The Next Bargaining Chip: Women's Lives

If you think this White House will stop the blastocyst-worshippers from mandating forced pregnancy, you've already forgotten how the president betrayed women with the Stupak amendment and worse.

From Digby:

Katha Pollitt draws attention to the startling fact that at least 53 of the new House members and five new Senators are hardcore anti-choice zealots and makes the important observation that all this blather about the GOP keeping the abortion issue roiling for cynical political purposes is just that: blather. The anti-choice zealots will be hard at work whittling away a woman's right to own her own body at the state level, while the GOP Congress will do its part to roll back whatever they can. And at some point, the movement is going to demand that their efforts to pack the court with wingnuts are rewarded with a reversal of Roe. They will get their case.

SNIP

... the administration tightened the rules for the sickest women far beyond even the Stupak compromise in the face of the forced pregnancy lobby's indecent mendacity. These cruel fetus worshipers actually want women who are battling terrible diseases to go through impossible hoops rather than have their sacred tax dollars touch dollars that paid for a necessary abortion. It's sick.

SNIP

Pollitt gives a list of the likely anti-choice efforts from the GOP House:

§  Reinstate the global gag rule, lifted by President Obama on his first day in office, which bars recipients of US foreign aid from so much as mentioning abortion in their work, and make it permanent.

§ Pass the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, a k a Stupak on Steroids.

SNIP

§  Pass the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act, which would ban federal funds for any organization that performs abortions or funds organizations that do so.

SNIP

§ Beef up so-called conscience protections for healthcare personnel and hospitals.

§ Ban Washington, DC, from using its own money to pay for abortions for poor women.

§ Revisit healthcare reform to tighten provisions barring coverage for abortion care.

§ Preserve the ban on abortions in military hospitals.

Note that the official theme here is not the banning of abortion but freeing the taxpayer from having to pay for it, however tenuous the connection.

One would like to believe that our nominally Democratic majority in the Senate will not advance any of this legislation and if they do our allegedly pro-choice president will veto it. But I fully expect that abortion will be on the able as a bargaining chip when the Democrats try to fashion compromises on economic matters --- women will be asked to give once again so that the Teabaggers can be appeased with something that isn't vitally important to the people. (Well, except the women, but they hardly qualify.)

The problem, of course, is that the anti-choice Tea Partiers will never be appeased, so nothing will be gained by it. But a lot could be lost.

Read the whole thing.

No one under 50 remembers the horrors of the pre-Roe world, although the freakazoids have come damn close to reproducing it in far too many states.

And do not forget that forced pregnancy is their literal goal: after banning abortion, they intend to outlaw contraceptives.