I got an email requesting we look at the new Ohio bill that essentially bans abortion.
It was marketed with much fanfare last week by the anti-choice activist who drafted it, and media reports said it was due to be introduced today, but it isn’t up on the legislative service site I use.
In any event, I think we should wait and look at the actual text of the bill, considering our experience with the federal anti-choice proposal. There, we discovered conservatives had redefined rape, excluded those women over 18 from provisions designed to address incest, and inexplicably started referring to women and girls as “pregnant females”, all the while insisting they hadn’t changed existing law. I’m thinking maybe a lobbyist wrote that one, too, which would explain why none of them knew what was in it.
Once I can find the text, we’ll have a look.
Until then, get to know the national anti-choice activist who wrote it.
Here, she’s praying that God will give Christians control over media and government.
Southern Beale
Okay, I think I’ve just had an epiphany. What is wrong with this country is that far too many of this crazies have actual influence in our policy-making. As in: someone like this could actually craft a bill and have it taken up by the legislature of a major U.S. state with a large population, i.e., not Wyoming.
kay
@Southern Beale:
Well, we know creditors drafted the bankruptcy bill, and energy concerns drafted the 2005 energy bill, so it’s not that big a shock when you find out that anti-abortion religious zealots are drafting law on women’s health.
It’s interesting, because the early reports had her writing it. Now she’s the “architect”.
I don’t know what that means.
Villago Delenda Est
It’s not “anti-choice”.
It’s “Forced birth”.
Yutsano
@kay: Semantic wordplay really. Architects are responsible for building, so it puffs up her supposed importance. Beyond that, it means bupkess.
Omnes Omnibus
@Southern Beale: The thing is, if I show up at Tammy Baldwin’s office here in Madison wearing a Free Mumia t-shirt and carrying a giant puppet head, she is not going to introduce on the floor of the House the nationalize the banks legislation that I give her.
General Stuck
Yea, RWW is one of my mainstays for keeping up with the right wing religious nuts. They about always have some batshit from Ms. Porter going on.
Delia
Hey, does this mean she’s in favor of the health care public option?
//snark
Veritas78
Praise be Jesus, she’s not an American, because she states that she lives in a nation where 31 states have declared marriage as between a man & a woman, and prays that the other 29 will soon, too. So where ever she lives, it’s not here.
What a bile-ridden collection of lemon-sucking expressions on that stage. Whew. Imagine waking up to one of them.
Dom Phenom
The real question is, if passed, will the heartbeat bill leave Cheney without normal legal protections in the state of Ohio?
kay
I attended a lunch meeting with the state chair and the rural county chairs today.
I could only stay 45 minutes, but all they talked about was women voters.
Understandably, I think, given that the Ohio legislature has focused exclusively on limiting reproductive rights since the election.
I don’t know anyone that wants this gal in charge of health care decisions.
geg6
The forced birthers are evil, evil people. They must be opposed with every ounce of energy. I cannot emphasize enough how urgent it is that they are stopped. I am really feeling pissed about this. Taking away women’s rights won’t be the end of it. If they can do that to over half the population, anyone who isn’t a white male Christian will be next.
Southern Beale
@kay:
Ugh. That word always reminds me of Karl Rove.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Southern Beale:
It’s getting time for a number of people on the left to start running for office, at every level. I think the left has gotten lured into think that posting online will solve our problems.
Mnemosyne
@Dom Phenom:
Dang, you beat me to it. I’d almost be willing to let the bill pass if it meant we could execute Cheney without a trial since an audible heartbeat will be what defines a person. Without one, Cheney’s just a live organ donor, assuming he has any left that are useful.
kay
@geg6:
Like everything they do, the marketing is so unbearably sappy and soft-focus disconnected from real women’s lives.
I’m offended that they treat us like 6 year olds. I don’t even know any mothers that are this sickly sweet. The (good) mothers I know are hard-headed pragmatists :)
Southern Beale
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’m not trying to be flippant but I really hate the “forced birth” thing because it doesn’t even scratch the surface. It’s forced pregnancy, forced birth, forced separation if you give the baby up for adoption and a lifetime of forced torment wondering how this piece of you out in the world is faring, if they will show up one day, or if you decide to raise the child then it’s forced parenthood … it’s just more than forced birth.
More to the point, it’s a bunch of busybodies who have no business sticking their nose in one family’s affairs deciding they know what’s best. Without knowing a damn thing.
Villago Delenda Est
@Southern Beale:
Yes, but anti-choice doesn’t hit you in the gut like forced birth does. Forced birth covers their hatred of contraception in any form, as well.
It also sums up their authoritarianism quite nicely.
Litlebritdifrnt
I don’t suppose that anyone has mentioned that what they are trying to impose on us is the Christian equivalent of Sharia law…
Cause you know I have no interest whatsover being stoned to death cause I do not subscribe to their Christian beliefs…
Southern Beale
@kay:
The state right to life group bought a huge billboard near our convention center when one of the big right to life events was happening … should a picture a of a chubby-cheeked infant, probably a year old, with the slogan “Babies are people too!” or something equally idiotic. Wish I could remember exactly now …
Pooh
Every now and again one of these things pops up, and I’m forced to wonder “why do these people give a fuck about what I do?” And not only do they give a fuck, they give so much of a fuck as to want to actually be in charge of my life. What is that?
ppcli
Wouldn’t this bill keep on life support for decades anyone with irreversible brain damage, but enough of a functioning brain stem that their heart would keep beating? Or is that part of the intent of the bill? Or did they just not notice? It will start to get expensive as our hospitals start getting filled up with more and more eternal patients.
Southern Beale
@Villago Delenda Est:
We need something better than forced birth though. It’s not accurate. Even if you want to start a family, it’s forced birth. There’s not really another way around it.
I like “war on women,” or “not trusting women to make the right decisions,” (I know, needs to be condensed to fit inside the brain of a gnat ….)
beltane
This country is devolving into the North American equivalent of Pakistan, with the most primitive, backwards-ass elements of society calling the shots because everyone else is justly afraid of them. I have a big problem with a country where the right to own weapons is absolute, but where a woman’s right to determine the use of her own genitalia is under attack on a daily basis. Only in America are corporations considered more human than women.
FoxinSocks
Personally, I use the term pro-fetus. They’re certainly not pro-woman, and I refuse to call anyone who supports a policy that would lead to the death and maiming of tens of thousands of women every year ‘pro-life.’
beltane
@Southern Beale: What they are really doing is taking rights away from the family and giving them to the state. In effect, they are making women and their reproductive organs the property of the state.
A state that can force women to give birth can also force women to undergo abortions. There is not a bit of difference between these forms of totalitarianism, both of which consider a woman to be nothing more than a life support system for a p**sy.
Southern Beale
@beltane:
Yes that is it. In a nutshell.
Omnes Omnibus
@FoxinSocks:I would avoid using “pro” anything as a term. They should be seen as “anti.” Anti-choice, anti-woman, anti-family.
Will
I use “forced-birth” and if they want to argue about it, I say “big-government-forced-birth-anti-freedom”
and they hate it.
Triassic Sands
Funny, how abortion foes lose all interest in the well-being of the baby as soon as it is born. After that, it’s mostly screw you pal, you’re on your own — unless you’re from a wealthy family and then we’ll do everything we can to ensure that your parents can maximize their own fortune so that 100% of it can be left to you when they die. Anything else would be communism!
@kay:
Well, banning abortion does show up as the number 1 priority of Americans who are asked about their priorities. Or close to number 1. In the top 100 anyway. Or maybe the top 500. Right near the top anyway.
So, knowing that nothing is more important to Ohio residents, since they elected these legislators, than an outright ban on abortion, it is only proper that state legislators focus all their attention on making sure that the number of future poor people (to pay regressive taxes to support the rich and fight their wars for them) is maximized. That can only be accomplished if we maximize the number of unwanted children. Further, it doesn’t matter if the resources exist to care for unwanted children, because Republicans don’t give a damn about the well-being of anyone but the richest n% of Americans. Revealing the great diversity in the GOP, n will vary wildly for different Republicans, but it is safe to assume its value is somewhere between 1 and 5 for most GOPsters. OK, there may be a few super-elitists for whom the value of n might be as small as 0.01, but we can safely ignore them, at least for the next two or three years when, through natural evolutionary processes, they will become the dominant force in the Republican Party. Obviously, any number larger than 5% guarantees that we’re back to talking communism; something that must be avoided almost as aggressively as allowing women control over their own reproductive lives. That must be opposed at all costs.
Goddamn, Republicans are horrible people.
BruceFromOhio
@beltane:
Fixt, no charge.
cmorenc
Of course the real question is what will SCOTUS ultimately do with the anti-abortion/forced birth legislation that’s out there percolating across the land. Until recently, the anti-abortion forces have been following a strategy of incrementally chipping away at Roe v Wade, by laws deliberately designed to make it as uncomfortable and inconvenient as possible for women to seek abortions, or for providers to offer that service. They also attacked “partial-birth” abortions, which originally mainly addressed third-trimester abortions, but more recently with efforts to extend that concept well back into the second trimester.
Nevertheless, it’s only fairly recently that right-wing activists and lawmakers have begun to aggressively confront Roe v Wade head-on, doubtless with the hope that five members of SCOTUS are willing to overturn Roe v Wade outright; they have two Justices in the bag for certain, two more probable, who knows with Kennedy, and four near-certain votes against any overturn.
Martin
Just wait until women are classified with livestock. Agriculture laws are much, much easier to fuck with.
AliceBlue
God, it just never ends.
Cacti
And the Republicans’ promised laser-like focus on the economy continues.
I hope they continue to hammer this shit for the next two years and remind the Indies why they threw them out on their asses in 2006 and 2008.
Southern Beale
Okay, this story seems apropos to the conversation.
U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes accuses the State Department of conducting an assault on “traditional American family relationships” by changing how citizens can refer to their parentage on passport applications.
DEAR GOD NO NOT THAT NOOOOOO!
Jules
Someday the Forced Birth Zealots will be a thing of the past…I pray to God that it won’t be too long.
I’m so sick and tired of this constant battle to maintain some autonomy over MY reproductive system.
Fuck them.
Fuck them all….
TomG
As a voluntaryist, anarchist sympathizer, I hate these evil people. Leave us alone, you statist creeps! How can they be against sharia law but in favor of its Christian equivalent ? Oh I know how, they don’t trust anyone to have the freedom to make up their own minds about their own bodies.
Suffern ACE
@Southern Beale: Is “disputed” an option?
Origuy
I drove by the Planned Parenthood office the other day. One of the protesters had a sign that said, “I regret my abortion.” It was a man who was holding it.
TenguPhule
One can only pray she suffers an Ectopic pregnancy.
Its like they started a mass Judas Goat breeding program that is only now bearing its poisoned fruit.
Triassic Sands
@BruceFromOhio:
Even buy health insurance?
Amy
In other news, Hawaii is about to get civil unions. That will bring to eight the number of US jurisdictions there’s equal marriage or civil unions — Hawaii plus Illinois, Iowa, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and the District of Columbia. Maryland and Rhode Island may be next.
About 2/3 of people support either civil unions for full marriage rights and most young folks support marriage. Somehow conservatives in 30 years will say they wanted it all along.
Nicole
@TenguPhule: But were she to have an ectopic pregnancy she would, of course, be in a TOTALLY different situation than the women she wants to legislate against because she has the disposable income to get an abortion which in that case is not immoral because well, shut up, that’s why.
I worry about going away from the philosophical center of the left’s position, which is that women are people, too, but with the assaults against our rights getting so frequent, I wonder if liberals might make headway by playing the pragmatist. As in, on these laws, adding amendments levying a tax on every citizen in the state by, say, $1000, stating that the money will be put into a fund to offer assistance to all of the additional citizens of the state that are being born, whether it be by direct support, or adoption subsidies or whatever. And include what the specific criminal penalties would be on the women seeking abortion- only the women, taking the attitude that the doctors are only offering a procedure for which there is a demand and so there is no need to punish them (thereby also justifying the additional tax, as the new mothers would be in prison during the babies’ formative years).
It gives a chance to argue back on the same ground the forced birthers take- that fetuses are people, too! Nod politely and say since we as a society believe they have a right to life then we must all be prepared to take care of them. If we as citizens feel so strongly that they must all be born, then we as citizens must be willing to support these lives that didn’t ask to be born.
Part of me fears the right-wing are nuts enough to say, “Great!” but I think it’s easy for people to claim to be against abortion because they don’t see it personally affecting them. If the left attempts to direct the dialogue in a way that makes it seem as though passing these laws will result in every single American having to pay more money in taxes, I think support for the anti-abortion movement will dwindle. And these proposed laws would either be delayed, or would die because I think anti-tax is a stronger force than anti-choice.
Mind you, I base this entirely on an anecdotal encounter with one forced-birther who was reduced to a incoherent mess when I repeatedly asked him to give me specifics on how much additional money he was willing to pay in taxes to pay for all the additional souls, but I’ll say this- the most recent time I saw him talk about abortion online he did say while he was opposed to it he considered it none of his business.
Xenocrates
Pray all you want, lady, but until such time as the First Amendment is repealed (some time during Sarah Palin’s second term…i.e., Never), “Christians” are NOT going to have control over our government. You want a nice theocracy, head to Tehran, they will have all sewn up. How stupid are these people??
debbie
@ Origuy:
I’ve yet to see a female protester outside the PP office in my area. It’s always a man, and I can’t help thinking that he’s not a father today, it could have something to do with the woman he screwed.
@ Southern Beale:
A “war on women” is exactly what it is. Can’t women still be charged if they’re seen drinking while pregnant? Who’s to stop someone from accusing a woman who spontaneously aborts? Couldn’t she have “willed” it?
PWL
It’s a shame that in America the Christian religion has been distorted into something sick, twisted, narrow-minded, corrupt, stupid, murderous, and malignant (There. I feel better.) These folks are the perfect argument for keeping the anti-establishment clause in the first Amendment.
Makes me think of the story of the American Indian who was sentenced to be burned alive by the Spanish for refusing to convert to Christianity. On the pyre he was given one more chance to convert, and told if he did not he would go to hell. He replied, ” Then let me go to Hell, because at least there will be no Christians there.”