If Californians would like to see an end to the extreme drought the state is facing, they should consider passing more restrictions on abortion. That, at least, was the suggestion of a California assemblywomen in remarks to anti-abortion activists last week.
"Texas was in a long period of drought until Governor Perry signed the fetal pain bill,” state Assemblywoman Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield) said, as reported by RH Reality Check. "It rained that night. Now God has His hold on California."
Question: What is the difference between a woman who wants an abortion after accidentally becoming pregnant with her boyfriend and a woman who wants an abortion after becoming pregnant through rape? Answer: The first woman voluntarily chose to have sex while the second woman didn’t.
In other words, people who want to see abortion banned but want to keep a rape exemption care very much whether a woman chooses to have sex or not. A woman who chooses to have sex should be required to deal with the “consequences,” i.e. pregnancy, birth, and child rearing. But a woman who becomes pregnant after being raped? Well, she didn’t choose to have sex so she shouldn’t have to deal with the “consequences.” In other words, if someone allows for a rape exemption, their opposition to abortion is not about “saving babies” but rather about making sure women who voluntarily choose to have sex and then become pregnant have to deal with the “consequences” of their decision to have sex.
It is likely that there are some people who believe abortion is murder but also support rape exemptions simply because they haven’t thought through the consistency of their position. They believe abortion is murder, but it seems instinctively wrong to force a woman who never chose to have sex in the first place but was instead forced against her will to carry and bear her rapist’s baby.
I wish politicians would figure out how to run the country rather than trying to run my uterus.
To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.
Because the ultrasound used at such an early stage is what they call a "transvaginal ultrasound" (i.e. they insert the device into the vaginal canal). Which is to say, it's an invasive procedure that could be quite traumatic for, say, a rape survivor. Unless there's an actual medical need for it, it's essentially just being used as a kind of punishment. It has nothing to do with showing "a baby" because what you'd see, in the average abortion, is something like this.
Newt Gingrich has moved quickly to repair any potential fallout from his remarks last Friday to ABC's Jake Tapper in which he said that life begins at the "successful implantation" of a fertilized egg, rather than at conception.
That is heresy to the pro-life movement, and had the potential to complicate Gingrich's rise in the Republican presidential polls, especially in crucial states like Iowa and South Carolina, whose early caucuses and primary are dominated by conservative Christian voters.
"As I have stated many times throughout the course of my public life, I believe that human life begins at conception," Gingrich said in a statement posted Saturday on his campaign's website and sent to Joshua Mercer at CatholicVote.org, a conservative political site that had first called attention to -- and sharply criticized -- Gingrich's statement.
Too bad Newt is not a woman. Then he could walk his talk. For instance, if he happened to get a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, he could just let himself die rather than have the fertilized egg removed. But even as a man he could start a giant movement to have all those frozen fertilized eggs in fertility clinics implanted in forced birthers.
I was taking an afternoon nap when the hemorrhaging started while my toddler napped in his room when I woke up to find blood gushing upward from my body. Though I didn't know it at the time, I was experiencing a placental abruption, a complication my doctor had told me was a possibility. My husband was at work, so I had to do my best to take care of me and my toddler on my own. I managed to get to the phone and make arrangements for both of my children before going to a Chicago hospital.
Everyone knew the pregnancy wasn't viable, that it couldn't be viable given the amount of blood I was losing, but it still took hours for anyone at the hospital to do anything. The doctor on call didn't do abortions. At all. Ever. In fact, no one on call that night did.
My two kids at home almost lost their mother because someone decided that my life was worth less than that of a fetus that was going to die anyway.
The story also highlights the subversive strategy the right wing has followed: there is now a serious dearth of doctors trained to do abortions, so when a necessary abortion case shows up in an emergency, you've got a muddle of the self-righteous and the ignorant, all incompetent to do anything, milling about with their thumbs up their asses. She might as well have stumbled bleeding into a church and asked for help...which is exactly what the Coathanger Coalition wants them to do.
Imagine if someone showed up in an emergency room having a heart attack, and for religious reasons, no one had any training in using a defibrillator, and the only one available was in an underfunded clinic across town. That's the direction we're going, only we're suppressing information and skills that would help just women's lives. Which makes it OK, I guess. No men will die of a placental abruption, so it's a low priority.
Human embryos are examples of human life. Therefore, by absolutist religious lights, abortion is simply wrong: fully fledged murder. I am not sure what to make of my admittedly anecdotal observation that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life....
