While traditionally, a baby’s heartbeat can be heard with a fetal stethoscope at the end of the first trimester, a heartbeat can be seen on an ultrasound as early as six weeks. That does not, as supporters claim, prove that the fetus will be carried to full term naturally. It also does not make the fetus viable outside its mother’s body. It does not indicate the presence or absence of other anomalies that would make the fetus or the baby incapable of independent life. Late term abortions are frequently recommended when it is found that a fetus has only the most rudimentary brain function, enough to make a heart beat but not enough for sustained life.

Furthermore, by writing a law with no exceptions, a “heartbeat law” can condemn a woman to death by forbidding the termination of a pregnancy that has presented complications which force a choice between the life of the fetus or the life of the mother. It was this kind of situation, not abortion on demand, that drove the movement for legalization of abortion in this country. Abortion supporters have always known that it was a devil’s bargain. To get access to legal abortions in cases of rape, incest, extreme fetal abnormality or threat to mother’s life, we had to have abortion on demand. If our tandem efforts in sex education and access to birth control had been as successful as abortion on demand, there would have been hundreds of thousands less abortions since Roe v. Wade.

Every single one of these laws designed to limit abortions, coupled with barriers to easy access to birth control and bans on factual sex education proves that the pro-life movement is not about saving unborn life. It is about controlling sexual behavior.

Related articles

• Latest Twist In Anti-Abortion Legislation (lezgetreal.com)
• The War On A Woman’s Right To Choose, 2012 Edition (thinkprogress.org)
• Texas Ultrasound Law Passes Federal Appeals Court (lezgetreal.com)
• What’s Next In Abortion Fight In Ohio (lezgetreal.com)
• Ohio’s Anti-Abortion Bills Will Be Challenged (lezgetreal.com)

Last week, Ohio ProLife Action delivered teddy bears with heartbeat sounds to all 33 senators’ offices in an attempt to push the so-called ‘heartbeat bill’. The bill would make abortion illegal as soon as a fetal heartbeat could be detected. The bill is expected to cost the state of Ohio millions in court costs after the lawsuits hit.

Senate President Tom Niehause has not committed to passing the bill, especially after Ohio native Bill Graber lobbied against passage based upon the amount of money it was expected that the bill was expected to cost the state.

The senators can legally keep the bears, each estimated to cost more than $30 to make, but they will have to be reported as a gift, and most state senators are loathe to do so.

According to Jason Mauk, Niehaus’ chief of staff, the majority of the GOP senators are planning to return the bears. Four bears and what appears to be a moose are currently housed in Mauk’s office. They are seated around his conference table holding a meeting and each has a Peppermint Pattie on the table in front of them.

Senate Democrat spokesman Mike Rowe has said that the Democrats were either giving the bears away or returning them.

Niehaus make it clear that he is giving his back saying “I’m not sure what I would do with it. I don’t have a grandchild that would be able to use it.”

The bears were bought from Build-A-Bear, and were manufactured in China, a nation that has millions of abortions each year due to their one-child policy.

According to the Dispatch “Last Valentine’s Day, Faith2Action, which is aligned with ProLife Action in the effort to pass the heartbeat bill, delivered heart-shaped balloons to House members’ offices. Most balloons were soon donated to Nationwide Children’s Hospital.”

However, Niehaus noted that “But because they have the heartbeat sound in them, I’m not sure that’s appropriate, because I’m not sure the kids would understand what that was. We thought the best thing to do was give them back and let the organization decide what’s best to do with them.”

Joni Ogle (left) and Molly Rampe (right) of Choice Network

Capital Care Network, in Columbus, Ohio, is a one-of-a-kind women’s health center. They do perform abortions, but before doing so, they offer the woman the services of something no other abortion clinic in America can – a fully licensed adoption agency on site.

Molly Rampe, founder of the Choice Network, said that “It’s not just a brochure being handed to women. It’s face to face. We’re here.” And that personal presence makes a difference.

One of the myths surrounding abortion is that a woman walks into an abortion clinic, says get rid of it, climbs on the table and walks out baby-free. But abortion providers know that the greatest problems with abortions can come in the aftermath, if a woman goes into a deep depression over her decision. Any reputable abortion provider makes certain the woman seeking an abortion knows what she is doing and has considered all the options. It is the myth of the words “abortion on demand” that have led to so many waiting period and counseling laws.

But if the option of adoption is just presented as a conversation, it doesn’t resonate properly. That is where Choice Network makes a difference.

Adoption is not a comfortable word for most women. It can conjure images ranging from warehouses of unwanted kids to “selling” a baby to nightmare foster parents who abuse children. Just telling a woman she can put her child up for adoption still leaves her panicked over the costs of carrying the baby and giving birth, not being able to work and support herself or her existing children. But the counselors of Choice Network can answer all those questions and many more. They can show the woman the kind of families, real families, who want to adopt a child. She can explain the options for affording prenatal care and delivery costs. She can even suggest parents who would be willing to maintain contact with the birth mother, relieving the woman of any regrets about being cut out of her child’s life forever.

There is another service that Choice Network is providing. Too many times a woman doesn’t know exactly when she became pregnant and has not had prenatal care that properly assesses the development of the fetus. In those cases, she could be denied an abortion because she is beyond the legal limit for receiving one without a medical need. Sometimes, women seeking abortions have histories with other children that lead the state to be monitoring the pregnancy and preparing to seize the baby as soon as it is born. For these women, adoption as an option prevents them seeking an illegal late-term abortion or having a baby put into the flawed foster system. It gives women control over what they probably feel is an out-of-control situation.

Choice Network is a brilliant idea, and one that is really needed everywhere. “Choice” does not mean always aborting a fetus. It can mean choosing an alternative to abortion, an alternative that benefits the mother, the child and those persons who want to be parents. The Choice Network helps turn a no-win crisis into a win-win-win.

In every legislature, but especially in those that have thrown up so many barriers to abortion, bills should be introduced that would help place full-service adoption agencies in abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood facilities, creating that perfect point where pro-life and pro-choice combine.

Related articles

• Clinic offers adoption as viable choice for women seeking abortion (dispatch.com)
• What’s Next In Abortion Fight In Ohio (lezgetreal.com)

Ohio

To read the news, one could believe that the most pressing issue in the state of Ohio is determining and legislating the point at which a fertilized human egg becomes a human being with constitutional rights. That is, until the unemployment numbers are published.

In December, the national rate of unemployment insurance filings fell again, down 15,000 to an adjusted 372,000, the lowest number since June 2008. In Ohio, however, they were up nearly 4,100 because of new layoffs in manufacturing, construction and transportation.

Ohio’s lawmakers and anti-abortion activists are probably missing a perfect solution here. They need to pass a law declaring fertilized human eggs to be corporations. The United States Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people. And, as corporations, they automatically become protected “job creators.” Isn’t that a simple two-birds solution?

Related articles

• DeWine certifies ballot language for ‘personhood’ amendment (dispatch.com)
• Abortion News – A Fire, A Poll and An Amendment (lezgetreal.com)
• What’s Next In Abortion Fight In Ohio (lezgetreal.com)

Bobby Joe Rogers, Escambia County mug shot

On New Year’s Day a fire gutted a Florida Panhandle abortion clinic. Bobby Joe Rogers, 41, of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was arrested for the crime of violating Federal explosives laws. He is being held in the Escambia Country Jail in Pensacola pending indictment. A conviction could result in a 20-year prison sentence. An anonymous tip led to Rogers’ arrest.

The fire alarm was raised at 1 a.m. and no one was injured. The fire began in a woodland behind the building, and a dense fog kept the fire from being seen soon enough to save the building.

This particular clinic has been targeted before. It was bombed on Christmas Day, 1984, and a doctor and volunteer escort were shot to death in 1994. Paul Hill, who was convicted of the murders, was executed in 2003.

Though Rogers is being held in the county’s jail, this is a Federal prosecution. Depending on the outcome of the indictment and the setting of bail, Rogers could be transferred to one of five Federal prisons in Florida to await trial, most likely the one in Pensacola.

Rasmussen, a right-leaning polling organization, has released their latest poll of “Likely U. S. Voters” on the issue of abortion. Though abortion ranks very low on the list of issues voters are concerned about, it has been used for the past year to divert attention from the more important issues, like jobs.

According to the January 2 telephone poll, in response to the question “Generally speaking, on the issue of abortion, do you consider yourself pro-choice or pro-life?” Americans responded 49% pro-choice to 43% pro-life.

Abortion is one issue that should not be polled with the usual simple questions and even simpler answers. There are too many variables, and too many shades of support. There are also too many ways to slant the questions so that people don’t have the opportunity to nuance their answers.

And finally, over in Ohio, the Ballot Board will take up the issue of the proposed “personhood” amendment. Like Georgia, Ohio’s constitution calls for amendments to contain one issue. There is a question of whether or not the “personhood” amendment, which would grant full rights to a fertilized egg, has too many aspects.

If it has more than one issue, the group which submitted the notification to collect signatures for a ballot initiative on “personhood,” then the group will have to rewrite the amendment and submit each issue separately. They would then need to collect 385,245 signatures for each issue petition. A “personhood amendment” would ban all abortions under all circumstances, as well as many forms of birth control. Everywhere that the proposed amendment has been placed on the public ballot, it has been defeated.

Related articles

• What’s Next In Abortion Fight In Ohio (lezgetreal.com)
• Title Board Okays Colorado Personhood Amendment (prweb.com)
• Arkansas Attorney General Rejects Personhood Amendment, Calling It Misleading (thinkprogress.org)

Ohio Gov. John Kasich

In 2011, the Ohio legislature passed laws banning late-term abortions (defined as after 20 weeks if the fetus is viable), strengthened parental consent laws for minor seeking abortions and forbid state insurance exchanges covering most abotions, except for incest, rape or the life of the mother. Governor John Kasich also signed laws which prohibited public hospitals performing abortions and banned abortion coverage in local public employees’ health insurance. So, what’s next?

On Friday, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine certified a petition allowing signatures for a “personhood” amendment. Such an amendment would bestow full citizen’s rights on a fertilized egg.

Ohio Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis praised the 2011 legislative session. “Never in the history of the pro-life movement have we had so many legislative measures enacted in one year.” And the conservatives went beyond just making it harder to get an abortion. The state Department of Health must apply for federal grants to fund abstinence education, which the naive believe cuts down on the number of unplanned pregnancies. Anti-abortion student groups are college campuses have access to school funds and facilities. The group’s goals for 2012 include defunding Planned Parenthood, providing funds for pregnancy counseling and prenatal care, a law requiring a woman seeking an abortion to see or hear the fetal heartbeat, which under enhanced detection methods could be as early as six to eight weeks, and electing a president and a senator who are just as anti-abortion as they are.

Elizabeth Nash, a Guttmacher Institute analyst, called Ohio “…one of the most restrictive states in the country, and if 2011 is any indication, it is going to become more restrictive. We had over 90 abortion restrictions adopted in 2011 [nation-wide] – and that’s a lot considering the next highest total was 34 in 2005.”

Gonidakis said the heartbeat bill is unconstitutional and it will not support a court challenge. The same holds true for the personhood amendment. So far, the personhood amendment has failed in every state it has been tried, including Ohio.

Linda Theis, president of Ohio ProLife Action, which supports the heartbeat bill, said the legislation must pass because it has the potential to bar as many as 90% to 95% of the state’s abortions. “We figure it would save about 26,000 lives a year. ” Ohio’s abortion rate has been dropping for the past ten years, hitting a low of 28,123 in 2010.

Theis is wrong. Making abortion illegal does not end abortion. It only makes abortion illegal and more dangerous.

Related articles

• Personhood Ohio To Try, Try Again (lezgetreal.com)
• Ohio’s Anti-Abortion Bills Will Be Challenged (lezgetreal.com)
• Iowa Drives GOP Field Far Right On One Issue (huffingtonpost.com)
• GOP Candidates Reveal Plans For ‘Personhood’ Laws (huffingtonpost.com)

In recent weeks, opposition has also come about regarding the bill from a few unlikely angles. Ohio resident, Air Force veteran and part-time Construction worker Bill Graber emerged into the debate with the argument that the bill would be too costly for the state of Ohio given the litigation that is already being threatened. Graber is annoyed with the Republican lead Assembly over their inability to create jobs or even their willingness to tackle that issue.

The bill, often called the heartbeat bill, passed the Ohio House back in June, but it has been stalled in the Senate. Niehaus has not specified how long it will take to revise the bill.

Supporters of the bill are hopeful that it will provoke a legal challenge to Roe v. Wade. While that legalized abortion, later rulings restricted that to about 22 weeks. The ACLU of Ohio has already said that they will fight the bill in court, and some of those opposed to the bill have pointed out that it will cost the state precious money that they can ill afford to lose on what is, essentially, a gamble in the courts. The likelihood of the courts reversing Roe v. Wade is very slim.

Niehaus noted the splintering among the anti-abortion groups saying “We’ve now heard hours of testimony that indicate a sharp disagreement within the pro-life community over the direction of this bill, and I believe our members need additional time to weigh the arguments.”

For the moment, the bill has been tabled, but it is unclear if it will be revised and resurrected.

Via Politico

Ann Coulter (photo by Stephen Lovekin, Getty Images)

We have been told that Ann Coulter has a sense of humor. This is hard to credit since all she seems to ever do is make mean comments about people and she never seems to actually say anything witty. Coulter says in her upcoming appearance on Logo’s “A List: Dallas” that the LGBT Community should be pro-life. Apparently, she tells gay Republican Taylor Garrett“The gays have got to be pro-life. As soon as they find the gay gene, guess who the liberal yuppies are gonna start aborting?”

This would be funny if it was not, well…no, it isn’t funny is it?

It is, of course, patently incorrect. Scientists have found a fair number of genes that seem to be linked to homosexuality, most of which appear to be recessive in the same way that red hair is recessive. Coulter also ignores the fact that it would be nearly impossible to afford finding out if a fetus is gay or not. Heck, it is pretty expensive just to find out if someone is chromosomally intersexed or not.

She, of course, has about as much evidence about this as she does about almost everything else in her books. Simply put, she makes everything up because it fits her twisted agenda.

Coulter believes that homosexuality can be prayed away and that it is a choice, so her comments are hardly even accurate according to her own beliefs.

The Ohio Statehouse, Columbus

Having failed to bring Ohio Right To Life on board to support her bill, Janet Porter, head of Faith 2 Action, helped create Ohio ProLife Action to advocate for a new form of anti-abortion legislation. Porter’s bill has already passed the Ohio House and is scheduled to go to committee in the Senate after a four-month stalemate over the legislation.

Under Porter’s bill, it would be illegal to abort a pregnancy once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Porter claims that she has the votes to pass the legislation and Governor John Kasich is pro-life, and could be expected to sign the bill into law.

Using doppler, it is possible to detect a heartbeat between 43 and 49 days after fertilization, or at the seven week threshold. Using a stethoscope, the heartbeat is discernible at 16 weeks. It is normal, in places where unrestricted abortion is allowed at all, for the time frame to be 13 weeks. A pregnancy is medically termed to be in the embryonic stage until 10 weeks and the fetal stage thereafter.

The “heartbeat bill” gets around those who argue that the Bible defines life as beginning when the blood flows, though at six weeks, the heart and blood vessels are extremely rudimentary. The “blood flows” argument is a rebuttal to those who want to ban abortion from the moment of fertilization of the egg by a sperm, using the Bible against those whose sole reason for wanting to ban abortion is religious principles. When Roe v. Wade first opened the door for legal abortions, the trimester rule was applied. Abortions were permitted “on demand” for the first trimester, 13 weeks, allowed with medical advisement for the second trimester, up to 26 weeks, and only in extreme circumstances in the final trimester. As medicine has advanced and premature babies were surviving at earlier and earlier stages of pre-natal development, the trimester rule became less inflexible, replaced in many places with a “viability” rule – can the fetus survive outside the womb.

There is much more to viability for a fetus than a heartbeat. In fact, the medical profession judges viability by the development of the respiratory system. The earliest baby to have survived birth was born at 21 weeks, 5 days and spent 16 weeks in neo-natal intensive care. The respiratory system is developed enough for independent viability at 31 to 32 weeks. At seven weeks, an embryo is not viable. It may at some point be possible to help a premature baby born at 20 weeks to survive, but before that, there are too many organ systems that aren’t even in place.

We shouldn’t be having this debate. We thought it was all settled with Roe v. Wade, that women no longer had to die from pre-natal complications or bear their rapist’s or incestuous relative’s babies. We didn’t expect the number of abortions that were performed or that some women would use abortion as birth control. But we can’t lose the reasons we wanted access to abortion in trying to stem the misuse of it. When the anti-abortion forces decided to include birth control in their crusade, when they also lobbied against factual sex education, they were trying to cut off the things we needed to prevent unwanted pregnancies and increasing the demand for abortions. The advocates for choice don’t really want the wholesale murder of babies. We want to prevent unwanted pregnancies more than we want to terminate them. But we also want that door left open, not just as a last resort for unwanted pregnancies, but as a first resort for saving the lives and sanity of women in physical or emotional danger. Like everything else in dealing with the conservative movement in America, it all comes down to fighting the propaganda and the way our side has been presented to those who only get their information from right-wing sources.

Related articles

• Anti-Abortion Chapter Disassociates From Ohio Right To Life Group Over Ohio’s Radical ‘Heartbeat’ Bill (thinkprogress.org)
• Personhood Ohio To Try, Try Again (lezgetreal.com)
• Abortion foes push fetal heartbeat bills in states (sfgate.com)
• How to Chip Away at Abortion Rights without Making Abortion Illegal (onebluestocking.wordpress.com)
• Ohio Abortion Ban Challenges Terms Of Roe v. Wade (huffingtonpost.com)

The Colorado-based Personhood movement has chosen its next target – Wisconsin. They have recruited State Representative André Jacque, Republican of Bellevue, to introduce a bill in the Wisconsin Assembly to amend the state’s constitution “to apply personhood rights to preborn children at all stages of development.” Personhood advocates hope to use the amendments to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The arguments are the same as in Colorado, which rejected the amendment twice, and Mississippi, which rejected it last week – personhood would condemn women to death in the event of pregnancy complications, would outlaw certain forms of birth control, would deny abortions to victims of rape and incest and could result in outlawing in vitro techniques because fertilized eggs might be destroyed in the process. Wisconsin opponents can now add the experiences of the most recent of Mexico’s pregnant children to the arguments – tell how this ten-year-old suffered life-threatening complications including extreme fever and seizures as she carried her step-father’s son to 31 weeks gestation, denied an abortion because she was too far along when she came to the attention of authorities.

So far, there is a split within Wisconsin’s right-to-life community that is stalling Jacque’s initiative. Pro-Life Wisconsin supports it, but Wisconsin Right To Life doesn’t. Though both groups want to outlaw abortion, there is hesitation within WRTL over the vagueness of the proposed amendment. Also supporting the measure is Julaine Appling, executive director of Wisconsin Family Action, which is also known for their anti-gay activities. Appling, who is middle-aged and never married, shares her home with Diane Westphal, her longtime companion and co-worker. They own a home together in Watertown. Go fig. Appling lobbies against reproductive and contraceptive choice.

The Personhood initiative is a lost cause. Mississippi, possibly the most conservative state in the union, rejected it 55-45 last week. Outlawing birth control and condemning women to death just goes too far even for the most ardent anti-abortion supporters.

The Republicans in Wisconsin’s legislature and Governor Scott Walker have overreached on just about every issue this year. The Democrats managed to snatch back two Senate seats in recall elections this summer, coming one shy of retaking control of the State Senate. The recall of Scott Walker got started this week. They need just around 700,000 signatures to force the recall election. Polling shows that Wisconsin residents support a woman’s right to an abortion in certain circumstances.

Fairly typical of where the supporters of these Personhood amendments are coming from is the post-election statement of Rev. Jimmy Porter, director of the Christian Action Commission, the lobbying arm of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, who said, “We mourn with heaven tonight over the loss of Initiative 26, which would have provided the hope of life for thousands of God’s unborn babies in Mississippi. Instead the unborn in Mississippi will continue to be led down on a path of destruction to horrible deaths both inside their mothers and in laboratories.” So much better for a 10-year-old to die burning up with a 106° fever and uncontrollable seizures tossing her around until her bones break or her blood vessels burst. And just incidentally, the baby dies as well, even though it might be viable. Yup – that’s fanatics for you – kill two human beings instead of terminating a pregnancy when it’s just a thimbleful of cells.

Outlawing abortion doesn’t end abortions – it just drives them underground and makes them more dangerous. What we need at this time is more women like the late Jane Russell – women who had illegal abortions before 1973, women willing to come forward and tell how the procedures robbed them of their ability to have children, or how horrific the experience was, or how desperate they were that they put themselves in the hands of a butcher, and relatives of those who died from the procedures, like myself. If these women could be guaranteed that no one would take legal action against them, they are the best witnesses we have to what outlawing abortion really means, and how truly stupid the whole anti-abortion movement really is.

Related articles

• Personhood Ohio To Try, Try Again (lezgetreal.com)
• Mississippi voters reject amendment 26 Personhood change that could have banned abortions (100gf.wordpress.com)

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine

Ohio’s Republican Attorney General Mike DeWine stopped Personhood Ohio’s attempts to get an amendment on the state constitution that would define “person” as “any human being at any stage of development, including fertilization.” That definition would not only outlaw abortion, it would end the use of many contraceptives and prevent saving women’s lives in the case of potentially deadly complications in a pregnancy.

Personhood Ohio announced on Monday that they would collect another 1,000 signatures, correct the technicality that caused DeWine to throw out their petition and just do the process all over again. Personhood Ohio Director Patrick Johnston said, in announcing the plan, “I disagree with the attorney general’s reasoning, but for the sake of time, this is the quickest way to resolve the dilemma.” Also the cheapest. Taking the case to court would have cost Personhood Ohio money that it may not have.

The Personhood movement is a nation-wide effort to create constitutional amendments that would outlaw abortion without mentioning abortion. They represent the extreme end of the anti-abortion movement because they would also prevent birth control and any exemptions for the life of the mother.

Like Herman Cain’s “no exemption” position, Personhood represents the best way for the anti-abortion movement to fail. Tens of millions of American women use contraceptives. Millions of American Catholics defy the Vatican to use birth control. The idea that a woman would be forced to die to prevent the termination of an lethally complicated pregnancy is abhorrent, even in cultures that outlaw abortion in every other circumstance.

As long as there are voice out there insisting that women should not be able to prevent unwanted pregnancies and that the single sperm-penetrated egg has more value than a woman’s life, the anti-abortion movement risks losing support.

In the vast middle, between the loud voices on both sides, are those who want to see pregnancies prevented instead of terminated and abortion to be accessible for those who need it, safe and rare. Until we start out-shouting the fanatics, the battle will rage on.

Related articles

• Ohio Attorney General Rejects “Personhood” Amendment (asohiogoes.wordpress.com)
• Mississippi Personhood Amendment: Of morality and politics (mississippipep.wordpress.com)
• Mississippi’s Choice: Personhood and the Rights of Zygotes (time.com)
• Mississippi Womb Controllers: Kiss Your Birth Control Goodbye as ‘Personhood’ Amendment Vote Looms (pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com)
• Will Mississippi Ban IVF? (thedailybeast.com)
• Herman Cain’s “Monty Python” Moment (lezgetreal.com)
• Editorial: The ‘Personhood’ Initiative (nytimes.com)

Herman "My Sperm's More Important Than A Woman's Life" Cain

On CBS’s Face The Nation Sunday morning, Herman Cain finally clarified his confusing position on abortion – he’s agin it no matter what. In his view (not God’s, read Leviticus 17:11 for His view), life begins at conception and no embryo, fetus, or baby should ever be aborted, not because of rape, nor because of incest, nor to save the life of the mother.

Of course not. In Herman Cain’s view, the result of a man’s sperm penetrating a woman’s egg is more valuable than the life of a woman. Man’s seed must always take precedence over a woman’s life, her reproductive health or her sanity. Every sperm is sacred, just as Monty Python told us.

Well, Monty Python was talking about birth control, but the position is the same….nothing must prevent the replication of man, impede his sperm or kill his child. Man is supreme and female humans are nothing but vessels for providing men with proof of their virility and power. Woman’s role in the human race is to pop out those sperm-products to be cannon fodder for man’s wars.

So, in Herman Cain’s world, we must never consider aborting an ectopic pregnancy but just let a woman die as her organs rupture. We must never think about aborting a pregnancy when a woman develops a complication or illness that will kill her….just let her die but keep that baby alive! And we definitely must never abort a grossly malformed fetus, but should allow it to be born and die in agony. After all, the pain of being mercifully aborted is too much to inflict on a fetus.

Check out the entry in Wikipedia on abortion. Even the most religious countries allow abortion to save the life of the mother. In many countries, it is the only exemption for abortion.

We didn’t fight for legalized abortions to use abortion as birth control. Most thinking women would prefer easy access to contraceptives and scientifically-based sex education. We fought to legalize abortion to prevent the deaths of women who were aborted illegally. We fought to legalize abortion to save the lives of women with catastrophic complications. We fought for legalized abortions because we believed that a woman’s life has as much or more value than a fetus.

There were other issues. The abortion debate went into overdrive because of a drug, thalidomide, and the birth defects it created. Thalidomide babies were born with flippers instead of limbs. Most went on to lead productive, if not normal lives. But we also knew that the thalidomide babies were a small portion of the types of birth defects that could occur, and some of them were death sentences. We did not have, and still do not have, the nationalized health system that would pay the exorbitant costs of keeping these babies alive or easing their deaths. We did not have, and still do not have, the social network that makes it possible for a family to care for such a child without going bankrupt and placing destructive strains on the family. Parents facing the knowledge that the wife was carrying such a child were caught between a society that said “don’t put the baby in an institution” and a society that said “you’re on your own here.”

Rape victims may be a grey area in this debate. Some rape victims are capable of carrying the baby to term and either raising it or giving it up for adoption. For others, the trauma of the rape was too destructive and carrying the pregnancy to term risks pushing that victim to suicide. For incest victims, a pregnancy can be a matter of life and death. Pregnant incest victims are frequently little more than children themselves. Menarche is occurring at younger and younger ages. What kind of danger does a pregnancy pose for a nine-year old?

If people like Herman Cain truly want to see an end to abortion, there are better ways than pushing women back into the hands of criminals on kitchen tables. Early and comprehensive sex education to reduce unwanted pregnancies, easy access to birth control, easily obtained funds for the expenses of a complicated pregnancy or a baby with extreme needs, funds for caring for those children so that a family can choose to keep the child. Education, contraception and national health care – those are the ways to end abortion.

In the meantime, Republican women need to really think about this issue. It’s easy to be pro-life, but what does that really mean? There is a chasm between saving the life of an unborn child and killing a mother to do so. Do Republican women really want a Presidential candidate who considers his sperm to be more important than their lives?

Related articles

• Herman Cain Says No More Abortions Then Attacks Planned Parenthood (inquisitr.com)
• Cain says he opposes abortion without exceptions (sfgate.com)
• Did Hermain Cain lie about Planned Parenthood? (4simpsons.wordpress.com)
• Herman Cain Clarifies Abortion Stance, Stands By Planned Parenthood ‘Genocide’ Comments (huffingtonpost.com)
• The Personhood Amendment: Rights for eggs but not for women (dailykos.com)
• Planned Parenthood Rejects Cain Claim Abortion Clinics Are Aimed at Black … – Fox News (news.google.com)

Personhood Now at the Supreme Court, March 2010

The Las Vegas Review Journal has reported that an attorney for Planned Parenthood has filed two challenges against proposed state constitutional amendments designed to permanently ban abortion in Nevada. The proposed amendments have been put forward by Personhood Nevada and Nevada Prolife Coalition.

Of the two proposed amendments, it is the one put forward by the “Personhood” movement that attracts the greatest opposition, from pro-life groups as well and pro-abortion groups. The actual proposed amendment says:

“The People of the State of Nevada do enact as follows: RESOLVED, That a new section designated Section 23 be added to Article 1 of the Constitution of the State of Nevada to read as follows: In the great state of Nevade, the term “person” applies to every human being.”

The ballot summary is more exact, stating: The Nevada constitution states, “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” Currently, some Nevadans are deprived of their inalienable civil rights, specifically their fundamental right to live, due to an arbitrary and discriminatory distinction between person and human being. While the state has no authority to grant inalienable rights, it has the obligation to protect them. This amendment therefore applies the term “person” to every human being. ‘Human being’ includes everyone possessing a human genome specific for an individual member of the human species, from the beginning of his or her biological development, without discrimination as to age, health, reproduction method, function, physical or mental dependency, or cognitive ability. This amendment benefits all Nevadans by guaranteeing, as envisioned by our founding fathers, that no one shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. It eliminates discrimination against Nevadans at the beginning of life and prohibits state intrusion in end of life decisions. This amendment codifies the inalienable right to life for everyone, young or old, healthy or ill, conscious or unconscious, born or unborn. It assures protection and dignity to our children, our infirmed and our seniors.”

The “Personhood” movement has attempted this amendment in several states, including Florida, Missouri, Montana and Colorado. It has been repeated voted down by huge margins. The pro-life opposition makes the case that the amendment is too vague to accomplish its goal and the motivation for the Personhood movement is highly suspect. They do not reveal their funding sources, move into a state from the outside and create the impression that the amendment will overturn Roe v. Wade, which it cannot do. If the amendment seeks to define a person as beginning from the moment of conception, it doesn’t do that. In fact, the pro-life opposition has made the case that the “personhood amendment” could be used by pro-abortion forces to block anti-abortion legislation.

The Nevada Prolife Coalition petition, which was filed in September, is an attempt to resurrect a ballot initiative that failed in 2010. The proposed amendment would ban “the intentional taking of a prenatal person’s life” and defines a person as “every human being at all stages of biological development before birth.”

In 1990, the voters of Nevada chose to allow legal abortions, codifying the Roe v. Wade decision. Repeated attempts to ban abortion in Nevada have failed.

The more the pro-life movement has moved to the extreme, the more people are starting to remember why the pro-abortion movement existed before Roe v. Wade. Though the specifics of Jane Roe’s suit were not about the issues that had given birth to the movement, the case fulfilled the movement’s goal. The movement was never about creating abortion-on-demand as a form of birth control. It was about saving lives. Women died from doomed pregnancies, were forced to sacrifice their lives to save the life of the baby, were driven to suicidal depressions carrying the babies of their rapists. Desperate women died at the hands of illegal abortionists. Abortion was a portion of greater issues of women’s rights – the right to put an incestuous relative in jail, the right to refuse sex, the right to bear a child out-of-wedlock without being pushed to the destitute fringes of society, the right to birth control and sex education. All these things figured into the pro-abortion movement. It was never our intention to create a culture where a baby was an inconvenience to be flushed. The right to an abortion as an alternative to death or insanity was just a portion of the rights we were fighting for.

We know that the simplest way to prevent abortions is to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but the same forces that are pushing the anti-abortion laws also prevent adequate sex education in our schools. They refuse to allow birth control to be dispensed. They refuse to recognize the value of a woman’s life. But most of all, they refuse to understand that making abortion illegal does not prevent abortion. It just makes abortion unsafe.

Related articles

• The Legality of the Personhood Amendment 26 (thegaysoutherner.wordpress.com)
• Personhood USA Releases New Video Documenting Infamous Roe vs. Wade Court Case (prweb.com)
• Life-at-fertilization initiative has hope in Miss. (msnbc.msn.com)
• Colorado’s Failed Life-At-Fertilization ‘Personhood’ Initiative Lives On In Mississippi (huffingtonpost.com)
• How to Chip Away at Abortion Rights without Making Abortion Illegal (onebluestocking.wordpress.com)
• Pro-Life Organizers Work on State Constitutions; Fed to Follow? (blogs.wsj.com)

San Francisco Vigil For Murdered Dr. George Tiller, Creative Commons

This from the blog Jezebel – Operation Rescue has unmasked a female doctor who has been providing abortion services in underserved areas to women who can’t get to far-away clinics and afford to meet the ridiculous “waiting periods.” These exposés by Operation Rescue have led to the shooting and murders of abortion providers and staff and bombing of facilities.

The doctor in question wears a mask when she travels to a site, uses a fake name and does everything possible to hide her identity and protect herself. Operation Rescue has distributed a sketch of the doctor, her real name and most disturbingly, information about her elderly mother. They have told their fanatical followers that she is unmarried, a naturalized citizen and a Yale graduate, which Jezebel called the “WITCH trifecta.”

The Operation Rescue “bio” on the doctor included the following: Freedom from relationships made it easy for Dr. X (Jezebel deleted her real name) abroad providing abortions in third-world African and South American countries. But in 2004, it was her relationship with her aging mother, who she strongly resembles, that brought her home. X continues to stay with her mother, X Mom, Professor of Anthropology, Emerita at Harvard University, at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” The organizations post goes on to say, “Abortionists don’t deserve anonymity. It keeps them from being held accountable for their actions. In some states, patients aren’t even told the full names of their abortionists and when things go wrong, women don’t even know who to file a complaint against. Identifying abortionists has helped Operation Rescue and other pro-life groups to warn women of abortionists with histories of abortion abuses. People who are proud of their work are willing to put their names on it. People who are ashamed or are trying to get away with something, like bank robber and abortionists, wear masks.”

Or maybe they wear masks to protect themselves from the kind of people who kill abortionists “under orders from God.” Operation Rescue, naturally, offers no proof of any abuses or things going wrong with these abortions. Pro-choice groups, on the other hand, can provide plenty of stories about things going wrong with illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade. I’ll start – my great aunt died of peritonitis following an illegal abortion. She was young, single and lived in a time when unmarried pregnant girls were either shipped off to convent homes for unwed mothers to be psychologically abused by the Church or thrown out on the street to make their way any way they could – usually as prostitutes.

Operation Rescue, in claiming that they have the right to hold abortionists “accountable” are presuming to place themselves in God’s shoes. Only God can hold a sinner accountable for their sins, and He will hold the murderers of doctors just as accountable as the abortionist if He indeed is opposed to the abortion of embryos that His own Bible doesn’t consider to be imbued with life.

So far, no one has chosen to prosecute Operation Rescue for their part in the murders of abortion doctors any more than anyone has held Bill O’Reilly accountable for the murder of Dr. Tiller. Should any harm come to the mother of this doctor, however, Operation Rescue should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law the same way a person would be prosecuted for hiring a hit man to take someone out.

Our thanks to Jezebel for alerting us of this travesty.

Related articles

• Operation Rescue Reveals Identity of Anonymous Abortion Doctor, Because Abortion Is Like Bank Robbery [Roe V World] (jezebel.com)

It appears that no matter how close to the Tea Party line John Boehner runs, he is not invulnerable to a Tea Party challenge. David Lewis plans on running against Boehner on one issue- his support for a federal budget that includes funding for Planned Parenthood. He calls the organization “the largest killer of unborn babies in America.” Of course, anti-abortion activists like himself happen to be the largest killers of women in this country, or at least approaching that, but let us not talk about the spike in deaths due to botched home abortions or maternal deaths due to the lack of availability of doctors to provide this medical procedure.

Lewis appears to be planning on running graphic anti-abortion ads against Boehner claiming that people will not reject abortion until they see abortion. Of course, they would reject cesarean sections or heart transplants if they saw them given that those tend to be rather graphic and hard to stomach as well.

Still, Boehner beat out two other candidates in a Republican primary last year with an 85% of the vote, but that may not work this time given the fact that a very large number of Americans are really angry with their Representatives.

Source

30 August 2011
by Bridgette P. LaVictoire

The Republican assault on the rights of women hit a snag today as US District Judge Sam Sparks struck down key provisions of Texas’ new anti-women law which required doctors to perform sonograms before an abortion and forcing women to see these images and the sounds of fetal heartbeats. According to Sparks, the law violated the First Amendment speech rights of doctors and patients.

The law was set to go into effect Thursday.

The ruling also struck down the part of the law which allowed women to avoid seeing the sonogram images if and only if they signed a legally binding statement saying that they were pregnant due to sexual assault or incest. Sparks ruled that the state cannot compel a woman to disclose such private information. There is not even a requirement that a woman inform the police that she has been raped. Sparks stated that such a disclosure is an attempt by the state to “permanently brand women who choose to get an abortion.”

Various states have been trying to indirectly remove the right of women to get an abortion. This has done little to stem the actual numbers of abortions being had, but has driven them dangerously underground.

Source

Prevention Park, Planned Parenthood's largest facility in Houston, Texas

A Federal judge in Wichita, Kansas, has issued an injunction against the state barring enactment of a new law that would effectively block funding for Planned Parenthood. U. S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten ruled that he believes the organization will win its suit against the state, overturning the law on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and is intended to punish Planned Parenthood for supporting abortion rights.

The law would have cost Planned Parenthood $330,000 in federal funding. It would have been forced to close its clinic in Hays, Kansas, which serves 5,700 patients a year.

Planned Parenthood has been the favorite target of anti-abortion groups this year because it is one of the last places that women can get abortion services. Too many private clinics have been forced to close because of demonstrations, attacks on personnel and community pressures. Contrary to the anti-abortion propaganda, abortion is not Planned Parenthood’s primary business. It is what it has always been, a place for women to learn how to prevent pregnancy and receive health care unique to women. Many facilities also provide specialized health care for men.

The attempt at the Federal level to cut off Planned Parenthood’s funding failed, so the drive moved on to the state legislatures where is has had more success – until the matter gets to the courts. Every court action brought on Planned Parenthood’s behalf has been successful, on several levels. The state laws violate the Supremacy Clause – which forbids states imposing restrictions on federal programs that the federal government doesn’t. It also probably violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments because it is targeted at Planned Parenthood, and the evidence before the Court supports that contention.

Marten wrote, “The purpose of the statute was to single out, punish and exclude Planned Parenthood.” The Title X funding provides payment for services such as contraception, cancer screening, STD testing, and education for family planning. The state insists that other facilities could provide the same care and the ruling violates the state’s sovereignty.

Kansas has now lost two preliminary tests of its anti-abortion laws. The first imposed new regulations on facilities that provide abortions and gave the effected facilities less than 10 days to comply.

Peter Brownlie, president of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, said after the ruling that the judge’s ruling was clear and unambiguous that the law was unconstitutional and enacted for the wrong purpose.

“We take comfort in the fact that the judge said we have a strong likelihood of prevailing on the merits when the full case is heard,” Brownlie said.

Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Chanay said the state will review the judge’s before determining how to proceed.

Planned Parenthood offers abortion services in Kansas only at its clinic in Overland Park, a Kansas City suburb, but it also has clinics in Wichita and Hays.

Planned Parenthood contends that the Kansas statute is part of a national campaign to cut off the entity’s federal family planning money because of its advocacy of abortion rights. Similar actions to partially or fully defund Planned Parenthood were taken by state legislatures in Indiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.

Marten’s order is the second setback for the state on the abortion issue this summer. A federal judge in Kansas City, Kan., in July issued a temporary injunction against new licensing rules for abortion providers that tell providers what drugs and equipment they must stock and set requirements for room sizes and temperatures, among other things. But the judge blocked their enforcement until a lawsuit over the rules is resolved.

The anti-abortion groups have decided that the presence of conservatives majorities in some state legislatures is their opportunity to finally remove abortion from America. Bombing facilities, killing doctors, attacking personnel, harassing patients has failed to produce the results they want – the recriminalization of abortion in America. There are only nine countries in the world which do not allow abortion for any reason – Laos, the Maldives, Vatican City, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Tuvalu, Chile and Uruguay. In the other 195 nations and sovereign states there are a wide variety of laws governing abortion. What the anti-abortion groups want is to turn us into the tenth no-abortion country. Laotians are majority Buddhist, over 98% of Tuvaluans belong to a conservative Protestant faith, Maldivians have no dominant religion and the other six countries are strongly Roman Catholic. Except for the Maldives, a dominant religion has determined the civil laws for abortion.

Related articles

• Kansas Planned Parenthood Ruling Could Protect It In Other States (huffingtonpost.com)
• Judge temporarily blocks Kansas’ family planning money restrictions (cnn.com)
• Dallas Planned Parenthood Clinic Attacked (lezgetreal.com)
• Defunding Planned Parenthood Opposed By Most Americans: Polls (huffingtonpost.com)

Governor Sam Brownback, Kansas

The state of Kansas has only one licensed abortion provider, which they say is enough to disprove any claim that their new abortion provider licensing law was designed to make abortions impossible to obtain in their state.

The new licensing laws, which dictate room sizes, temperature, bathrooms, drugs and equipment to be stocked, and enough regulations to make any right-minded Republican wince if they were imposed on any other form of business, were enacted with such speed that it was impossible for two of Kansas’ three abortion facilities to comply in the time limit. Approved on June 17^th, the regulations went into effect just 13 days later. For one, if not both facilities, it will be necessary to find new accommodations because their existing facility simply does not have enough room to install all the required bathrooms and closets and consultation rooms. Only the Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri clinic in Oakland Park was set up in a space large enough to meet the new regulations. It still took two inspections for them to meet the new requirements. For the other two, the remodeling and construction costs would be prohibitive for facilities that operate with no profit.

Among the requirements are each procedure room must be 150 square feet, each clinic must have a 50 square foot janitorial closet for each procedure room, handwashing facilities outside the procedure rooms, a separate recovery room for each procedure room where the patient must stay for two hours, thermostats set between 68 and 73 degrees, separate changing rooms for the patients (that translates into three rooms and a janitor’s closet for each patient) and the clinic must have pediatric medical equipement. That last regulation is based on the anti-abortion activist claim that abortion clinics consistently flaunt the existing laws concerning when in a pregnancy an abortion can be performed and the lie that they are killing babies who could survive outside the womb.

The advocates of the law say it will “protect patients” but no medical evidence has been presented that shows an additional square foot of space makes the patients any safer. Those protesting the law point to the fact that it was pushed by anti-abortion activists and signed by an avowed pro-life governor, Sam Brownback.

The facilities that lost their licenses, the Center for Women’s Health also in Oakland Park and Aid For Women Clinic in Kansas City, have filed suit in Federal Court. The suit is being heard by U. S. District Judge Carlos Murguia. They are not seeking to overturn the law, but to put a hold on its implementation, citing among other things, the fact that the regulations were appoved on the 17^th, but the clinics did not receive notification until the 20^th. The state’s attorney’s defense attached the Planned Parenthood license to his brief, stating that “Women in Kansas seeking abortion services will still be able to obtain medical care at a properly licensed facility even if the statute and regulations are enforced exactly as written.”

Attorney Bonnie Scott Jones, of the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, representing plaintiffs Herbert Hodes and Traci Lynn Hauser, the father and daughter owners of the Overland Park clinic made it clear that the new regulations are a “crazy process.” Though she acknowledged that the license for Planned Parenthood is “certainly better than no one being open….it’s certainly not enough to meet the needs of the women of Kansas.” She noted as well that the Planned Parenthood clinic was licensed as one of the state’s 74 ambulatory surgical centers and the other two are licensed to perform surgery. They have met all the regulatory requirements for those licenses. The new ones are aimed solely and completely at abortion procedures and have nothing whatsoever to do with proper surgical procedure or facility.

In addition to arguing the specifics of the licensing regulations, the lawsuit challenges the legality of denying the clinics legal due process. The Kansas department of health says the law was written with a mandate for immediate implementation. There is a Sept. 7 public hearing scheduled in Topeka to meet the legal requirement that such regulatory changes have a public comment period before full implementation.

The three Kansas abortion facilities were clustered around Kansas City, on the Missouri border. It is around 440 miles from Kansas City to Elkhart in the southwest corner of the state. That’s an 8 hour drive. These facilities also served women in Missouri.

Kansas has a lot of problems. It is the slowest growing state in the union. It has over 6,000 ghost towns. Too many of its counties don’t have enough population to support schools and medical facilities. But the governor and legislature have spent all this time working to dismantle women’s health facilities instead of properly addressing the state’s problems.

Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota

In the meantime, the new South Dakota law requiring a 72-hour waiting period for abortions has been blocked by a Federal judge. In her 61-page opinion, U. S. District Court Chief Judge Karen Schreier stated that Planned Parenthood’s challenge to the new law would probably succeed. The new requirements “constitutes a substantial obstacle to a woman’s decision to obtain an abortion because they force a woman against her will to disclose er decision to undergo an abortion to a pregnancy help center employee before she can undergo an abortion.” Additionally, the three-day waiting period forces women to make two trips to the one available clinic and potentially wait a whole month between visits. Though not stated in the news reports, that waiting period restriction could push a woman past the point where she can legally obtain an abortion, thereby denying her her legal rights. Schreier did note that no other state requires a similar waiting period, a counseling session with a group that will try to prevent the abortion and certification from an independent doctor that she has not be coerced into having the abortion.

The suit was brought by Planned Parenthood, which operates the only clinic in the state. Sarah Stoesz, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, said “This law represents a blatant intrusion by politicians into difficult decisions women and families sometimes need to make.” The anti-abortion activists insist that women use abortion only as a birth control device, make the decision callously and cavalierly, are soulless wantons who practice promiscuous sex and expect the state to pay for their mistakes. They refuse to admit the reality of high-risk women, high-risk pregnancies, married women whose birth control failed, the way in which their anti-abortion and anti-sex education policies have cut off access to education that prevents unwanted pregnancies, and rape and incest victims.

Governor Dennis Daugaard, who signed the law, said the decision was to be expected. “I believe everyone agrees – no matter what their stance on abortion – that it’s a laudable goal to reduce abortions by encouraging consideration of other alternatives.” Right. Nice rhetoric. It just doesn’t match up with the anti-abortionists efforts to shut down the only proven way to prevent unwanted pregnancies and abortions – sex education and birth control as available through Planned Parenthood facilities. The only thing their “abstinence only” sex education agenda has done is increase teen pregnancies.

Until people understand that the alternative to safe, legal and available abortion services is women dying from punctured uteri and peritonitis when their only alternative is knitting needles, we are going to continue to have jerks who think that making abortion illegal prevents abortions.

Related articles

• Kansas Licenses Just One Abortion Clinic (newser.com)
• South Dakota’s strict new abortion law blocked (cbsnews.com)
• Kansas’ War on Abortion (thedailybeast.com)
• Kan. abortion clinic denied license, may close (cbsnews.com)
• Down To 1 In Kansas (talkingpointsmemo.com)

I strenuously recommend linking to The Daily Beast for Michelle Goldberg’s story “The Return of Back-Alley Abortions.”  It is a something everyone should read and share.  Though the stories she tells deal with women who were trying to or did end their own pregnancies (and even one who wasn’t trying), the fact is that we have no idea if or where illegal abortionists have set up shop to help women cope with the increasing barriers to obtaining legal, safe abortions.   Illegal abortions can result in injuries that cost women their ability to have children or cost women their lives.  Abortions in America did not just begin out of nowhere after Roe v. Wade.  They were always here.   The only thing these new laws are accomplishing is risking the lives of otherwise healthy women.  Abortion will not disappear if it is legally restricted.  It will just disappear from view.

Related articles

• The Return of Back-Alley Abortions (thedailybeast.com)

competing abortion rallies

As before, pro-choicers and pro-lifers are pretty close in a national Gallup poll. In 2008, they were 45% choice and 47% life. Now, they are 49% choice and 45% life. It’s not a massive shift, but the rest of the poll is significant.

On the issue of the “moral acceptability” of abortion, 51% say that abortion is morally wrong, but only 22% want it illegal under all conditions. Though it is morally acceptable to 39% of Americans, only 27% think it should be legal under all conditions. The vast middle – 49% of Americans – think abortions should be available, but not in all circumstances.

The numbers fit into the part of the abortion debate that never really gets polled – what are “acceptable” circumstances? Abortion for convenience or abortion as birth control are morally reprehensible to most of us. There’s a switch in our heads that says people should prevent unwanted pregnancies, not terminate a life. It operates in even the most liberal of us. But attempts to reduce abortion by assuring better sex education have failed because of the Religious Right’s position that sex education causes kids to run out and have sex. They have pushed an “abstinence only” sex education curriculum that has increased teen pregnancies since their low point during the Clinton administration. Attempts to provide better access to birth control have run into the lack of access to health clinics and societal attitudes.

Attitudes about abortion run more on age lines than on gender lines. Men and women responded nearly identically on all quesitons. It is adults over 55 who are most likely to identify themselves as “pro-life” while under 55′s are more likely to say they are “pro-choice.” There is no difference in responses between the 18-34 age group and the 35-54 group. Most of those over-55s who support abortion rights are probably like me. They have personal experiences that override the picture-perfect lives we were all supposedly living in the 1950′s and early 1960′s. Republicans are more “pro-life” and Democrats are more “pro-choice,” at 66% identification in each group. Independents are 51% pro-choice and 41% pro-life. Republicans consider abortion morally wrong by a 75% majority and almost 80% believe it should be legal only in the most limited circumstances.

President Clinton said that abortion should be “safe, accessible and rare.” His vision fits with that of most Americans even more today. Abortions are best prevented by preventing unwanted pregnancies, not by making it impossible for women with real medical problems to get the proper care. The less that abortion is used as a remedy for inconvenience or a last ditch birth control, the less the “pro-lifers” can argue for its limitation by law.

Perhaps, we’re fighting the wrong battle. We need to go back to the battle for complete and accurate sex education, and we need to sell it to the electorate as the best way to prevent abortion. After all, that’s just the truth, isn’t it? Then, while we are preparing and protecting the majority of teenagers and young adults, They can opt their kids out of sex-ed so their abstinent daughters end up like the one in my daughter’s sex-ed class – pregnant at 15.

Related articles

• Mixed results from latest Gallup polling on abortion (hotair.com)
• Pro-choice vs. Pro-abortion (metamorphosisofthemind.wordpress.com)
• Abortion: A Closer Look (socyberty.com)
• Pro Life Movement: On the Winning Side (cowboypapist.com)
• ‘Pro-lifers’ choose their next target (dailykos.com)
• Recycling: Good for newspapers, bad for lousy pro-legalized abortion arguments (4simpsons.wordpress.com)

Gov. Mitch Daniels

Once upon a time, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels called on Republicans to call a truce over social issues and concentrate on fiscal ones. He sold his soul for votes yesterday when he signed an ultra-conservative bill cutting funding for Planned Parenthood. The bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Eric Turner of Cicero, made it clear that no one will be talking about Daniels’ call for a truce once the bill becomes law. “People in the conservative community care about action, and he’s clearly the most pro-life governor in America with a signature on that bill.” We will remind Turner of that statement when the first low-income woman dies because she didn’t get cancer screening in time. Planned Parenthood in Indiana serves 22,000 women a year, most low-income, many on Medicaid. For years, there has been a problem in both Medicaid and Medicare with far too many doctors refusing to accept patients on either program.  Without Planned Parenthood, low-income women would have to rely on charity hospitals, which are also closing their doors because of Republican fiscal policy.

To get his bone fides in the right wing, Daniels has decided that 22,000 women should not have cancer screenings, pap smears or access to birth control and education to prevent the unwanted pregnancies that result in abortion. He gave in on this bill because of the outright lies that Planned Parenthood uses tax money to fund abortions and that abortions are 90% of Planned Parenthood’s services.

Planned Parenthood will be filing suit today, based on the fact that this bill violates Medicaid law and the 14^th amendment. Abortion is legal, at least for now, and all these pissy little bills that make it harder and harder for women to get safe, professionally performed abortions in the earliest stages of their pregnancies are just increasing the incidents of second trimester abortions and illegal abortions, as well as unwanted children who will live in abject poverty.

Rachel Maddow did a very interesting piece last night on Ralph Reed and how Reed can push all the right buttons in the Christian conservative movement to get what he wants in the secular world of politics. The completely unbelievable part is not that Christian conservatives hold very strong beliefs, but that after all these years they are incapable of seeing how they are manipulated and used by the fiscal arm of the Republican Party. For fiscal hawks to cut medical services to poor women, they pushed a cartload of lies at the Christians, who then rallied against the one organization in this country that does more to prevent abortions than any other. Women have abortions because they get pregnant by accident. When they are educated about reproduction (something the anti-abortion groups also oppose), when they have access to birth control, they don’t get pregnant by accident, ergo, they don’t have abortions.

For the fiscal Republicans, the poor are expendable. They don’t buy health insurance, so they don’t enrich the insurance industry that pours so much money into Republican campaigns. They don’t use medical services from for-profit facilities, so they don’t enrich the medical industry. So what if they die? They don’t contribute to the enormous wealth of the people who fund the Republican Party. To save all those “pre-born children” the Christian conservatives are prepared to get into bed with the people who will guiltlessly murder living children, living women and living elders because they don’t have enough money to pay the outrageously inflated medical costs in this country – costs driven to twice the size of the next most expensive nation because of the insurance industry and for-profit medical industry.

Maybe that’s what irritates so many of us about fundamentalist Christian conservatives – they are so programmed by their religion to accept information without question, that they are incapable of seeing lies, deception and manipulation. They allow fear mongers to focus them on a few small passages in the Bible and ignore Christ’s injunctions to charity, tolerance and peace.

And Mitch Daniels? Welcome to national Republican politics….park your principles, ideas and morals at the door. You have just proven you are willing to prostitute your beliefs for votes.

One last thought….when Bill Clinton was being impeached for his sexual proclivities, Republicans kept claiming he had embarrassed us to the world.  The Republican agenda, from anti-union bills to anti-abortion bills are getting just as much international press attention as Clinton’s impeachment did.  It wasn’t Clinton who made us a laughing stock in the world – it was and is the Republicans.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Related articles

• Another State Law Possibly Un-Constitutional (lezgetreal.com)
• Planned Parenthood funding cut by Ind. governor (cbsnews.com)
• Indiana Gov. Daniels Eliminates Funding for Planned Parenthood (theroot.com)
• Planned Parenthood Attack Moves To States (lezgetreal.com)
• Indiana Governor cuts funds to Planned Parenthood (theglobeandmail.com)
• Indiana Governor Cuts Funds To Planned Parenthood (huffingtonpost.com)
• Mitch Daniels: Let’s face it, my chances of beating Obama are “quite good” (hotair.com)

Image via Wikipedia

04/25/2011 – by Cynthia S. Wright

The arrest of D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray has set off a chain reaction among several, prominent African-American pro-life, spiritual leaders.

Bishop Harry Jackson, using this issue to get his name back into the press had this to say:

“Washington, D.C. has a 30 percent abortion rate, and abortion is the leading cause of death in the black community nationwide. We’re called to save lives and serve women. That is why we will open up a new pregnancy center here in D.C. this year.”

Actually, the leading causes of death within the black community happen to be:

Where is the abortion? Instead, we have countless issues surrounding our health care. Where is the “need” to flesh out the issues involving the lack of health care our community often receives especially in the urban sectors. It is tiring to hear all these pastors want to save black babies but they don’t seem to care that much for them once they age. Heart cancer, stroke, diabetes in most cases can be preventable, if proper education is given – why don’t we talk about the lack of interest or funding in that arena – instead of attempting to incite fear in those that believe that the black community is on its way towards distinction.

Reverend Dean Nelson, Vice President of Underserved Outreach for Care Net believes that women in Washington DC need “life-affirming pregnancy options not more abortions.” Nelson has also stated that he believes the actions of the Mayor and the DC Council is a betrayal to the community as a whole.

“We used to protest to protect the civil rights of our community, not for the right to destroy our unborn children,” Nelson commented.

Instead of focusing on abortions, it would be nice if the black church community would come together to discuss lack of health care within most black communities. If there is lack of substantial health care, it would be hard for healthy, black babies to be born anyway – so maybe it is time for that to be our focus.

Image via Wikipedia

3/31/2011 – by Cynthia S. Wright

When Roe vs. Wade came into effect in 1973, it aided in protecting women that privately sought out abortions. The President during that time was Richard Nixon, who at the time didn’t say anything for or against the ruling. It wasn’t until unreleased tapes were made public in 2009, did “Tricky Dick” let his real opinion by known. During a confession to one of his aides, Nixon commented that greater access to abortions would aid a sense of “permissiveness” in the country and that it would inevitably break down the family dynamic. Yet, at the same he did see a viable use for abortions but only for those that fit within his particular bracket.

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white… Or a rape.”

Well, can’t fault the man for being honest – in private.

With the recent passing of a bill limiting abortion rights in the Arizona Senate, one can wonder if they Senators in the cacti state took Nixon’s opinion to heart.  During a recent Arizona Senate meeting, enough delegates got together to pass a bill that would make it a felony for a doctor to perform any type of abortion that is based on race or sex of the fetus. Violators would face an estimated prison term of 3.5 years.

The bill has been lauded as another attempt from members of the right to use fear mongering in order to bully others into becoming pro-life.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, has stated that there is no evidence of gender-based abortion in this country. She the commented that the problem is confined to countries like China where parents generally are limited to a single child, and India where parents worry about the cost of a dowry to marry off a girl. When it comes to race based abortions, Sinema claims the accusations still make no iota of sense due to that in all cases, the woman knows at least 50% of the babies background, if not 100%.

Along with that, there is no substantial evidence that anything along the lines of gender or race selective abortions are taking place, yet those for the bill in the Arizona Senate won’t give up.

Turning their sight to their favorite target, Planned Parenthood, Senator Gail Griffin claims the reason that race abortions take place is due to money. She then read a release from the National Black Pro-Life Union, where it claims PP takes “racist donations, even to the point of being excited at the possibility of taking money specifically to kill a black baby.” The release also mentions that Planned Parenthood often places their clinics in urban neighborhoods because they get the most services from the women who reside in those areas.

When in all honesty, fewer than 1 in 10 abortion clinics are located in predominately black neighborhoods, a recent report from the Guttmacher Institute has expressed.

Sen. Linda Lopez has come against the bill, commenting that the bill is “one of the most offensive, odious pieces of legislation I’ve ever seen.”

By now, most of us have heard about the stunning events in the U.S. House of Representatives Thursday night during the debate about defunding Planned Parenthood. After New Jersey Republican Chris Smith read graphic descriptions of abortions from a book, California Democrat Jackie Speier rose and denounced the men who allege that abortion is a decision women make cavalierly or casually. She recounted how she had endured a necessary medical procedure which ended the life of a baby she wanted to have. The pregnancy had developed a complication that could not be corrected and the decision was a painful and sorrowful one for Rep. Speier. “There is a vendetta against Planned Parenthood and it was played out in this room tonight,” she said on the House floor. “Planned Parenthood has a right to operate. Planned Parenthood has a right to provide family planning services. Planned parenthood has a right to perform abortions. Last time you checked, abortions were legal in this country,” Speier concluded.

When Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed Rep. Speier Friday night, he made the point that everyone knows someone who has had an abortion. Men like Smith just don’t know they do. I’ve known three of them. For each one, the decision was heart wrenching. They had different reasons for their decisions – abandoned by the father, sinking in poverty with an alcoholic husband and three children already, unacceptably high risk due to age and prior reproductive history. I’ve also known a 15 year old who was forced to give birth to her own brother because abortion was still illegal, and then had to endure the state allowing her mother to adopt the baby. My mother spent over sixty years mourning the loss of a beloved aunt who died of peritonitis caused by an illegal abortion, which Mom’s older sister denies ever happened. I have a cousin who got pregnant at 13 and spent a year “visiting relatives in the Poconos,” though we didn’t have any relatives in the Poconos. That was the world before Roe v. Wade – denial, disgrace, being driven from home and family to survive however possible, finding a kitchen-table abortionist and risking death during the abortion or from infections contracted during the abortion, being sent to convent nursing homes that arranged adoptions whether the mother wanted it or not, ending up in prostitution if they kept the baby because it was the only profession they could practice. Those old movies that feature orphanges – Annie, Boys Town, Pollyanna – they duck the question of where all those kids came from. Forget the cutesy stories about train crashes and car accidents. Overwhelmingly, they were the children of unwed mothers. The fact that Roe v. Wade occurred at the same time that people my age rejected the idea that unwed motherhood was a disgrace and something that should drive a girl from her community was in some ways an unfortunate coincidence. It muddied the perceptions of both issues. My own grandmother was an unwed mother, four times. It was far more common than conservatives ever want to admit because the facts don’t support the picture perfect America they are trying to take us back to. Baby boomers did not invent pre-marital sex, unwed pregnancies or abortions. They always existed. They were just easier to ignore before the 1960′s.

On Friday, the House of Representatives voted to terminate funding for Planned Parenthood, despite all efforts to convince House Republicans that Federal funds are not used for abortions performed by or with the assistance of Planned Parenthood. The effort to end the funding was led by Rep. Mike Pence, of Indiana, an opponent of abortion for any reason. The separation of funding is irrelevant to Pence and the other men who are determined to deny reproductive rights to American women. The real issue isn’t how abortions are funded. It is about Planned Parenthood flying a doctor into South Dakota to perform abortions. It’s about three bills in the House that would restrict abortions.

Many years ago I met a woman who worked for the State of Georgia counseling welfare mothers. It was about the time “abstinence only” sex education was being pushed across the country. She said that the two main causes of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies were ignorance and lack of access to birth control. The ignorance of the women she worked with stunned her. They didn’t know how their own menstrual cycles functioned, when in the cycle sex would most likely result in pregnancy, basic hygiene issues relating to both their periods and sexual intercourse. Her clients had never had sex education courses, either because they were too old and the programs didn’t exist when they were in school or because their parents had opted them out for religious reasons. It’s a common allegation among Christians – teaching about sex will make teenagers want to have sex. The one girl who was opted out of my elder daughter’s health class for religious reasons came back to school pregnant the next year.

Education and access to birth control prevent unwanted and unplanned pregnancies. Education and access to birth control are what Planned Parenthood has always provided. The organization is called PLANNED PARENTHOOD, not “get your free abortion because you were too stupid to insist on a condom.” Preventing unwanted and unplanned pregnancies is the best way to prevent abortions. Period. End of sentence. Nothing else works as well. Making abortions illegal never stopped them, it just made them difficult to arrange and dangerous for the woman, it made women who could afford it travel to countries where it was legal just the way pregnant Irish girls flew to England to get abortions.

Preventing pregnancies prevents abortions. What’s so freaking hard to understand? Pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control say they are opposed to abortions and claim that the pill is an abortion. Aside from the fact that their medical knowledge is nil, if they wanted to prevent abortions, hand out the damned pills. If the congressmen and women who are opposed to abortion want to prevent it, fund the organizations that educate and make birth control available.

This is an argument we have been having for decades. President Bill Clinton said it all, “We want to make abortion safe, available and rare.” It takes a real ideologue to deny the facts, yet they continue to deny it. Anti-abortion groups are the ones who oppose sex education in our schools. As governor, Sarah Palin tried to force an abstinence-only sex education program on Alaska’s schools. We all know how her dedication to abstinence-only worked out, don’t we? Hubby Todd admitted in a People Magazine interview that they never discussed sex with their children. If parents don’t educate their own children and work to deny sex education in the schools, they are infinitely more likely to end up with a bastard grandchild.

Planned Parenthood prevents abortions through education and access to birth control. This funding cut isn’t really about abortion. It is about denying women access to affordable health care. Defunding Planned Parenthood is just another aspect of the Republicans’ campaign to deny health services to the poor and struggling middle class. They couldn’t repeal the health care law, so they attacked a health provider. N ext, they will seek to defund county charity hospitals and neighborhood clinics. This about culling Americas, removing the unwanted elements from our society, killing off the poor. It stopped being about abortion when the anti-abortion forces started fighting birth control and education.

Rep. Speier asked what has any of this to do with creating jobs and bringing down the deficit? In fact, what have the Republicans done since they took power to help the unemployed find work? Nothing. The idiot fringes of the Republican Party are wasting time and money pursuing social issues that will not pass the Senate or the President so they can flex their teeny little muscles for their voters. They are more interested in looking good to the lunatic right than they are in governing this country. And they lunatic right keeps re-electing them, hoping beyond all reason that sooner or later they will get their wish – a Christian theocracy as oppressive and repressive as the Islamic theocracy in Iran. They chip away at our rights one inch at a time because they are too chickenshit to face a full-out battle they know they would lose. They can keep deluding themselves that they represent the will of the American people just as long as they don’t bring down the full force of our Constitution upon themselves. And we can keep going through this ludicrous exercise year after year, watching hate mongers incite murder and watching the welfare rolls swell with unwed mothers who would be unwed mothers if they had been properly educated and had access to birth control.

I wonder what the money would look like, funding Planned Parenthood vs. increases in welfare?

Related articles

• Rep. Jackie Speier Stuns House as she goes Personal for Planned Parenthood (lezgetreal.com)
• Rep. Jackie Speier Rips Rep. Mike Pence During Abortion Debate: ‘I Lost a Baby’ (towleroad.com)
• Planned Parenthood Funding Voted Down (abcnews.go.com)
• Rep. Speier Explains Abortion Procedure, Says Congress Must Stop Politicizing Women’s Health (blogs.abcnews.com)
• House Blocks Federal Aid For Planned Parenthood (huffingtonpost.com)

Many people are tired of the culture war, and the majority of Americans support keeping abortion legal and for fixing the social ills which have lead to the needs for abortions.

Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner has, basically, come out and said “fuck the jobs”.

He stated about his assault on federal jobs:

“In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs. If some of those jobs are lost so be it. We’re broke. The biggest danger to our country is if we do not act. The status quo is shackling the future for our kids and grandkids – that’s why we have to act.”

It is, of course, nothing but a shrill attempt to foist off the blame for the state of the economy and the government on something else. Boehner has been using social issues such as abortion in order to try and deflect attention from the economy and has been doing his best to force draconian and punitive cuts in the budget in order to both hurt the economy and punish Liberals while never wanting to do anything to actually get money from the richest people in the nation.

His priorities are laid out nicely by MoveOn.org’s ad. Kill the women, fuck the jobs, and damn the nation.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/15/if-spending-cuts-kill-jobs-so-be-it-boehner/

Related articles

• Focus on Jobs! But First, Let’s Limit Abortions (lezgetreal.com)
• Abortion Trumps Jobs on Republican Agenda (lezgetreal.com)
• South Dakota Legislature Wants to Declare Open Season on Doctors (lezgetreal.com)
• GOProud Continues To Proudly Support Republican Attempt To Destroy Women’s Rights (lezgetreal.com)
• GOP Removes “Forcible” Rape Provision From Bill, Retain Other Anti-Woman Language (lezgetreal.com)
• Tony Perkins Continues His Lies- This Time About Planned Parenthood (lezgetreal.com)
• GOProud Supports Republican Mass Destruction Of Women’s Rights (lezgetreal.com)
• GOP Obsessed With Women’s Uteri, Jobs- Not So Much (lezgetreal.com)
• Dem: GOP’s rape-redefining bill “a violent act against women” (dailykos.com)
• Is South Dakota set to legalise the murder of abortion providers? (newhumanist.org.uk)

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.

GOP Thinks Government Control Over This Is More Important Than Jobs

This could go down as one of the more interesting segues in MSNBC history as Dr. Rachel Maddow turns things over to discussing the Republican Party’s obsession with women’s uteri by using the word ‘uterus’ to transition from the story to the discussion. The discussion, though, is a serious one. The GOP is planning on spending very little time actually doing any work, and they are more than willing to spend what time they are working simply trying to make it as impossible for a woman to have an abortion as possible. This includes a piece of legislation which is designed to make it possible for a hospital to allow a woman to die rather than having them perform an abortion that could save her life.

The GOP ran on jobs and job creation. They ran on overturning healthcare reform. What they have done since then is pretty much nothing but symbolic and now they are trying to throw a few bones to the Christian Conservatives because the odds of them getting anything through the Democratic majority in the Senate is pretty much nil when it comes to social issues like abortion and LGBT rights.

So much for less intrusion into people’s lives.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It has been reported by TPM that Representative Chris Smith, the lead sponsor of the bill and the chair of the House anti-woman caucus, will remove the phrase “forcible rape” from the bill. Smith spokesman Jeff Sagnip stated “The word forcible will be replaced with the original language from the Hyde Amendment.”

Ostensibly, the bill is suppose to make the Hyde Amendment permanent. Currently, it has to be renewed every year. In reality, it will redefine what government financing means so that it is impossible to even use money saved up for medical procedures for an abortion or for health plans to cover abortions.

As TMP notes:

Republicans and pro-life groups quickly clammed up about the bill, declining to comment on it to just about anyone — until today when the bill’s language changed.

The altered bill language will be undoubtedly be seen by some as a victory for pro-choice activists. But the bill still contains numerous provisions that appear to dramatically expand federal limits on abortion funding. The new version of the bill apparently retains the clause that limits the incest exemption to girls under the age of 18 and language that makes it tougher for women to obtain abortion coverage through their private insurers.

On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart made the point that his tax dollars went to pay for things he opposed such as the War in Iraq.

In 1976, the Hyde Amendment banned federal funding for abortions to Medicaid recipients and all women covered by Federal civilian health insurance and military health insurance. In 1993, Congress passed an exemption for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. According to the Guttmacher Institute, at least 9,100 women seek abortions after rape each year. The numbers are not readily available for incest victims because of privacy laws involving minors.

HR 3 would limit funding to victims of “forcible rape” – a term that doesn’t exist in most state definitions of rape. It would deny abortions to victims of statutory rape – the seduction of under-age girls by adult men. It would deny abortions to victims of incest over 18 years of age. It would deny abortions to victims of date-rape drugs and victims mentally incapable of understanding what is being done to them. If the rapist doesn’t beat the crap out of his victim or hold a knife to her throat while he rapes her, it’s not rape. It wouldn’t even be considered rape if the rapist had a partner and they took turns holding a gun to the head of the victim’s child. No matter what the reason for her submission, if a woman submits, it’s not forcible rape.

The bill would not only deny abortions to recipients of Medicaid, it would cut off all government subsidies for the purchase of health insurance under the new health care law if the insurance pays for abortions. It would affect everyone, not just the tens of millions of women who might qualify for a subsidy for their health insurance premiums. Any policy that offered abortion payment would be denied subsidy unless those policies followed the strict restrictions of what the anti-abortion forces want to define as rape.

It is “one of the most extreme bills that we’ve seen.” says Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL, Pro-Choice America. “It’s basically putting more restrictions on what was defined historically as rape.”

Because Medicaid is a state-run Federal program, the definition of rape could be so severely limited in some states as to make abortions impossible to get under any circumstances. They are already damned near impossible because of the religious fanatics who insist on controlling women’s bodies.

It is time to take the issue of abortion out of the arena of civil rights and into the First Amendment. The anti-abortion movement is religion-driven. The Bible defines life as being “in the blood” which means that according to the Judeo-Christian Bible, life does not exist until blood vessels have formed in the three to six weeks after conception. In fact, there is only one reference to abortion in the Bible. In Exodus 21:22 it states that if a pregnant woman is injured and miscarries, the person who injures her must pay a fine to her husband. If she dies, the person who injured her is condemned to death. The Bible does not equate the life of a fetus with the life of the mother. The anti-abortion folks have twisted up the Bible with the teachings of various religions over the millennia and come up with their version of God’s will.

There is a reason the First Amendment is worded the way it is. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof:” For thousands of years, governments chose state religions, acceptable religions. At the time of the founding of this nation, Europe had been at war for almost 300 years over the question of whether Catholicism or Protestantism would be the official religion of nations. Our First Amendment wasn’t about “freedom of religion” it was about freedom from state religion. Or, as my grandmother put it, the writers of the Constitution knew which was the cart and which was the horse. One cannot have freedom of religion until one has freedom from state-imposed religion. Our immigrant ancestors didn’t really come here for freedom of religion. They came to escape countries where their religious affiliations limited their civil rights or made them objects of persecution. They came for freedom from religion merged with secular law.

Any law that has as its sole reason for passage a religious doctrine is a backdoor method of establishing a state religion. Laws limiting abortions and laws limiting the rights of gays are based completely in religious doctrine and have no basis in scientific or socialological fact. They impose the religious beliefs of one group of people on all people. They establish a state religion, even if they don’t specifically name a particular church or sect as their inspiration.

HR 3 will probably not pass the Senate and it certainly won’t pass the President’s desk. There would not be enough votes to override a Presidential veto. This law is just junk to pay off the people who put the Republicans in power. What is dangerous about this bill is not the possibility of Federal law. It is the possibility that it will inspire states to use their control over Medicaid to implement it’s ideas into regulations. That would not require any votes by any elected body. Just as Gov. Jan Brewer has restricted vitally important medical procedures by cutting off funding in Arizona’s Medicaid program, other governors could impose their religious beliefs on Medicaid.

It is time to stop limiting our First Amendment legal fights to nativity scenes in public parks and Bible readings in classrooms. It is past time to stop pussyfooting around with lawsuit after lawsuit fighting for our rights on the grounds of equality and civil rights or something as vague as our right to privacy. Our civil rights includes our right to not have religion thrust upon us. Our civil rights include freedom from state imposed religion. It is time to challenge any religion-based law that limits our rights as un-Constitutional under the First Amendment’s establishment of religion clause.

And it is time to call out the hypocrites who condemn Muslim countries for their state religion while trying to impose one on us.

As Ted Edwards, who lives on the street said, “She looked off the road for one second, and that’s what happens. . .Took her eyes off the road for one minute–for a sign!” This was the fifth time that protesters have been to this doctor’s house, which is angering the residents. Edwards also said “If you want to veto something, go to their place of work. Not the residence.”

John Musca, one of the anti-women’s rights bullies, said “we do also go to the place of work, but this is also part of the pro-life fight.” Of course, one should note that Musca will never get pregnant without a major miracle. The man who was hit was rushed to Lee Memorial, but he appeared to have been alert. Florida Highway Patrol has said that the teens were taken to Health Park. Another car was also involved after the initial crash, and that completely slowed down traffic.

There were some seventy protesters at the home on Sunday, and their leaders say that they will be back. Anti-woman protester Musca said “This is a battle zone. Drastic times call for drastic measures and that’s why we’re here.” Apparently, Musca never got the information that the rhetoric needed to be toned down, but then again, many in the anti-women’s rights and anti-abortion rights movement have been far less than sanguine about watching their rhetoric.

Source

Leah Winandy and her mother Sarah Winandy were outside the building as normal harassing anyone who was going into the building. In this case, the woman that Leah Winandy chose to harass was Mechelle Tallulah Hall, who brandished a knife that she carried in her purse and informed Leah Winandy not to approach or speak to her. When Ms Hall was almost beyond earshot, Leah Winandy spoke out saying “Don’t do this! Fear God!” Upon hearing this, Ms Hall turned and walked back to Leah Winandy and held the knife to the younger Winandy’s throat. At this time, Ms Hall stated that she was mentally unstable. Leah Winandy was not harmed, but only frightened.

None of the reports on this incident mention that Ms Hall is or was pregnant, nor do they mention that she worked for any of the tenants. She may have been visiting the coffee house inside the building, or one of the other services. In the wake of the murder of George Tiller, it should not be surprising that many of those who have business inside a women’s health clinic, be it for an abortion or many of the other services, may feel threatened by the very presence of often overzealous pro-life activists outside the clinics. While Ms Hall did express regret for her actions while being arraigned, she felt threatened enough at the time to snap.

According to Sarah Winandy, she and her daughter go to the Building for Women every week because “God has called us to be there to preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to bring glory and honor to Him…We are there because it is what God wants us to do. He has sent us there, He has made the way for us to be there.” These are, of course, the sentiments of Scott Roeder who shot and killed George Tiller in his own church. Rather than devoting time and money to helping the women who feel that they need to have an abortion care for others, the Winandys spend days outside the building harassing people in a climate that is getting more and more hostile towards them. Sarah Winandy on her blog states that there were fourteen women who went into the building to have an abortion, but that would be impossible to prove since the building’s facade indicates that the entrances to each different tenant is within the building and not accessible directly from outside.

It would certainly be easy for a woman who is visiting the Program for Aid to Victims of Sexual Assault to feel further victimized by the harassment from these two. Certainly someone who has been victimized in a sexual manner might lash out and hurt the new victimizer.

The “interview” with Leah Winandy mentioned at its beginning the murder of James Pouillon. The attempt to portray the murder of Pouillon as martyrdom has not been based on reality since Pouillon was known for being overly agressive and targeting teenage girls for his harangues. His eldest son, also named James, stated that Pouillon was part of the pro-life movement in order to harass and attack women, and that he did not actually care about abortion.

“He did this to stalk, harass, terrorize, scream at, threaten, frighten, and verbally abuse women. He had a pathologic hatred of women: his mom, my mom, everyone. After my mom finally left him and he lost his favorite punching bag the violence and abuse that was always contained within our 4 walls was unleased on the people of Owosso. My dad used the pro-life movement and 1st Amendments foundations to defend him, support him, and enable him. He fooled them all. He was at the high shool because my niece was there, and female family members were always his favorite targets. Again, my dad didn’t care about abortion. He wanted to hurt people, upset people.”

This, of course, shows the danger of the pro-life movement in that it does have a large number of people who do not seem to care for the well being of women in general, and may have major issues regarding women as a whole.

Interview with Young Pro-Life Counselor Threatened with Knife to Throat
Knifing suspect: What I did was wrong
Women’s Health Center & Building For Women Duluth MN. Extraordinarily Cruel To Unborn
James M. Pouillon criticizes father, slain pro-life activist James L. Pouillon, in online post
Welcome! The Duluth Building for Women is…..
Why Do We Go To The Building For Women In Duluth MN. Weekly?

While it is often portrayed as being nothing more than an extension of the status quo, the reality of what the Stupak-Pitts Amendment would do has not really penetrated the shell that it was put into. In the end, the Stupak-Pitts Amendment would make it nigh on impossible for women to actually get coverage for an abortion. It would certainly create problems with regards to abortion coverage when it comes to terminating a pregnancy that may not be viable, but is not a threat to the mother’s health.

Currently, the Roman Catholic Bishops are hopeful that Democrat Bob Casey might be willing to sponsor the amendment, and they are hoping that language offering to beef up prenatal care and increase the safety net for women with unwanted pregnancies will draw in support. The unfortunate problem becomes that many abortions occur in the United States where it is a woman choosing to abort a feotus that is not viable, but not a threat to her life.

The decision by Pope Benedict XVI to involve the Catholic Church in politics flies in the face of his predecessors Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II. Pope Paul threatened to excommunicate two Catholic priests who were involved in anti-government and anti-war activities in the late 1960′s. Pope John Paul II demanded all ordained Catholic clergy either leave the Church or leave politics. In politicizing the Roman Catholic Church, Benedict has abandoned the views of both Paul VI and John Paul II. Given that John Paul II could become a saint, this creates an even trickier situation for Benedict as it could be seen as unholy.

The Bishops are willing to accept different language to that of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, but worry that could result in the Conference Committee simply removing that language entirely after the final votes are in.

In an appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Bishop Thomas Tobin refused to get into specifying what kind of punishment should be enacted to ensure that the edict against abortion be followed. Matthews, a practicing Catholic, is also pro-life, but he is also adamantly against, as can be heard in his tone, to the interference of the Catholic Church in American politics. Bishop Tobin failed to understand that Matthews’ pushing of him on the issue of what kinds of punishment the woman should face for having an abortion was central to the discussion. Bishop Tobin also failed to grasp that the reason murder and theft are part of the legal codes has to do with the writings of John Locke and are considered to be natural law. The taking away of a person’s life, liberty and property without due process is a violation of natural law. A person committing adultery is not a violation of natural law, though it is immoral. The stance that life begins with conception is also in opposition to almost 2000 years of Catholic teaching.

The lack of support in the Senate could doom the Stupak-Pitts amendment given the opposition to it, and the possibility that it could sway enough votes to end up killing reform entirely. Given that, any Senator who decided to support it could find himself out in the cold sitting on the Postal Committee listening to people complain about the US Post Office.

Politico