Matt Bevin: Women Are Sub-Human Incubators

Because that's what you really mean when you deny women bodily autonomy.  When you insist that they endure forced birth.  When you mandate that their doctors rape them with foreign objects.  Not Missouri: Kentucky.

From the Propaganda Office (corrections in italics):

Gov. Matt Bevin's legal team this week fuiled a response opposing EMW Women's Surgical Center's petition for rehearing in a recent federal court case that resulted in a major pro-life anti-woman victory for the Commonwealth woman-hating freakazoids.

In contrast, Attorney General Andy Beshear refused to say anything in defense of the law, arguing simply that he should not have to be involved refused to defend a blatantly un-constitutional law that violates women's 14th Amendment rights to equal protection under the law, and women's human rights to bodily autonomy.

In April, the anti-woman freakazoids on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the constitutionality of House Bill 2 (2017). HB 2 requires an abortion provider to provide mothers with an ultrasound and a description of what it depicts, as well as the opportunity to hear the fetal heartbeat, before she chooses to terminate her pregnancy. force a hard plastic untrasound wand into a woman's body against her will.


The Louisville abortion clinic is asking the Court to rehear the case en banc (before the entire bench) in a desperate attempt to undermine the Kentucky law, which passed with the support of more than 87 percent of state legislators. courageous move to protect the last place in the entire Commonwealth where women can receive health care that respects them as women and as human beings.

The Americans who respect a woman's bodily autonomy - consistently 60 to 80 percent of the population - are going to have to stop pretending that there is some kind of compromise or middle ground with the wingnut freakazoids on the issue of female bodily autonomy.

To do that, we are going to have to stop mealy-mouthing on abortion and start saying - no, screaming - flat out that:

• The multi-celled object that grows inside a uterus is not a baby, a child, a precious or unborn anything.  Until it can breathe air outside the uterus, it most closely resembles a tumor.
  
• Until it does breathe air outside the uterus, it is, indeed, a part of the woman's body.
   
• Like a tumor, it steals food and energy from the woman's body, weakening and debilitating her, and subjecting her to high risk of injury and death if she undergoes forced birth.
  
• Only the woman is qualified to decide whether to take that risk or quickly,  easily and safely remove the tumor.
  
• Therefore, abortion is nobody's fucking business.
  
• Women will not have civil or human rights in this country until we have Abortion on Demand.
  
• That means no restrictions, no bullshit requirements, no questions asked.
  
• That means federally-funded abortion clinics on every fucking street corner in America and fuck you if you don't like it, it's none of your fucking business.

They're not coming for just Roe vs. Wade.  Griswold vs. Connecticut (right to contraception) is just a stepping stone.  They're gonna steamroll over Brown vs. Board (unsegretated schools.) They won't be satisfied until they've repealed the Equal Protection of the 14th Amendment.

Because only then will only rich, white, straight, conservative, christian, republican men have any rights in the country that won't be America any more.

Roe Ended a Genuine Holocaust

Well of course the first and more important item on the agenda of the new repug majorities in the states is saving women from the horrors of legal abortion slapping the bitches back to the kitchen.

Applying our standard rule that reality is precisely the opposite of what repugs claim it is, we should find that legal abortion in fact save women's lives.

Yep, that's exactly what it does. 

Dr. David Grimes, who has been providing abortion care for four decades, is worried that the time period before abortion was legalized in the United States is becoming a distant memory.

“I’m 67 now, and people younger than me don’t remember what the bad old days were like. That’s why people seem so complacent about allowing those days to return,” he said in an interview with ThinkProgress.

Grimes, who currently works as a clinical professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, was in his final year of medical school when Roe v. Wade was handed down. When he was a young doctor, he treated some of the women who were injured by the unsafe abortions that were still being performed in the 1970s.

People younger than me don’t remember what the bad old days were like.

He still remembers some of the extreme cases he encountered. One patient, for example, was running a 106 degree fever after having a rubber catheter inserted in her uterus in an attempt to terminate a pregnancy. Another arrived at the hospital in a state of antiseptic shock with a dead fetus inside of her.

In his new book — entitled Every Third Woman in America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation — Grimes returns to those days. And he uses the stories from that time period to argue that medical historians will put legal abortion on par with antibiotics, vaccinations, and modern contraception as one of the most meaningful advances of the 20th century.

SNIP

In the decade when Grimes was born, the 1940s, there were records of more than 1,000 women dying each year from unsafe and largely self-induced abortions. Every large municipal hospital in the U.S. had a “septic abortion ward,” and treatment for the complications from so-called “incomplete abortion” was the single leading cause for admission for OB-GYN services across the country. National Opinion Research Center surveys conducted in the 1960s found that hundreds of women were attempting to self-abort by penetrating themselves with knitting needles, coat hangers, bicycle spokes, ballpoint pens; others tried to swallow chemicals like turpentine, laundry bleach, and acid.

“When the laws began to change, almost overnight, deaths from septic abortion disappeared,” he told ThinkProgress. “Any way you look at it, abortion has been an astounding public health success.”

SNIP

The current juggernaut of laws are designed to drive women back into the back alley.

“An entire generation of Americans has grown up expecting safe and legal abortion to be there, and it may not be — as we’ve seen with this recent skirmish in Texas,” Grimes said. “The current juggernaut of laws are designed to drive women back into the back alley. But people don’t really understand what the implications are.”

First Step to Abortion on Demand: Overturn Hyde

The fact is that rich women - virtually all-white - have always been able to get abortions. Because if you have the money, you can always find a doctor who will do what you want, laws be damned.

So "legalizing" abortion is really "making available to the vast majority of women" abortion.

Which is why the denial of abortion rights and the murder of Roe v. Wade really started with the Hyde Amendment. Just three years after Roe, Hyde denied medical insurance coverage to women seeking reproductive care that was none of Congress' fucking business.

Dani McClain at The Nation:

On a sunny Wednesday afternoon in August, the All Above All tour bus parked in a busy plaza in the heart of downtown Oakland, California. Around it, activists and advocates milled about handing out literature, collecting petition signatures and attempting to build the ranks of people fighting to secure access to abortion for low-income women.

The bus, which began its national tour in Los Angeles this month, and the coalition behind it are part of the latest effort to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which for nearly four decades has banned the use of federal funds for abortion and limited the options available women who depend on Medicaid for their healthcare coverage.

The ban’s real intent—reversing Roe v. Wade to the greatest extent possible—has been clear from the beginning. After the budget amendment’s passage in 1976, Republican Representative Henry Hyde said, “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman. Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the…Medicaid bill.”

Advocates for poor women and women of color have been trying to repeal the Hyde Amendment ever since, arguing that a person’s income level shouldn’t dictate her decision whether to become a parent. Currently, about 9 million women of reproductive age are Medicaid beneficiaries, and advocates use that number to quantify how many are denied access to abortion. Using a bus tour with stops in cities including Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, DC, and a social media campaign, the fifty-plus organizations that make up the coalition want to push a conversation about Hyde into mainstream conversations about abortion rights and eventually into the halls of Congress.

Legislative pushes for repeal have failed in the past, since even Democrats who are otherwise in favor of abortion rights have been unwilling to challenge anti-choice framing that’s put “taxpayer-funded abortion” out of bounds. That’s why a central goal this campaign is to mobilize elected officials who lead on issues of choice but who rarely talk about the need to repeal Hyde, Kalpana Krishnamurthy, policy director at a supporting organization called Forward Together, told me.

“The Hyde Amendment has never been a rigorous part of the pro-choice agenda,” Krishnamurthy said. “We want to make sure that our friends and allies know that it’s a new day and it’s time to take this on.”

Yes, of course it's a huge lift; against the fucking repugs what piece of humane legislation isn't?  But it's way past time to stop slinking away in the face of freakazoid insanity and fight back.

It’s time for legislators to start talking about the exclusion that low-income families have faced for decades, Dreyfus-Pai said. “Roe does not mean as much with Hyde in place.”

 Fuck. Female citizenship and basic humanity don't mean anything with Hyde in place.

"Roe is Here For Good"

From Cecile Richards at Planned Parenthood:

It's been 40 years since Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in this country.

Forty years of protecting every woman's fundamental right to make the most personal medical decisions.

Forty years of ensuring that abortion remains a safe and legal procedure for a woman to consider, if she needs it.

And, it's been 40 years of facing a vocal minority of politicians and others who continue to insist on interfering with a woman's decisions about her own health.

That's why, as the 40th anniversary approaches on Tuesday, those of us who trust women, who value their health and rights, have something to say — Roe is here for good.

Roe is here for the good it has done for our mothers and grandmothers, and every woman who fought for the right to make her own health care decisions. We will not give up what they fought so hard and suffered so long to achieve.

Roe is here for the good it does me and women nationwide. We won't allow a small band of politicians and out-of-touch activists to interfere with a woman's personal health care decisions. We won't allow lawmakers to stand between women and their doctors.

Roe is here for the good of our daughters, who deserve to live in a world that respects their decisions and their rights. They are counting on us to protect their health, to move forward and never turn back. We won't return them to the world that generations of women before them left behind. We will secure their right to make their own decisions today, so they don't have to fight for them tomorrow.

Scott Lemiuex at Lawyers, Guns and Money refutes Five Myths of Roe v. Wade. This is the one that makes me craziest:

Roe is only a rich woman’s right. This critique from the left actually has a plausible basis and a limited amount of truth.   Since the Supreme Court has narrowly upheld the constitutionality of the Hyde Amendment and the regulations upheld by Casey disproportionately burden poor women,  the current legal regime protects abortion access for poor women much less than it should.   But even as diluted by Republican-dominated courts, Roe matters to poor women most of all. Affluent women, who will generally either have the connections to obtain gray market abortions or the resources to travel to a jurisdiction where abortion is legal, are likely to have reasonable access to abortion under any plausible legal regime.   To women who lack these advantages, Roe matters substantially, even though both courts and legislatures should be doing more to protect abortion access for poor women.  (Amanda has more on this general point.)

Because Incubators Have No Rights

Abortion is as old as conception.  What was new about Roe v. Wade was codifying in constitutional law a woman's control over her own body, including a non-viable fetus.

So reversing that autonomous control means reversing the primacy of the adult woman over the non-viable fetus.

Thus the lie not only that a fetus - a zygote, a blastocyst, a single fertilized cell - has an independent life, but that the "life" of an undifferentiated clump of cells takes precedence over the life of the adult woman who gestates it.

From that lie, forced pregnancy is the logical next step. And not just forced pregnancy, but shackling and imprisonment for any woman who dares to put her own health and life ahead of a fetus'.

Karen McVeigh at The Guardian: 

Hundreds of women have been arrested, convicted, jailed, detained in mental institutions or forced to endure medical procedures as a result of the "criminalisation of pregnancy" over the last four decades, a new report has found.

In the first study of its kind, to be published on Tuesday, researchers from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) identified 413 criminal and civil cases across 44 states involving the arrests, detentions and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women's liberty between 1973 and 2005. NAWP said that it is aware of a further 250 cases since 2005. Both figures are likely to be underestimates, it said.

The report, which will appear in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, found that women were denied a wide range of basic human rights, including the right to life, liberty, equal protection and due process of law "based solely on their pregnancy status".

It found a wide range of cases in which pregnant women were arrested and detained not only if they ended a pregnancy or expressed an intention to end a pregnancy, but also after suffering unintentional pregnancy loss.

The cases of detention and forced medical intervention varied widely and included one in which a judge in Ohio kept a woman imprisoned to prevent her having an abortion.

Another involved a woman in Oregon who refused a doctor's recommendation for additional testing for gestational diabetes. She was held in a locked psychiatric ward. Another case involved a court in Washington DC, which ordered a critically ill woman to undergo caesarian section over her objections. Neither she nor the baby survived.

Lynn Paltrow, executive director of NAPW and lead author of the study said: "Our analysis of the legal claims used to justify the arrests found they relied on post-Roe measures such a foeticide laws and the same arguments made in support of so-called 'personhood measures' – namely that state actors would be empowered to treat fertilised eggs, embryos and foetuses as completely legally separate from the pregnant women."

McVeigh gets this wrong: it's not the criminalization of pregnancy, it's the criminalization of female autonomy. Because the anti-abortionists don't give a flying fuck about the fetus "pre-birth" much less post-birth; they care only about controlling women.

The Constitutional Right That's Really Under Siege

If the governor of Massachusetts, or California, or Oregon, were to state publicly on multiple occasions her determination to eliminate individual gun ownership in her state, what do you think the reaction would be?

Probably not the deafening silence that is greeting the successful efforts by at least one U.S. governor to eliminate a woman's constitutional right to control her own body.

Deafening, except for one determined voice.

Part One

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Part Three

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After the Supreme Court decided Roe, most abortions in this country were performed in hospitals, anonymously.  You couldn't tell by looking at the people passing through the hospital's multiple doors who was a patient, much less who was there for an abortion.  Hospitals wouldn't tolerate protesters blockading entrances or harassing patients.

But hospital abortions were expensive, and once the Hyde Amendment barred Medicare and Medicaid from paying for abortions, hospitals stopped providing abortions to women without private insurance or significant cash. 

The anti-woman forces could not get any leverage as protesters until they forced abortions out of the safe haven of hospitals and into isolated clinics vulnerable to attacks.

So the Hyde Amendment wasn't about saving tax dollars; it was about throwing women and the doctors who care for them to the wolves.

The one piece of legislation that could end this denial of constitutional rights is one requiring that every hospital that receives any federal dollars also perform abortions.

Take abortions out of the clinics that are nothing but juicy targets for freakazoid psychopaths and put them back into hospitals where patients are safe and private.