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ABORTION TRUMPS JOBS ON REPUBLICAN AGENDA

02/09/11-by L.S. Carbonell
House Republicans are claiming that “fiscal responsibility” is the reason behind two separate anti-abortion bills currently on the House agenda and one expected to be introduced later this year. The bills would restrict money for subsidies for health insurance for the poor if the policies permit abortion, greatly expand the restrictions on abortion funding and would cut off all support to women’s health agencies that perform abortions. It would be too simple to point out that an abortion costs less than the costs of a high-risk pregnancy, or the cost of supporting a kid whose mother dies in childbirth, or the costs of sustaining the life of a child so malformed that it can only live a few days, or a childhood of Medicaid or welfare suppor,t or incarceration when an unwanted kid becomes a criminal or foster care, but since the Republicans are planning on gutting all of that as well, it’s kind of pointless.

These bills may just be the opening salvo. The provisions in these bills can easily be included in next fiscal year’s budget bills. Defunding abortions in the name of spending cuts is the newest twist on the abortion battle that has already shut down hundreds of women’s clinics, denied health care services to millions of women and cost the lives of doctors, nurses and escorts

There is no way in hell these bills will make it past the President and even less chance they can get the two-thirds votes necessary to override a Presidential veto. These bills are sheer right-wing diversionary tactics. If the Republicans make enough noise about abortions, maybe the American people won’t notice they aren’t doing anything about the economy except asking us to go back to the ideas that sank it in the first place.

Rep. Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, author of one of the bills, stated that “This House is more pro-life than it’s ever been.” Whose life might that be, Mr. Pitts, a shot glass worth of cells or the lives of incest victims, rape victims and women who will die without an abortion? We already know that the life of a doctor isn’t equal to the life of those cells in the minds of deranged anti-abortionists.

Democrats in both the House and Senate fought back at a press conference on Tuesday, using last session’s allegation that Dems were more focused on social issues than on jobs and flipping it back at the Republicans. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said “The election was about the economy.” Well, apparently, the Republican idea of a jobs creation agenda is to take women out of the job market by keeping them barefoot and pregnant. Senator Barbara Boxer of California (who survived the tea party challenge of multi-millionairess Carly Fiorina) added “We are sending a clear message to House Republicans that their agenda on women’s health is extreme. It breaks faith with a decades-long bipartisan compromise and it risks the health and lives of women. It also punishes women and businesses with a tax hike if they wish to keep or buy insurance that covers a full range of reproductive health care.”

It wasn’t just Democratic women who took aim at the Republican extremists. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey said the proposed bills would be akin to turning America into a “third world country that’s requiring women to wear head shawls and to cover their faces even if they don’t want to do it.”

Kevin Smith, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner defended the bills by saying that “Republicans are focused on creating a better environment for economic growth and job creattion and that is reflected in the legislation the House is passing.” Really? Maybe Mr. Boehner should get off the golf links once in a while and actually read what his unruly party is passing. Boehner’s second-in-command Rep. Eric Cantor claimed that the new anti-abortion measures are “obviously very important in terms of the priorities we set out initially in our pledge to America.” So, controlling the wombs of every woman in America is your idea of small, non-intrusive government?

Smith is also the man who promised that the words “forcible rape” had been removed from one of the bills. They are still there, those words which have no definition in the laws of most states and which could be defined any way a state’s Medicaid administrators choose to define them

The old guard of the Republican party have lost their collective marbles. They are so scared of the party’s Young Turks like Cantor and Paul Ryan who are so openly hungering after the power positions, and so terrified of the Tea Party that they are willing to sell their souls and our nation to save their seats. They are refusing to see how their party is being run into the ground by ideologues who can’t see reality for the rhetoric.

This isn’t responsible governance. This is a fractured, disintegrating party trying to hold itself together by cowtowing to the lunatic fringe on all sides. Thank whichever deities you believe in that we still have a Democratic majority in the Senate to tamp down the extreme agenda in the House.

It never ceases to amaze me that the anti-abortion activists think that making abortion illegal again will stop it from happening. Making abortion illegal just makes it dangerous. We have no accurate measure of the number of illegal abortions that were performed before Roe vs. Wade, or even any idea how many women died from them. Women have always been and always will be able to find someone willing to abort their unwanted pregnancies, and if they can’t, they will attempt to do it themselves. These attempts to stop abortions will simply drive them from sterile operating rooms to kitchen tables, start a black market in ancient herbal “miscarriage” concoctions and smuggled morning-after pills, or create a new “underground railroad” – women being helped to safety in Canada and Mexico for their abortions.

There is only one way to curtail the number of abortions – honest, realistic sex education presented at an appropriate age and easy access to birth control. The fact that the anti-abortion groups also oppose these measures proves that they are not concerned with preventing abortions, just with controlling women’s bodies. Abstinence-only programs haven’t produced a reduction in teen pregnancies and allowing parents to opt their kids out of sex-ed on religious grounds has resulted in too many pregnancies.

——– If you missed last night’s The Rachel Maddow Show, please take 45 minutes, log on to MSNBC.com and watch it. Rachel devoted her entire hour to this issue, complete with big board graphics and life-sized cut-outs.