An Open Letter to Sen. Joni Ernst

Dear Senator Ernst,

I am writing to ask your support for having the Senate hold deliberate, open hearings from experts in health care prior to any further legislation repealing, replacing, or revising the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). I am gravely concerned that political and fiscal interests are taking precedence over health and moral outcomes. In particular, I think there is a particular issue regarding pro-life goals--a position you and I both share.

In the mid-’90s in Atlanta, I was briefly on individual plan insurance. I was in my 20’s and a perfectly healthy woman. Kaiser Permenente was the best insurance available to me. The monthly premiums for healthy individuals my age were (to the best of my recollection) $30 for men, $90 for women, and $130 for women who wanted maternity coverage. There was also no contraception coverage in these plans. The contraceptive pill cost $39 a month. Abortions at the time in the local clinic cost $450 in cash. To give you some perspective, my rent at the time was $450 a month, and I lived in a very impoverished part of town in an efficiency apartment.

At the time, I wasn’t planning on needing contraception, but as a sexual assault survivor, I knew that even a commitment to chastity didn’t necessarily mean a single girl couldn’t get pregnant. I marveled how the insurance system that I was participating in actually had a financial incentive for women to have abortions rather than either preventing pregnancy with contraception or covering maternity care for all women. A healthy pregnancy and delivery could cost $10,000 in out-of-pocket care without a maternity rider, a maternity rider cost $480 per year, the contraceptive pill was $468 per year, and the abortion was $450.

We cannot go back to the Wild West days of health insurance, which is what will happen with a repeal of ACA without an intelligent alternative. Letting ACA “fail” as our President advocates, would be even more disastrous. The free market will not necessarily support moral, pro-life values.

I am sympathetic to those who chafe at the idea that Planned Parenthood receives medical reimbursements for non-abortion procedures, when they are the biggest provider and lobbyist for unfettered access to abortion. I would love for Planned Parenthood to go out of business--preferably because abortion is no longer desired by any woman. But I can’t ignore that for many women in rural or low-income situations, Planned Parenthood is their only access to low-cost or no-cost family planning and annual pelvic exams. It is unfortunate that we have let our public health clinics die on the vine from lack of financial support thus enabling Planned Parenthood to fill in the void.

I hope you will consider the lives of the most vulnerable--the unborn--as you proceed to work with your colleagues on health care legislation. Health care is nuanced and complicated. It reaches into our lives in subtle and significant ways. It deserves our best efforts to investigate and address all the angles, not just the fiscal ones.

I was a blogger once...

Twelve years ago, when I was newly married, newly unemployed, and newly Texan, I set out to be a blogger. I had big dreams. I would write about spirituality and simplicity. We were Catholic and broke so it seemed like a good fit. When the kids came along, I morphed into a wannabe Mommy blogger. Then my kids got older--I increasingly felt that telling their stories was an invasion of privacy. Then my husband got a raise--I increasingly felt like I was losing my simplicity credibility. Then we moved to Iowa and I realized in the light of the midwestern sun, what I took for frugal simplicity might just have been how most people outside of Texas live. I stopped blogging.

My blog button on my toolbar beckoned me from time to time, but I never really jumped back in. Once the kiddos started school, I tried dusting off my old marketing skills to help promote their small Catholic school. Along the way, I made an interesting discovery. There’s always a need for stories, for writers. Each teacher had an interesting history. Every work of art produced by my kid begged to have the mini-biography of the inspiring artist to be told. So I founded and started submitting things to the school’s blog.

Then I got sucked into serving on the Catholic School Board. After nearly a decade out of the paid workforce it was a heady rush to be taken seriously again by fellow adults making very. Important. Decisions. I loved being an advocate for Catholic education. I was good at it. If I’m honest, I also loved having an influence beyond my family circle in a way that was visible and appreciated. I stopped telling stories. I thought that was so easy that anyone could do it. The blog sputtered out.

This past May, after much discernment, I stepped off of the Catholic School Board for both personal and spiritual reasons. Almost immediately, I was asked to give a presentation to the parish staff about improving communication. That turned into an invitation to lead the initiative to redesign and rethink the role of the parish bulletin in our parish. The office staff was capable of the graphic redesign. The parish staff leadership was willing to try a new tactic and provide information. Guess what gaping hole in the project soon became apparent? Dedicated storytellers--writers who knew how to get the job done.

So here I am back where I started 12 years ago. I’m at a crossroads personally and professionally. The call of the keyboard beckons me. It calls me to write about spirituality and simplicity. It calls me to document the stories of fellow disciples. It calls. It calls.