Justin's Political Corner
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican-led House on Tuesday passed a far-reaching anti-abortion bill that conservatives saw as a milestone in their 40-year campaign against legalized abortion and Democrats condemned as yet another example of the GOP war on women.
The legislation, sparked by the murder conviction of a Philadelphia late-term abortion provider, would restrict almost all abortions to the first 20 weeks after conception, defying laws in most states that allow abortions up to when the fetus becomes viable, usually considered to be around 24 weeks.
It mirrors 20-week abortion ban laws passed by some states, and lays further groundwork for the ongoing legal battle that abortion foes hope will eventually result in forcing the Supreme Court to reconsider the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, that made abortion legal.
It passed 228-196, with 6 Democrats voting for it and 6 Republicans voting against it.
In the short term, the bill will go nowhere. The Democratic-controlled Senate will ignore it and the White House says the president would veto it if it ever reached his desk. The White House said the measure was “an assault on a woman’s right to choose” and “a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.”
But it was a banner day for social conservatives who have generally seen their priorities overshadowed by economic and budgetary issues since Republicans recaptured the House in 2010.
Democrats chided Republicans for taking up a dead-end abortion bill when Congress is doing little to promote jobs and economic growth. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called it “yet another Republican attempt to endanger women. It is disrespectful to women. It is unsafe for families and it is unconstitutional.”
Democrats also said the decision by GOP leaders to appease their restless base with the abortion vote could backfire on Republican efforts to improve their standing among women.
“They are going down the same road that helped women elect Barack Obama president of the United States,” said Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s delegate to the House. The bill is so egregious to women, said Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., that women are reminded that “the last possible thing they ever want to do is leave their health policy to these men in blue suits and red ties.”
Democrats repeatedly pointed out that all 23 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee that approved the measure last week on a party-line vote are men.
Republicans countered by assigning women to conspicuous roles in managing the bill on the House floor and presiding over the chamber. Republican women were prominent among those speaking in favor of the legislation.
The bill, said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who was assigned to manage the bill despite not being on the Judiciary Committee, would “send the clearest possible message to the American people that we do not support more Gosnell-like abortions.”
After Franks’ remark, which he later modified, Republicans quietly altered the bill to include an exception to the 20-week ban for instances of rape and incest. Democrats still balked, saying the exception would require a woman to prove that she had reported the rape to authorities.
The bill has an exception when a physical condition threatens the life of the mother, but Democratic efforts to include other health exceptions were rebuffed.
The legislation would ban abortions that take place 20 weeks after conception, which is equivalent to 22 weeks of pregnancy.
Some 10 states have passed laws similar to the House bill, and several are facing court challenges. Last month a federal court struck down as unconstitutional Arizona’s law, which differs slightly in banning abortion 20 weeks after pregnancy rather than conception.
Thankfully, the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House’s threat of a veto makes this anti-reproductive choice bill from ever taking effect.
h/t: AP.org
Displaying a remarkable lack of self-awareness, Rush Limbaugh tried to convince a caller that ”it’s a pretty safe bet” that liberals always lie and conservatives never do — an assertion he backed up with a series of his own lies on everything from abortion to minority vote suppression and the IRS.
On the June 18 edition of his radio show, Limbaugh addressed a caller who expressed interest in hearing both sides — liberal and conservative — of any given debate before coming to his own conclusion on the issue. Limbaugh chastised the caller for informing himself in this manner, telling him, “The liberals lie. I do not form my opinions on what both sides say. I form my opinions on what I know to be right.” Limbaugh concluded that it’s a “pretty safe bet” that liberals are always lying, while conservatives don’t lie. In his attempts to prove his theory, Limbaugh turned to some misinformation of his own on the subject of abortion and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
On the issue of reproductive choice, Limbaugh claimed that “nobody is taking away a women’s right to choose …. it’s never happened,” which is deceptive, if not an outright lie. Limbaugh pointed to the U.S. Constitution as evidence, and he is correct that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to obtain an abortion, and thus no Republican is able to restrict this right without meeting a high bar. But Limbaugh conveniently ignored the vast and varied efforts of the Republican pro-life movement to restrict the ability of women and girls to obtain an abortion — laws which have almost certainly resulted in women being denied access to abortion entirely.
Limbaugh continued his defense of conservative integrity by seguing into another common right-wing myth: that no one at the IRS has been fired for applying improper scrutiny of conservative groups. Limbaugh said, “Obama hasn’t fired anybody for what they did in any of these scandals.”
In fact, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew fired Steven Miller. Lois Lerner was asked to resign and was placed on administrative leave when she refused. Her deputy has also been placed on administrative leave.
And Limbaugh’s claim that conservatives never lie didn’t end with a distortion of administrative scandals and abortion myths. He continued with the same caller, next opining on the subject of GOP efforts to suppress minority voters, saying, “there’s no evidence” that Republicans are attemped to suppress the black vote:
Limbaugh’s claim that the GOP has not and is not able to suppress the votes of African-Americans is a lie. The Republican Party has tried — and succeeded — at suppressing the vote of minorities as recently as 2012. In Florida, black and Hispanic voters were disproportionately represented amongst the tens of thousands of individuals whose votes were suppressed due to long lines stemming from Republican legislation that reduced the number of early voting days from 14 to eight during the 2012 elections. Commentators from across the political spectrum have written widely on Republican efforts in numerous GOP-controlled state governments to suppress minority voters — with voter ID laws, administrative changes to election procedure and other similar tactics.
Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to Rush’s listeners. His propensity for pushing conservative misinformation is well-documented.
H/T: MMFA
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto dismissed the epidemic of sexual assault in the military, claiming that efforts to address the growing problem contributed to a “war on men” and an “effort to criminalize male sexuality.”
Taranto, a member of the Journal’s editorial board, dismissed these facts to claim that McCaskill’s effort to address the growing problem of sexual assault in the military was a “war on men” and a “political campaign” that showed “signs of becoming an effort to criminalize male sexuality.” He also claimed that the female lieutenant who reported that she had been assaulted acted just as “recklessly” as the accused attacker, apparently by doing nothing more than getting into the same vehicle as him.
But McCaskill is not trying to re-litigate the case; she is trying to determine why Helms ignored her legal advisers and overturned a jury of five Air Force officers. As the Post explained, advocacy groups charge that “any decision to overrule a jury’s verdict for no apparent reason has a powerful dampening effect,” contributing to a culture in which the majority of sexual assaults in the military remain unreported.
h/t: MMFA
Anti-choicers in Ireland are giving the prime minister hell because he’s supportive of liberalizing their incredibly harsh abortion ban. Enda Kenny reports, “I’m getting medals, scapulars, plastic fetuses, letters written in blood, telephone calls all over the system, and it’s not confined to me.” Man, Catholicism does weird shit to people’s brains. It’s funny that they call themselves “pro-life”, when their tactics—obsessing over blood, fetishizing surgical pictures, sending scalpels in the mail—seems much, much closer to the habits of a serial killer.
Which, actually, under the circumstances is totally appropriate, because this deluge of mail has nothing to do with “life”—fetal or otherwise—but is straightforward advocacy of murdering pregnant women through medical neglect.
Spurred by the international outrage surrounding the death of Savita Halpannavar — an Indian woman who died after being denied an emergency abortion in an Irish Catholic hospital — Kenny approved legislation in April that would allow women to access abortion services if their life is in danger. On Wednesday, Ireland’s ministers signed off on a completed form of the legislation, and the parliament hopes to enact it before adjourning in July.
But, even though Ireland’s amended abortion law is still incredibly harsh — it doesn’t include any exceptions for rape, incest, or fatal fetal defects, and women’s health advocates caution that it’s only an incredibly small step toward greater reproductive rights — the deeply conservative nation has erupted into controversy.
Because letting women live is controversial. If the vessel cannot bring forth the child, the vessel—who has no value outside of being a baby machine—needs to be tossed onto the trash. That said vessel is a human being with feelings, thoughts, and people who love her is no matter, apparently. I bet even veternarians in Ireland are allowed to abort a pet’s pregnancy if it’s a danger to the animal. That’s where women rank in the minds of anti-abortion fanatics.
h/t: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/14/irish-anti-choicers-furious-that-women-may-live/
In many states, it takes longer to get an abortion than it does to purchase a gun. Twenty-six states require women to wait for an abortion, usually 24 hours after an initial counseling session
(via winningprogressive)
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a national organization representing thousands of women’s health experts, has publicly come out against the state-level abortion restrictions that impact the way doctors are allowed to treat their patients. The group’s Executive Board has issued an official statement opposing all laws that “unduly interfere with patient-physician relationships” and compromise patients’ health care for political gain.
“Given the relentless legislative assault on the patient-physician relationship that we’ve seen in the past few years — and unfortunately continue to see — we were compelled to issue a formal Statement of Policy,” the group’s president, Dr. Jeanne A. Conry, explained in a press release. “A disproportionate number of these types of laws are aimed at women’s reproductive rights and the physicians that provide women’s health care services.”
In its formal statement, the doctors’ group criticized specific pieces of anti-abortion legislation that comes between women and their doctors — including forced ultrasound laws that require women seeking abortions to look at an image of their fetus before continuing with the medical procedure, “disclosure” laws that require doctors to tell women about the scientifically disputed link between abortion and breast cancer, and laws that require doctors to use an outdated procedure for administering the abortion pill.
The OB-GYNs point out that these type of laws allow legislators, instead of doctors, to set medical protocol. When doctors aren’t allowed to follow the current accepted medical practice because of a politically-motivated law, they aren’t able to provide their patients with the best quality of care. That dynamic has contributed to a serious shortage of women’s health doctors in states with harsh abortion restrictions, since medical professionals would rather avoid situations in which they may have to choose between providing their patients with the best health care and following a complicated state law.
“We are speaking out not just on behalf of OB-GYNs, but for all physicians and patients,” Dr. Conry noted. “Many of these laws are dangerous to patients’ health and safety. As physicians, we are obligated to offer the best evidence-based care to our patients. Government should stay out of imposing its political agenda on medical practice.”
This isn’t the first time that the College has weighed in on an area of women’s health that has become overly politicized by elected officials. Last fall, the group came out in support of improving women’s access to birth control by allowing them to buy it over the counter. It has repeatedly encouraged doctors to help reduce unintended pregnancies by providing teens with long-lasting contraception like IUDs. And, as the Obama Administration has continued to advocate imposing age restrictions on over-the-counter emergency contraception, OB-GYNs have reiterated that they don’t support preventing young teens from buying Plan B without a prescription.
(via stfuprolifers)
By several objective measures, Mississippi is one of our worst states. It has the nation’s highest poverty rate, its second-highest teen pregnancy rate, and its highest teen birth rate. An Education Week report ranks its schools 48 out of 50. Only Louisiana locks up a higher percentage of its people. Its infant mortality rate—9.67 deaths per 1,000 live births, the highest in the nation—is close to Botswana’s. Its life expectancy is the lowest in America and lower than those of Guatemala or Pakistan. Few states invest less in public education or public health. If it were an independent country, we’d consider it part of the Third World.
Not coincidentally, Mississippi is also one of our most conservative states, though in a recent Gallup poll, it slipped from first place to fourth. As iVillage reported last year in a piece on the country’s worst states for women—Mississippi came in first, or rather last—it’s one of only four states that has never sent a woman to Congress.
So we really shouldn’t be shocked that Mississippi’s governor, Phil Bryant, thinks America’s educational woes can be laid at the feet of working mothers. Speaking on a panel this week about how the country became so “mediocre” in education, he replied, “Both parents started working, and the mom is in the workplace.” His comments sparked national outrage and indignation, but they shouldn’t have surprised us. Of course arch-conservatives think social breakdown is caused by the abandonment of traditional gender roles. Of course they fail to recognize that excessive wingnuttery is decimating their societies. That’s why their answers to social breakdown are frequently so ridiculous.
Consider Mississippi’s brilliant new approach to fighting teen pregnancy. On Monday, NPR reported on a new Mississippi law mandating the collection of cord blood from babies born to girls under 16. The idea, apparently, is that DNA could identify fathers who have passed through the criminal justice system and who might be statutory rapists, hence discouraging older men from impregnating younger girls. “Too many of these young teens are becoming pregnant against their will,” Bryant said.
Given that Bryant was a co-chair of the failed campaign for a personhood law in Mississippi—which might have outlawed the birth control pill, the IUD, and the morning-after pill, as well as all abortion—it’s nice to know that he’s suddenly concerned about forced pregnancy. But this law, a gross invasion of girls’ privacy, will do nothing for the state’s teen pregnancy problem. For one thing, as NPR reports, “[r]oughly 65 percent of teenage pregnancies in the state occur between teens who are one or two years apart in age.” Besides, the law doesn’t lay out who will pay for all this DNA testing, or who will be in charge of prosecuting fathers if they find them. “[P]rosecutors would have to determine in which county conception had occurred before charges could be filed,” says NPR.
Then there’s the very real danger that this law will be used against the girls themselves. Right now, says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, two Mississippi women who have suffered stillbirths are being prosecuted under the state’s murder statutes because there were drugs in their systems when they lost their pregnancies. If every single teen mother has her cord blood on file, it would be easy for prosecutors to test it if their babies suffer expected medical problems. “If they’re collecting cord blood, it could be used just as easily against pregnant women,” says Paltrow. “She’s at much at risk of prosecution as the person who impregnated her.”
There are, of course, more sensible ways to address teen pregnancy, which has already fallen dramatically all over the country since the 1990s, even in Mississippi. Step one: increase access to birth control. “Recent research concluded that almost all of the decline in the pregnancy rate between 1995 and 2002 among 18–19-year-olds was attributable to increased contraceptive use,” a 2012 Guttmacher Institute report concluded. “Among women aged 15–17, about one-quarter of the decline during the same period was attributable to reduced sexual activity and three-quarters to increased contraceptive use.”
Naturally, Mississippi is doing nothing to promote increased contraceptive use. “When the governor of Mississippi is saying these teen births are a tragedy, he’s not doing anything to prevent the births,” says June Carbone, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota and co-author, with Naomi Cahn, of the forthcoming book Family Classes: What is Really Happening to the American Family. “He wants to punish the sex. That’s the whole campaign—no sex education, make abortion difficult, and say you have no business having sex.”
Not that more access to sex education and contraception would be enough to stem Mississippi’s dysfunction. “A promising future is the best contraceptive,” says Carbone. “If women see they have a promising future, they are less likely to get pregnant, less likely to have sex at 14 or 15.” That means investing in education overall, as well as in decent jobs that pay a living wage. You’re not going to see much of that with a governor like Phil Bryant, who will never grasp that more conservatism is the problem, not the solution.
Of COURSE the law will be used against the girls themselves.
(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)
Reproductive rights under threat in America as the War On Women gets worse.
- Think Progress Health, http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/06/13/2152801/2013-worst-year-reproductive-freedom/
Ohio Republicans are already attempting to hijack the state’s budget process to push for abortion restrictions, advancing a version of Gov. John Kasich’s budget bill that includes amendments to defund Planned Parenthood and shut down abortion clinics. But they’re not stopping there. Now, a group of 35 Republican lawmakers in the House have introduced an omnibus anti-abortion bill that combines some of the worst attacks on women’s reproductive health into a single measure.
It’s NOT Todd Akin.
Despite Republican strategists’ efforts to keep GOP politicians from making insensitive comments about rape victims, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) channeled former Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) infamous “legitimate rape” comment during a committee hearing on Wednesday. Defending his proposal to ban all abortions after 20 weeks with no exceptions for rape and incest, Franks claimed, “The incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.”
As the Washington Post reports, Franks went on to nonsensically argue, “But when you make that exception [allowing rape victims to get abortions], there’s usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case that’s impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation. And that’s what completely negates and vitiates the purpose of such an amendment.”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has thrown his support behind an anti-abortion measure that’s currently moving through the state legislature, saying he will sign the bill into law if it makes it to his desk. SB 206 would require women to undergo an ultrasound before getting an abortion — which would mandate an invasive transvaginal probe for some of the women who seek early abortions in their first trimester — and force one of the state’s last abortion clinics to close its doors.“I don’t have any problem with ultrasound,” Walker told reporters on Tuesday in Milwaukee. “I think most people think ultrasounds are just fine.”
Forced ultrasound bills mandate a medically unnecessary procedure that would otherwise be left up to the discretion of a woman and her doctor. Medical experts, including the largest national group representing thousands of OB-GYNs across the country, are opposed to this type of legislation because they say it interferes with their work and compromises their relationships with patients. “All of a sudden, the Senate is full of doctors,” Wisconsin Sen. Tim Cullen (D) said in reference to SB 206′s advancement.
And, even though the lawmakers who push for mandatory ultrasound measures sometimes deny it, these laws also require many women to undergo an invasive transvaginal probe. Before 12 weeks of pregnancy, a transvaginal ultrasound is the only way to detect a clear image— and, since the vast majority of women in the United States seek abortion services in their first trimester, those women must submit to an invasive probe in order to comply with these burdensome laws. Over the past year, reproductive rights advocates have repeatedly decried transvaginal ultrasound laws as “state sponsored rape.”
SB 206 doesn’t stop there. The proposed legislation also includes a provision that would impose additional restrictions on abortion clinics, which would ultimately force a Planned Parenthood clinic to shut down. Since there are only four health clinics in the entire state of Wisconsin that currently provide abortion care, SB 206 could end up severely limiting women’s reproductive access.
The anti-abortion measure was first introduced at the beginning of this month, and it has swiftly advanced in just over a week. Women’s health advocates are accusing the Wisconsin GOP of intentionally fast-tracking SB 206 so that its opponents won’t have enough time to mobilize against it. “This speed of passage sends a clear signal that these legislators want to deny any efforts to ensure due process and are refusing to allow sufficient time for medical providers, advocates, women and their partners to truly weigh in on the anticipated damaging effects of this legislation,” Sara Finger, the executive director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health, said in a statement. Finger had less than 24 hours to analyze the legislation before testifying against it.
Walker is expected to follow through on his word to sign SB 206. Throughout his time in office, the GOP governor has approved several attacks on women’s health. Last year, Walker signed three different bills into law to limit abortion access and expand abstinence-only education. And his recent budget stripped family planning funding away from Planned Parenthood, forcing the women’s health organization to close force of its clinics in rural Wisconsin.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is encouraging her colleagues in the House GOP to once again attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, even though in the last election 59% of voters said they were pro-choice and 53% opposed efforts to defund the women’s health organization. But not according to Blackburn, who told Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council yesterday that “the majority of the American people,” and “the majority of American women,” oppose abortion rights and Planned Parenthood funding.
Blackburn claimed that Planned Parenthood “outsources” cancer screenings and birth control services and uses federal money “to subsidize the abortion services,” while Perkins worried that the government was creating a “feeder system for the abortion business” by naming it as a “resource” for women.
Contrary to their assertions, the government is banned from funding abortion services (which represent just 3% of Planned Parenthood services) and the dollars are not fungible.
h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW
Fox News host Andrea Tantaros claimed that Susan Rice was appointed National Security Advisor only because she is a woman and could be used as a “human shield” by President Obama, continuing her pattern of launching sexist attacks against progressive and other women with whom she disagrees.
In an interview with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council today, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) said he is confident that his bill banning abortion after 20 weeks will “pass with strong margins in the House of Representatives,” and warned that the US is doomed if the country doesn’t totally abolish abortion rights.
Even though the recriminalization of abortion would surely drive more women to dangerous, back-alley abortion clinics like Kermit Gosnell’s, Franks told Perkins that abortion rights proponents want the country to “embrace the evil that Dr. Gosnell has displayed to all of us” and “send America over the brink.”
He went on to argue that President Obama, whom he once called an “enemy of humanity,” will “go down in history as the abortion president” and that his opposition to abortion bans will “shame” his administration.
Bryan Fischer has a pretty simple solution for solving the problem of sexual assault in the military: ban women and gays.
On his radio program today, Fischer said that the purpose of public policy is to construct barriers to engagement in sinful behavior and so it makes no sense to allow women to serve in the military where they come into close contact with members of the opposite sex .
Fischer then went on to call for gays to likewise be banned from the military, and did so by misrepresenting an op-ed from the New York Times to claim that 90% of the sexual assaults in the military are “being committed by serial homosexual rapists.”
