JenEllen, the public is paying for a LOT of procedures, many of them you might consider unsavory. Poor people need a vast range of medical offerings, just like everyone else with access to private insurance. (Or not. There are a lot of people who fall in the middle, no insurance and no access to medicare or medicaid). To suggest that poor women should somehow fund their own abortions even if everything else is covered, when abortion is legal, is a rather ala carte approach to reforming public medicine. This nation has such a hard time dealing with Sex. Many private insurance companies will deal with various ob/gyn issues, but they won't pay for birth control pills. This somehow presumes that sex is a frivolous option, mere recreation for people (great pun, by the way!), and they're not going to encourage sex by making it easier for women to afford prevention of unwanted pregnancies.

What is the logic at work here? Big Daddy Boss Hogg who runs the insurance company KNOWS that sex is as much a driving force for living beings as is eating and sleeping, and knows that people are gonna go ahead and do it. And just like they afford food to eat, they'll manage somehow to afford birth control pills. . . except they don't or can't always, and then those unwanted pregnancies happen. Perhaps they used less reliable methods, or nothing, but the insurance company is BANKING on the odds that more women will go ahead and buy their own birth control and the company won't have to pay as much at the back end of the transaction for abortions as they would up front from supplying birth control. When viewed in this economic context, it IS obscene, isn't it?

SRS