KY Repugs Start By Killing Women and Workers

They've finally got the all-repug majority they need to destroy the Commonwealth, and they're starting with women and workers.

Tom Loftus at the Courier:

FRANKFORT, Ky. — Republicans in total control of the 2017 Kentucky General Assembly wasted no time Tuesday in moving conservative priority bills, including two measures to restrict a woman's ability to get an abortion.

SNIP

A new Senate bill would ban abortions for women after the 20th week of pregnancy, according to Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester.

Stivers told reporters that a mother has a "choice early on to make a decision to conceive or not conceive. But once conception starts, there becomes another life involved. And the legislature has its ability to control how that life may proceed or how it would be terminated."

He said he expects the bill to move through committee and be passed by an overwhelming majority on the Senate floor later this week.

Stivers is a lying piece of shit.  Women have no choice about conception when Stivers and his repugs close down Planned Parenthood clinics and make it impossible for Kentucky women to obtain birth control.  And no, blastocysts are not people, babies, children or anything other than a clump of cells as "human" as a cancerous tumor. Also, totally unconstitutional.

Amber Duke, communications director for the ACLU of Kentucky, said, "It's unfortunate after weeks of lawmakers promising business would be their top priority and social issues wouldn't be on the front burner that within hours of gaveling in we see two anti-abortion bills that seem to be on the fast track."

SNIP

The bill applies fines and suspensions to doctors for violating the ban but no penalty to the pregnant woman.

Duke said the ACLU is particularly concerned about the bill banning abortion after the 20th week of pregnancy. "Legislation about bans like this pose a serious threat because they ignore women's health needs in individual circumstances," she said. "We believe that women deserve dignity and should have the right to make personal and private medical decisions without interference from politicians."

Restrictions on legal and safe abortions do not reduce the number of abortions by a single one.  All they do is force women in desperation to seek out an illegal and unsafe abortion, which frequently ends up killing an actual, adult, living and breathing human being.

Hoover was more confident that two measures Republicans have sought for years but have been blocked when the House was controlled by Democrats will be passed by the full House later this week.

Those are the so-called right-to-work bill, which would ban membership in a union or payment of union dues as a condition for employment, and a repeal of a requirement that a regional prevailing wage be paid to construction workers on public construction projects.

SNIP

Also Tuesday, the Senate referred for committee consideration a bill Stivers sponsored that he said would require workers "to affirmatively opt in" to having union dues withheld from paychecks rather than the current practice where a worker must act to opt out of having an employer withhold dues.

But Bill Londrigan, president of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO, disagreed.

"They are pursuing a policy to penalize unions," Londrigan said. "It's a low road to economic development that will actually end up costing all Kentucky workers in the form of lower wages."