MANKATO — This past week, in a burst of nesting energy, I cleaned my house from top to bottom. I'm nearly seven months pregnant with my sixth child. So perhaps this commentary is simply a manifestation of my nesting instincts moving outward — a desire for the society in which my children live to be better, less greedy, healthier.

This piece is also a plea to women and to mothers. Health care is our issue, and day after day, I see old men on television arguing back and forth about the merits and demerits of health-care reform. Women, we need to get with it, get informed, get loud, and claim this issue since we are, traditionally, more expensive to maintain and keep alive, and we are, traditionally, the ones who sacrifice work — including promotions and raises — for the care of sick children.

There exists a manipulating contingent trying to appeal to your sense of morality, your sense of religious righteousness, your history of Midwestern responsibility and duty to work hard and be successful without the aid of the government and to shame those who apparently haven't — the thinking being that if other people lived the way you did, responsibly and morally, they could afford health care, too.

Nonsense. It is not true that every person who gets educated or works hard achieves the "American dream" or even any semblance of it. Lots of people who work hard lose their jobs, their homes, get sick, go bankrupt, have a string of bad luck. The American dream is a myth, exploited.

Ridiculous distractions
These individuals work to convince you that a vote for health-care reform is a vote for abortion. They have already attempted to entangle the immigration debate into the issue of health care, and, if they could, they would somehow tie gay marriage to health care, as well. These three issues — abortion, immigration, and gay rights — are ridiculous distractions from the real issues designed to make you feel moral about your decision to not support the health and wellness of millions of real, live children already here. You cannot be against abortion and against paying for the public systems, including health care, that would support these children should they be born. It is an impossible-to-reconcile contradiction.

Women, you and your children deserve health and wellness in the same way you deserve safety. No one questions the morality of subsidizing the police to maintain security on our streets, to protect our homes and places of business from burglary, or to arrest and prosecute those who victimize our basic right to safety. Why do we question the morality of subsidizing health? In the same way a person can purchase extra protection on their home or car by buying an alarm or other type of safety device, if a person wants extra health care, let that person purchase it. But the basic right to health care should exist for everyone.

Women, we subsidize men's work and interests all the time: We pay for the police, arresting (and employing) mostly men; we pay for prisons, harboring and employing mostly men; we pay for fire departments; street and highway maintenance; farm subsidies, payments which mostly go to men. We pay for a lifetime of health-care benefits to congressmen, who are mostly men. We pay for all sorts of industries that employ our male counterparts. And we've recently bailed out, big time, banks and the auto industry, mostly led by men who prefer chewing off their little fingers to giving loans to women. We pay for the military, the most notable of (mostly) men's arenas, the most expensive, the most wasteful, the least regulated and most secretive. The one area we subsidize that employs mostly women —  education — is woefully underfunded and, locally, cavalierly cut to endorse the political endeavors of a governor whose sights have grown beyond the power the governorship of Minnesota can afford him. We pay for him to overreach his intelligence and skill.

Listen, learn
Women, listen carefully to your legislators in the next few months. Educate yourself. Analyze the components of their various arguments. There will be great forces working to persuade you to return to your traditional, religious, or cultural role, back to your acceptable realm as the emotional glue that holds your family together or the support of your husband or the person who sacrifices for the greater good, in this case, the person who sacrifices health for the greater wealth of a select few.

Women's historic marginalization has long been upheld by the very religious, cultural, or traditional practices we live. More than racism or religious differences, this planet suffers from sexism. And neither of the former concerns will ever be corrected until each and every person, family, religion, culture, state, and nation correct it.

We can start with health care. If we free ourselves from this one burden, our opportunities in our families, businesses, and creative lives will reveal themselves in ways both surprising and beneficial.

Nicole Helget is a writer and teacher from Mankato.