VivirLatino

As promised, I’m spending the next few days slowly but surely exploring different aspects of the Affordable Health Care for America Act which passed in the House of Representatives this weekend. I wrote a little yesterday on the Stupak Amendment which pretty much bans access to abortion services for women. Of major concern ever since health care reform was presented was how immigrant access to healthcare would be impacted.

My reading of H.R. 3962 says that undocumented immigrants can buy into the health exchange out of their own pockets but that they are not eligible for any subsidies or affordability credits. Documented immigrants would be subject to a 5 year ban on access to subsidized public health services including Medicaid.

Liza over at Culture Kitchen writes about the impact that the Stupak Amendment has on Latina abortion access.

It is a fact of the heinous access to reproductive health education and services in this country that 67% of non-white women in this country have abortions. 22% of those women are Latinas. Why make it even more difficult for our sisters to get the kind of health care services they need to survive?

How can the infamous pro-Stupak men of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus be considered “courageous” for throwing lower-income and poorer Latinas under the bus with their? This amendment actually extends the Hyde Amendment in Medicaid legislation and goes further since it the ban would extend to any federally funded health insurance, not just Medicaid. This would mean that many more than the 2 Million Latinas who rely on Medicaid would be affected by Stupak. And it would mean many more Latinas relying even more on the “do-it-yourself” abortions that kill at least 5,000 of us yearly.

Is that what Janet Murguia and the National Council de la Raza really want for Latinas, needless to say all women in the United States? What would it have taken for NCLR to stand right next to Planned Parenthood or the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health and denounce this Health Care Reform bill as bad for all women and all immigrants? Why do we still have to debate the important of not just intersectionality in politics but in coalition building as well?