In Godless We Trust

When States Abuse Women

HERE’S what a woman in Texas now faces if she seeks an abortion.

Under a new lawthat took effect three weeks ago with the strong backing of Gov. Rick Perry, she first must typically endure an ultrasound probe inserted into her vagina. Then she listens to the audio thumping of the fetal heartbeat and watches the fetus on an ultrasound screen.

She must listen to a doctor explain the body parts and internal organs of the fetus as they’re shown on the monitor. She signs a document saying that she understands all this, and it is placed in her medical files. Finally, she goes home and must wait 24 hours before returning to get the abortion.

“It’s state-sanctioned abuse,” said Dr. Curtis Boyd, a Texas physician who provides abortions. “It borders on a definition of rape. Many states describe rape as putting any object into an orifice against a person’s will. Well, that’s what this is. A woman is coerced to do this, just as I’m coerced.”

“The state of Texas is waging war on women and their families,” Dr. Boyd added. “The new law is demeaning and disrespectful to the women of Texas, and insulting to the doctors and nurses who care for them.”

That law is part of a war over women’s health being fought around the country — and in much of the country, women are losing. State by state, legislatures are creating new obstacles to abortions and are treating women in ways that are patronizing and humiliating.

Twenty states now require abortion providers to conduct ultrasounds first in some situations, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization. The new Texas law is the most extreme to take effect so far, but similar laws have been passed in North Carolina and Oklahoma and are on hold pending legal battles.

Alabama, Kentucky, Rhode Island and Mississippi are also considering Texas-style legislation bordering on state-sanctioned rape. And what else do you call it when states mandate invasive probes in women’s bodies?

“If you look up the term rape, that’s what it is: the penetration of the vagina without the woman’s consent,” said Linda Coleman, an Alabama state senator who is fighting the proposal in her state. “As a woman, I am livid and outraged.”

States put in place a record number of new restrictions on abortions last year, Guttmacher says. It counts 92 new curbs in 24 states.

“It was a debacle,” Elizabeth Nash, who manages state issues for Guttmacher, told me. “It’s been awful. Last year was unbelievable. We’ve never seen anything like it.”

Yes, there have been a few victories for women. The notorious Virginia proposal that would have required vaginal ultrasounds before an abortion was modified to require only abdominal ultrasounds.

Yet over all, the pattern has been retrograde: humiliating obstacles to abortions, cuts in family-planning programs, and limits on comprehensive sex education in schools.

If Texas legislators wanted to reduce abortions, the obvious approach would be to reduce unwanted pregnancies. The small proportion of women and girls who aren’t using contraceptives account for half of all abortions in America, according to Guttmacher. Yet Texas has some of the weakest sex-education programs in the nation, and last year it cut spending for family planning by 66 percent.

The new Texas law was passed last year but was held up because of a lawsuit by the Center for Reproductive Rights. In a scathing opinion, Judge Sam Sparks of Federal District Court described the law as “an attempt by the Texas legislature to discourage women from exercising their constitutional rights.” In the end, the courts upheld the law, and it took effect last month.

It requires abortion providers to give women a list of crisis pregnancy centers where, in theory, they can get unbiased counseling and in some cases ultrasounds. In fact, these centers are often set up to ensnare pregnant women and shame them or hound them if they are considering abortions.

“They are traps for women, set up by the state of Texas,” Dr. Boyd said.

The law then requires the physician to go over a politicized list of so-called dangers of abortion, like “the risks of infection and hemorrhage” and “the possibility of increased risk of breast cancer.” Then there is the mandated ultrasound, which in the first trimester normally means a vaginal ultrasound. Doctors sometimes seek vaginal ultrasounds before an abortion, with the patient’s consent, but it’s different when the state forces women to undergo the procedure.

The best formulation on this topic was Bill Clinton’s, that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Achieving that isn’t easy, and there is no silver bullet to reduce unwanted pregnancies. But family planning and comprehensive sex education are a surer path than demeaning  vulnerable women with state-sanctioned abuse and humiliation.

The New York Times

This is seriously one of the most disgusting articles I’ve read recently.

~Mooglets

North Carolina GOP Lawmaker Calls For Bringing Back Public Hangings, Starting With Abortion Providers

The last legal public hanging in America took place in 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky. The “event” attracted 20,000 people and turned into such a sickening spectacle that many credit it with ending the practice in the U.S.

But one North Carolina Republican believes that as a country we’ve grown soft since banning public hangings and is calling for them to reinstated as a deterrent to crime. If Rep. Larry Pittman had his way, “abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers” would be first in line for the gallows:

Republican Rep. Larry Pittman, who was appointed to the District 82 House seat in October, expressed his views in an email sent Wednesday to every member of the General Assembly. […]

“We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner,” Pittman wrote in the email. “If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.”

As ThinkProgress reported, last year Republicans in South Carolina, Nebraska, and Iowa pushed legislation that would essentially legalize the murder of abortion providers. Such radical sentiments have been echoed by prominent conservatives like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who said during his 2004 campaign, “I favor the death penalty for abortionists.”

ThinkProgress

Dude, because providing an abortion to someone who really needs it, is exactly the same as taking someone’s life or freedom. 

And I’m not even going to comment on the whole public corporal punishment thing.

I just hope this guy doesn’t actually get any real power.

~Mooglets

Catholic Group Battles Government Over Right To Deny Birth Control & Abortions To Trafficking Victims

Once again Republicans are accusing the Obama administration of religious discrimination because they believe “freedom of religion” means that they should have the freedom to impose their religious beliefs on every American. Sadly this time they’re toying with the health of one of the most vulnerable groups imaginable: the victims of human trafficking.

The Washington Post reports that in September, the Department of Health and Human Services denied a grant to U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has been providing services to human trafficking victims nationwide since 2006. Though the organization got high marks from an independent review board, it refuses to refer women for contraceptives or abortion, so HHS officials decided to give the money to three groups that do. Now more than 30 Republican lawmakers have sent letters to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius complaining that the move was unfair and possibly discriminatory.

Rep. Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey says, “We’re talking about a Catholic group with a superior track record that was pushed aside to promote the abortion agenda.” Women shouldn’t be denied any health information (after all, Republicans are all about “informed consent”), but in an attempt to rile up pro-lifers, Smith conveniently forgot to mention the Catholic organization’s most egregious act. It won’t even provide information about where one can obtain birth control, though most Americans (and Catholics) are in favor of using contraception.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops isn’t legally obligated to provide these services or refer people to other family planning organizations, but it can’t demand that the government provide grants for a program that’s lacking basic features. Richard Sorian, HHS’s assistant secretary for public affairs, says:

“[The agency is] fully confident that the organizations best suited to provide comprehensive case management to victims of trafficking were awarded the grants for these services … The health and ability of these victims to retake control over their own lives is our sole concern in awarding these grants.”

Since the mid-’90s, Catholic groups have received more than $800 million in funding for social services from HHS. While Republicans can only see the issue as part of the neverending political battle over abortion, this isn’t a plot by HHS officials to score a victory for President Obama’s alleged fetus-killing campaign. Pro-life lawmakers may be confused because they aren’t all that interested in women making their own health decisions, but government officials are mainly trying to do what’s in the best interest of women who’ve been horribly victimized.

From Jezebel

I have no words to describe what I am feeling.

So I shall post this comment posted on the article: 

Any group that truly believes that it is acceptable to deny contraceptives, abortion access, or information about either of the above to victims of horrible amounts of sexual abuse has absolutely NO moral authority. 

~Mooglets

Abortion advice from Nadine Dorries is classic backstreet politics: The campaign to put abortion counselling in the hands of faith-based groups is grubby and mendacious

There are two main problems with Nadine Dorries’s amendment to the health and social care bill: the first is that it looks innocuous. Who could object to independent counselling for women seeking abortions? It sounds so generous and caring, like getting free dental work when you’re pregnant. The second problem is that any discussion of the abortion amendment risks drawing fire away from the rest of the bill, which desecrates the NHS. There is no answer to that, apart from to carry on protesting against the whole thing. But back to Dorries’s amendment: it is not innocuous. The fact that it looks that way is critical to how dangerous it is.

The exact wording is this: the government should provide “independent information, advice and counselling services for women requesting termination of pregnancy to the extent that the consortium considers they will choose to use them”. “Independent” is defined as “a private body that does not itself provide for the termination of pregnancies or a statutory body”.

In other words, GPs decide how much counselling to provide, and it can be provided by anyone except those performing the abortion. There is no requirement that “independent” mean “not faith-based”: we’d have to rely on the discretion of the Department of Health to keep out groups such as CareConfidential, whose “counselling” consists of misinformation aimed at discouraging women from having abortions.

The ethics of allowing faith-based groups to have a central role in healthcare provision have been well rehearsed: there’s an interesting tangential point, here, when you look at the other work undertaken by charities lining up to do abortion counselling. Groups such as New Frontiers (a church run by David Stroud, husband of Iain Duncan Smith’s special adviser, Philippa) have a number of “social action projects”, including crisis pregnancy and post-abortion counselling, parenting lessons and helping ex-offenders. Women with unwanted pregnancies are recast, in this parlance, as another “vulnerable” group. “Vulnerable”, by the way, is just Tory for “you’re a big social problem, but we don’t judge” – so a family on the breadline is “vulnerable” and so is a prostitute; a Muslim student who tutors think might turn extremist is “vulnerable”, and so is an ex-con. What the implications are of this new terminology is a conversation to have another day, but it will surprise any woman who’s been accidentally pregnant to find that, by dint of her fertility, she’s joined the ranks of vulnerability.

But right now none of that is the problem: the problem is that this amendment expressly removes the right of organisations such as Marie Stopes and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service to impart information. Immediately, then, the process of getting an abortion is disrupted. If you can’t get information from the provider, you have to go elsewhere: that “elsewhere” is at your GP’s discretion. You might find that New Frontiers is the only place to go. Or you might find that there’s just a leaflet.

So let’s go back to why Dorries objects to the BPAS’s advice. She claims they are salesmen, motivated by profit to encourage abortions. I have a grudging admiration for the way she takes a classic leftwing argument – don’t trust the suits, they’re in it for themselves – and uses it against the classically leftwing constituency of pro-choicers. But this joke isn’t funny any more: BPAS is a charity. There is no profit motive.

Dorries reserves particular anger for the consultation process at BPAS, which she described to me when I interviewed her recently: “When you go in for an abortion, you’re counselled in this room which has no end of soft-marketing techniques around you, you are told, don’t worry, three out of four women have had this at your age. That’s like going into an off-licence and saying ‘Is this wine nice?’, and them saying, ‘Well, we sell a lot of it’.”

That figure is wrong: it’s one in three. The phraseology is wrong: they don’t have a little chart to tell them what proportion of women have had an abortion and in which age group. The description is wrong – soft marketing techniques? It’s just a room with some chairs. Just by having had an abortion, I already know infinitely more that either Dorries or theLabour MP Frank Field, neither of whom have ever contacted BPAS to ask about its consultation process or look around a clinic. They have no evidence of biased advice, but Field dismissed that point this week with this unbelievable analogy: “We had no evidence of mis-selling of pensions until people investigated.” Never mind that: out of the blue he wants us to judge a charity by the same standards as a dishonest financial corporation. If he does think this should be investigated, why not investigate? Why just remove the advice function from abortion clinics on grounds that you’ve got no evidence for and you haven’t examined in the slightest?

Dorries says that she is pro-choice, but wants to see the time limit brought down. Her amendment would of course necessarily delay the process. More to the point, in 2000 40% of abortions performed by BPAS were at under 10 weeks. In 2010, that figure was 75%. They modestly put this down to Poundland starting to sell cheaper pregnancy tests, but it is also down to their excellent standards of care. In other words, if you are an MP who holds the same views as Dorries and Field – you are pro-choice, but want to see the gestational age of aborted foetuses brought down – then two main organisations meeting that aim are, by design, BPAS; and, by accident, Poundland.

There is a second amendment that also sounds innocuous: to remove responsibility for abortion guidelines from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and give it to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. Again, the aim is to discredit the Royal College committee that does the guidelines. “They’re all abortionists! They all earn their livings from abortions,” Dorries told me.

Every line – from the pro-choice intent and the slurs against BPAS and the RCOG, to the fake “independence” of the bodies waiting to take on this counselling – every element of these two amendments is mendacious. MPs who are pro-choice should be fighting harder, if not for women, then for their own credibility. Even MPs who are anti-abortion should consider if they can, in conscience, support an argument that has been so dishonestly made. To my mind, this is more dangerous to parliamentary process, and the reputation of politicians, than it is to women’s reproductive health. It’s grubby and it’s secretive: it’s backstreet politics.

From the Guardian newspaper by Zoe Williams

UK Parliament, I am dissapoint. Seriously. I’ve so far not needed an abortion, but to put it bluntly, I would rather slap a ‘religious councilor’ than listen to their stupid fucking religious based entreaties for me to keep the damn pregnancy. I can’t believe Dorries is even getting away with this. Ugh.

~Mooglets

When a child is aborted.

jamesisnotpoliticallycorrect:

That child is not sad.
That child is not angry.
That child is not wondering what kind of live he could’ve lived.
That child does not think, “Mother, why did you not love me?”
That child is not thinking at all.

The only people it immediately affects, are the parents.
It’s their decision, no one else’s.

Not the government.

Not yours.

And not your God’s.