Your Opinion: Obamacare and abortion

Harry Trickey

Jefferson City

Dear Editor:

With Obamacare to be argued before the Supreme Court seven days after the election and Roe vs. Wade at the center of an upcoming Supreme Court nomination, we are truly living in interesting times.

If you follow and believe the Republicans' arguments against Obamacare, you would have taken Affordable Health Care away from my friend Wayne who contacted a heart and lung virus six years ago that put him into St. Mary's Hospital off and on for many of those five years. He was often in intensive care. Wayne carried on, as best he could, as a car salesman and husband and father until his death in 2018. He left no debts. He left only memories because his employer had recommended he enroll in Obamacare.

Barbara Carvalho, director of the Marist Poll, recently found, "Just 13 percent of Americans say Roe vs. Wade should be overturned. While 77 percent say the Supreme Court should uphold Roe; 26 percent of those say they would like to see it remain in place, but with some restrictions added; only 21 percent want abortion on demand under any and all circumstance; and 14 percent want some of the restrictions that are now state prescribed reduced." What decided the issue for me was a girl at my college who bled to death trying to self-abort with a coat hanger, knitting needle or whatever and a 16-year-old couple from my first high school teaching gig that jumped together from the Rotunda of the Utah Capitol building. The girl was pregnant. I say, "What wasted lives those two stories are. That none of the three had another alternative and must have felt they only faced reproach and rejection from their families and communities."

The Senate Republicans and Donald Trump are hastening the appointment of a third judge to the Supreme Court with the expressed intention of dismantling Obamacare and Roe vs. Wade. I ask my friends and neighbors to vote to protect the next Wayne and his family and to give the next 16-year-old girl who is in trouble, and there will be many more, another option other than a knitting needle or a leap from a tall building.