, that he has to buy a rider. I wouldn't support that. And they shouldn't support going after a woman using her own private funds for her reproductive health care. Is it fair to say to a man you're going to have to buy a rider to buy Viagra and this will be public information that could be accessed? No, I don't support that. I support a man's privacy, just as I support a woman's privacy."

Well, for those of us who disagree with the good senator from California on this issue, the right to exist trumps the right to privacy. Of course, as Ria noted in her post, the Senate has in any case already rejected that amendment, from Nebraska's Democrat Ben Nelson, which would have further limited abortion coverage in the health care reform legislation. But it's important to me to note that just as in the pre-Stupak version of the House reform bill, the Senate bill does not allow federal funds to be used for abortion anyway, as so many of my fellow pro-lifers fear.

Just yesterday, I had a tense moment on that point with the nice woman who came to bring my mom Communion in the Catholic hospital where she's recovering from surgery; when we bowed our heads, the Eucharistic minister asked us to pray that the health care reform bill wouldn't pass because of the abortion issue, and my eyes popped open. (Couldn't I just receive our Lord and keep my mouth shut? You know me better than that; apparently not.)