I already think the pro-life fanatics are creepy, but stuff like this just takes it to the next level:
A socially conservative majority dominating the Michigan House hopes to impose new regulations on abortion providers and mostly prohibit the practice after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
A House committee on Thursday advanced a three-bill package to the floor requiring abortion clinics to be licensed surgical centers, imposing new requirements for disposing of the remains of aborted fetuses and making it a crime to coerce a woman into terminating a pregnancy.
One of the bills includes a ban on late-term abortions for unborn children 20 or more weeks developed, with a narrow exception when the mother’s life is at risk, said the bill sponsor, Rep. Deb Shaughnessy, R-Charlotte.
The legislation does not allow late-term abortions in cases of rape, incest or fetal defect, such as a missing brain or spine.
It doesn’t matter what trimester of pregnancy a woman is in, if the fetus doesn’t have a spine and brain, it isn’t a baby. It never was a baby. It was a biological mistake. I can’t think of anything crueler or creepier than a bunch of religious nuts forcing a woman to carry a brainless pile of cells to “term.”
These people are very, very sick.
Linnaeus
I’m so mad at what the West Side Wingnuts and their enablers are doing to my ancestral state. My family sometimes asks me, “Are you going to move back?” Not if this shit keeps up.
LanceThruster
Boy howdy!
Rob in CT
Once you actually learn about “late term abortions” you find out that:
a) there aren’t very many; and
b) they are overwhelmingly due to serious medical issues, including that sort of massive birth defect.
The idea of forcing a woman to bring a pregnancy to term is effed up. The idea of forcing her to bring it to term *no matter what, no exections you dirty slut!!!* is so repugnant I don’t have words to express it. And I’m a wordy fellow.
Spaghetti Lee
The cynical explanation about pro-life fanatics is that they’re interested in breeding more Christian Soldiers to outpace minority demographic growth, right? I think, uh, this goes a bit beyond that. We’re into ‘fetish object’ territory here.
Califlander
So … being born with no brain or spine is okay, if you’re a conservative.
Got it.
eric
@Spaghetti Lee: the really cynical view is that the right wing is just one giant al davis cult : Just win baby!
Bubblegum Tate
@Spaghetti Lee:
These are the people who think Rack Santorum’s demented Miscarriage in a Jar thing is something to be applauded. They’re deranged.
David in NY
@Linnaeus:
Right. Damn shame what’s happened to the decent state I grew up in.
redshirt
Small Government, represent!
rammalamadingdong
We are school shopping for my step-son and met with the local Christian school. They have a contract that states immoral activity in the home, specifically calling out homosexuality,is grounds to expel the student. Every contract clause sites scripture. It was the creepiest thing I have ever read.
Hungry Joe
Empathy failure: I cannot begin to imagine what goes on in these people’s minds … assuming, of course, they weren’t born without a brain. Which may require something of a leap.
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
You’re just trying to keep natural Republicans from being born and becoming voters!
.
Alex
Republicans just see the brainless as future Republicans
SRW1
Anybody checked whether Rep. Deb Shaughnessy, R-Charlotte was born with a brain?
kindness
@rammalamadingdong: Why are you shopping Christian schools to begin with? Your kid will know hypocrisy and believe you to be it.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Rob in CT:
Having a late term abortion increases the entertainment value for all the participants.
The Dangerman
Wait until they want to lock up pregnant women prior to their 20th week to prevent miscarriages.
J.W. Hamner
Eugenics/Nazis yadda yadda yadda…
BGinCHI
So even though Grover Norquist was born without a brain and Steve Almond was born without a spine, they aren’t HUMAN??!!
You are a monster, John Cole.
Just Some Fuckhead
Wait, no brain and no spine. Is this code for Republicans and Democrats?
daveNYC
@The Dangerman: Or have the police investigat every miscarriage after 20 weeks as a possible crime. Or did they already do that someplace?
Brachiator
I don’t understand anyone who does not see this as a civil liberties issue.
How is this happening in Michigan? When did the state go nuts?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
__
Can we call them Thalidomide Conservatives yet? Or would that be uncivil and hence contribute to lowering the quality of our public discourse, regarding which our brainless and spineless news media overlords are always so concerned?
Yutsano
They removed the rape/incesht clause as well. So you must have asked for it, you cheap hussy!
Thoughtcrime
I, for one, welcome our jellyfish overlords.
SatanicPanic
If they keep this up, people may realize that it’s not about concern for babies at all.
scav
Remember peoples, the Lord God seemingly gave us Free Will so that a) he could watch us exercise it and he’d have the fun of damning us for breaking his arbitrary and inconsistent rules; and b) to make our abject obedience to him all the tastier. These self-appointed emissaries of his on earth are busy taking away this god-given free will from everybody and getting in the way of Their Lord’s entertainment. (Besides, they really hates wimminz with brains and backbone so making wimminz of all sorts lower in legal importance than brainless spineless fetuses is, as everyone noted, gravy to them.)
Southern Beale
Sick, yes. But I’d say the vast majority of these zealots are men who don’t have to go through the physical stress of actually dealing with this. It’s just academic to them.
dww44
But this is the proposed law that was pretty much passed in the Georgia Legislature in April just minutes before the closing. In an effort to bring some medical sense to the debate some Atlanta area doctors (ob/gyn types;not abortion doctors) testified that the law was too restrictive. So in the last few weeks a couple of those doctors who testified have had their offices set on fire. Arson, you think?
The only good thing is that the tea party crazy legislature did concede that exceptions should be made for the no brain fetus. But, otherwise, the 20 week cutoff for abortions is pretty much in place.
2010 did this country no favors,most specifically its female citizens.
Jeff Spender
@Brachiator:
This state has always been nuts. Huge chunks of it are the Alabama of the north. KKK, Nazis, the list goes on. Malcolm X used to live in Lansing, where I grew up–his father was killed by white supremacists in a street car “accident.”
It’s just that enough good people have left this dying state so now the crazies can take over.
PurpleGirl
“Make it illegal to coerce a woman into having an abortion.”
Okay, who is this aimed at: the doctor, the clinic, nurses or maybe the boyfriend/husband/father who doesn’t want a woman to have a specific pregnancy come to term?
(Shakes head… of course it should be a crime to force any one to do ANYTHING against their will, but we know this isn’t the subtext here.)
Raven
Mr Loopner was born without a spine. Lisa turned out pretty good. . .
Brachiator
@Southern Beale:
Unfortunately, there are women who support this as well. I recall seeing a Mississippi state official bragging that a new law would in effect make abortion impossible in the state. Standing next to him, applauding the law, was a woman supporter.
And all these stories brings to mind this recent story about a poll indicating that “Only 1 in 3 Women Think War Has Been Declared on Them.”
zifnab25
@Brachiator: The state lost a few million jobs. That tends to drive the townsfolk into a tizzy.
And our nation has a long storied history of addressing is problems by burning witches. So this isn’t even out of the ordinary.
Raven
@Jeff Spender: It was also home to John Sinclair, The White Panther Party and Up Against thew Wall Motherfucker!
slag
Not just on you, sparky.
Hilarious that the Republican Party’s love of small government and hatred of frivolous lawsuits is so easily superseded by their prodigious creep factor. Priorities!
zattarra
@Brachiator: We went nuts in 2010. Obama may have saved the auto industry but the state went totally FUBAR under a Democratic Governor so they voted out the Democrats in 2010.
Sad thing is there is nothing Democrats can do about this. Our dictator of a governor cut a deal with the UAW to keep them from supporting his recall, the recall campaign in Michigan quit after Wisconsin last week, the local Democratic party has no spine and Republicans hold super majorities in both Houses now.
Ash Can
I went to the link to read the comments to try to figure out just how in the living hell anyone could defend forcing a woman to carry an obviously doomed fetus to term. The answer seems to be that these people have a visceral, knee-jerk reaction to abortion being bad, period, and combine it with a complete lack of empathy for the fellow human beings subjected to pregnancy, which is evident in the fact that they completely avoid considering any of the ramifications or complexities of pregnancy. In other words, they’re convinced that abortion is wrong no matter what, dismiss any information that indicates otherwise, and don’t give a tinker’s damn about the pregnant woman herself.
So I’m with John; they’re sick — specifically, empathy-impaired and delusional.
Shinobi
Whatever, the solution is simple. If you don’t want to carry your brainless spineless fetus to term just don’t get raped in the first place.
/prolifersarecrazypants
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Because women are not full citizens with the same rights as men.
I’ve never seen a libertarian “pro-life” argument that didn’t boil down to that.
Linnaeus
@Brachiator:
1. Michigan has an urban-rural divide similar to that in other states. Liberals and moderates are concentrated in metro Detroit, and conservatives in the exurbs and rural areas. The core liberal areas have either been losing population or gaining it more slowly than the core conservative areas, and the purplish suburbs often vote Republican in state races enough to empower the conservatives, even if those voters themselves are more center-right.
2. The state GOP has turned very hard right since the 1980s or so. The dominant faction in the party used to be Romney- and Milliken-style moderates. But the conservatives, particularly those from the west side of the state (where conservative Dutch Reformed Protestantism has a lot of influence) have more or less taken over the party. It’s gotten so bad that the wing of the party that was considered the conservative wing back in the 1970s and 1980s is now considered the moderate wing.
Jeff Spender
@zattarra:
Yeah. Michigan’s pretty fucked up right now and I’ve never liked the Democratic Party here.
I do have to say this, though: Pete Hoekstra looks dead in the water. My uncle met him once and called him a dickhead. I told him, “Well observed.”
He is a dickhead.
jibeaux
I doubt if I could find it again, but I once read the story of a woman who had a baby who had a rare condition that meant he would inevitably die, in pain and with all his limbs seized up and unable to move, almost certainly before his 2nd birthday. She wrote a very moving piece about the two simultaneous truths of his existence: that she loved him unconditionally as her baby and her son, and that he brought her many moments of joy; and that if she had known he had this fatal condition, she would have had an abortion, before or after 20 weeks. If you don’t think about it at all, they seem to be contradictory truths, but if you do think about it, if that were a wanted child, it is hard to see any perspective other than that. I know it’s been observed before, but a fundamental failing of Republicans is their inability or unwillingness to even make the most halfhearted attempt to put themselves in someone else’s shoes.
bemused
@Southern Beale:
Must be loads of fun being married to these nutcases.
dedc79
And what happens if one of these fetuses is somehow born alive but without any ability to function or prospect of ever being able to function without being connected to life support? If the whole Schiavo fiasco is any guide, presumably these same nuts will want to stop doctors from taking them off life support.
Politically Lost
The paternalistic thinking is that those clumps of cells without gray matter or a spine are irrelevant. It’s that women have to birth them because its good for them. For the women that is. Just like when cows give birth to a stillborn…or something.
Shinobi
@jibeaux: Was it this one?
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
FTFY.
Bulworth
Is this more of that less government conservatives have been promising us?
Roger Moore
@Bulworth:
They want to shrink government until it’s small enough to
drown in a bathtubprobe a woman’s vagina.ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@dedc79:
__
And these are the same folks who are dead-set against workman’s comp, SSDI, and anything even remotely resembling single payer healthcare, because Soshulism! Moochers! Lazy layabouts who are obviously faking it! I guess the victims of their law can always pay for their horrendous state-imposed medical expenses by holding a bake sale at their local church.
Matt McIrvin
Many people seem to think that going through the process of having a baby, and seeing the fetus on the ultrasound, and really starting to love a child when it hasn’t been born yet, would naturally make you anti-abortion.
I have to say, for me it’s the opposite. Going through that process, and having the usual worries and false fetal-development scares, and, above all else, seeing my wife go through pregnancy and birth made me more rabidly pro-choice than I ever was before. We had a normal birth and a healthy child. The idea of having the process go horribly wrong one way or another, and then being told that some moralizing anti-abortion law will force my wife to carry the pregnancy to term, fills me with dread and disgust.
22over7
zifnab has it right. This is witch-burning for the 21st century.
Ash Can
@Southern Beale: There are a lot of women who have this extreme lack of empathy and denial of reality; make no mistake. In fact, they’re even sicker than their male counterparts. At least the men have the excuse of being physically removed from the situation in that they can’t get pregnant or give birth.
@dedc79:
As was evident from that comments section, you may as well be speaking Mandarin Chinese to them when you say this; it simply does not compute in their brains. To them, if the child dies of its own accord, oh well, but to actively take that child’s life cannot be allowed. It’s all about the principle of the matter; the only suffering they recognize is that of the fetus having its life taken through the intervention of others. The obvious suffering of the fetus once it’s born doesn’t enter into the equation.
jl
@jibeaux:
I think that story is a good example showing why, until the fetus is viable outside the womb, the woman should have the right to make the final decision, and no one else.
I find horrifying and barbaric the idea that a woman must bring a fetus to term that can never be viable.
donnah
Don’t forget that in some religions, suffering is our reason to exist. Our time on earth is supposed to be filled with tests of our faith and we exist to worship our vengeful Father and repent our sins until we get to heaven. That’s where all of those poor (christened or baptized only, of course) sick babies go.
So it’s not that these people lack empathy, they want to be sure someone is suffering enough to get to heaven. That’s how compassionate they are./ snark
NancyDarling
@jibeaux: I read that same story. I think it was in Slate or Salon. It was at least two years ago when all this bull shit was first in the news. Sullivan (this was when I still read him) printed a lot of the women’s stories so he may have had a link to this one.
I went through the embryology museum at Loma Linda Medical School years ago. Unfortunately it is not open to the general public, but these ignorant bastards should be forced to go there before they dream up laws like this. I remember shelf after shelf of big jars with preserved, full-term babies in them with every unimaginable defect. How the xtianist think it is God’s will that these little things be born is beyond comprehension.
Sarah Posner had a bloggingheads conversation with Marie Ashe of Suffolk University Law School. They covered the constitutionality/privacy issues of these laws about abortion and reproduction. Ashe emphasized the prurience that has always been at the heart of women’s reproductive rights. Look up Mary Dyer’s wikipedia page and see what Governor Winthrop, of “shining city on a hill fame” did to her. He exhumed her horribly deformed fetus and cited it as evidence of her heresy. Then she was hanged in Boston Square.
The Other Chuck
Can we just call the union a failed experiment? I simply do not want these fucking monsters in my country. I refuse to stand with them as fellow citizens.
Trinity
@Linnaeus: I am from Michigan like you. The rest of my immediate family is still there. The craziness that has taken over MI politics is unfathomable. I would love to move back home to be with my family but there is no way I could stomach it now.
It’s tragic and infuriating.
Patricia Kayden
“The legislation does not allow late-term abortions in cases of rape, incest or fetal defect, such as a missing brain or spine.”
But remember, the GOP is NOT waging a war against women. It’s all in our heads.
currants
@Shinobi: I think it was–I remember reading that around the time Santorum’s wife’s … er … pregnancy problem … was in the news.
jl
IMHO, crazy old Joe Biden said it best in an interview: the system now is a good compromise that respects the rights of each interested party, which is the woman, the fetus, and state.
Until the fetus is viable outside the womb, the woman has the final say.
As the likelihood that the fetus will be viable outside the womb increases as it nears term, the state gradually has more say in guarding its welfare, and we have medical, ethical, and legal guidelines to ensure that the rights of both the woman and the fetus are respected.
What rights do insane religious fanatics, on solely sectarian religious grounds, have in any pregnancy or birth or abortion? None. No righs, no standing.
I think the pro reproductive rights people should respond more aggressively when forced birth fanatics say we need to protect the rights of the unborn.
The answer should be that we DO respect the rights of the unborn now, with rules that are consistent and sensible given the unborn’s likelihood of ever becoming a conscious person.
If religious nuts have a problem with that, they should go talk to their crazy demented idea of a god, to find out why he made the early stages of pregnancy so uncertain and risky, and leave everyone else alone.
Edit: and for a fetus that can never be viable, because it has no heart or no brain, then the women always as the final say, it seems to me. I do not see what potential person would ever exist that the state could ever have a rational interest in.
The Other Chuck
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Their position isn’t really that unusual once you realize that a religion that teaches them to hate themselves makes them pretty much a bunch of miserable misanthropes who wish to maximize the suffering of others in general.
NancyDarling
@daveNYC: Bei Bei Shuai is going on trial in Indiana if it has not already begun. She attempted suicide which may have led to the death of the fetus she carried. She was held 435 days without bail. The Indiana supremes ruled the trial could go ahead, but they had to grant her bail.
Katha Pollit has an update with links to a petition and a site where you can donate to her legal defense fund.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/168254/update-bei-bei-shuai-bad-news-indiana
jibeaux
@Shinobi: Yep, that was it. Heartbreaking. Thank you.
qwerty42
@Bulworth: Might be the Laser-like focus on jobs.
Or is it the “Freedom Agenda”?
Ruckus
This is about religion, maybe not your religion, certainly not my(lack there of) religion. There don’t have to be any logical arguments in religions, only beliefs, and so there are no logical arguments in religions. You don’t place yourself in someone else’s shoes, you believe what you are told.
Roger Moore
@Ash Can:
I’m willing to bet there’s a ton of denial mixed in with that lack of empathy. Bad things only happen to bad people, you know, so as long as they prove what good people they are by opposing the evil abortionists, they know nothing bad will happen to them.
Ruckus
@donnah:
You could have taken off the snark tag.
eemom
My teatard idiot SIL is from a place called Holland, Michigan, and as far as I can tell teh wingnut crayzee is in the water there.
Chris
@The Other Chuck:
This. There’s a considerable amount of self-loathing inculcated into at least their kind of Christians right from the start (“original sin”). The low sense of self-worth encourages them to “find themselves” by melding into a larger whole that gives them meaning, e.g. their church.
Brachiator
@zifnab25:
I’m not quite seeing the connection between “we lost jobs” and “let’s screw women over even more.” But I do see a concerted effort by social and religious conservatives to escalate the assault on abortion into a larger assault on reproductive rights. I can also see that this is a counter-reaction to health care reform, which is hated by conservatives precisely because it lets individuals make medical decisions without having to defer to any religious authority.
@Linnaeus:
Thanks very much for the background on this.
Shinobi
@The Other Chuck:
The crazier the right wing gets the more I think it would be a good idea to subdivide the country. There is no productive discussion with some people. They are never going to agree or want to compromise? Why are we doing this?
(I often think of this with regards to Chicago/the rest of Illinois Or other states with extreme rural urban divide. They seem to think they don’t need us, but we pay for their roads.)
jl
Western Michigan is full of old school Calvinism. Jonathan Edwards could preach his mid 18th century sermon there today and it would not be out of place.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinners_in_the_Hands_of_an_Angry_God
There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.
Edit: never occurred to me before, but using the word ‘mere’ to describe the pleasure of God seems a mite disrespectful. And, where is the soul old Jonathan Edwards now? Burning like a crushed spider on hot brick in the fire for that little misstep? Enquiring minds want to know. /snark
jl
Mr Edwards and the Spider, Robert Lowell
Excerpt:
What are we in the hands of the great God?
It was in vain you set up thorn and briar
In battle array against the fire
And treason crackling in your blood;
For the wild thorns grow tame
And will do nothing to oppose the flame;
Your lacerations tell the losing game
You play against a sickness past your cure.
How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?
A very little thing, a little worm,
Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said,
Can kill a tiger. Will the dead
Hold up his mirror and affirm
To the four winds the smell
And flash of his authority? It’s well
If God who holds you to the pit of hell,
Much as one holds a spider, will destroy
Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy
On Windsor March, I saw the spider die
When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire:
There’s no long struggle, no desire
To get up on its feet and fly
It stretches out its feet
And dies. This is the sinner’s last retreat;
Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat
Then sinews the abolished will, when sick
And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.
http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/5/lowell/spider.htm
Some places, that kind of thinking is drummed into people since as long as they can remember.
WereBear
Makes H P Lovecraft look downright prescient.
And I believe we lapped “creepy” a while back.
LanceThruster
@Mnemosyne:
I like the maxim that says if men got pregnant, it would not be a right, it would be a sacrament.
Bill Arnold
@eemom:
Just wondering; is there any correlation, or inverse correlation, between the wingnut crazy and fluoridation of the water supply?
NancyDarling
@WereBear: Even more prescient is Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”—A dystopia brought on by the assassination of the president and every member of Congress—probably by Islamist radicals. It was published in 1985.
Linnaeus
@eemom:
That doesn’t surprise me at all. Holland is exactly in the part of Michigan (west side, Lower Peninsula) where social conservatism runs the strongest. Culturally, it’s a very different place compared to SE Michigan, which is considerably more socially diverse.
shortstop
@LanceThruster: No. We women are not morally superior to men. If men could get pregnant and women couldn’t, it would be the worst-natured women trying to control the sexuality of men–with the enthusiastic help of the most lickspittle men.
shortstop
@Linnaeus: I like knowing that Saugatuck sits in the middle of all that repressive conservatism, just waving its big gay ass in defiance.
Linnaeus
@shortstop:
I know. It’s hilarious.
El Cid
@NancyDarling: There probably should have been a movement against the writing of dystopian futures by liberals, leftists, feminists, etc., because instead of being seen as clear warnings of a horrible future to be avoided, apparently they all end up being used as instruction manuals for the right on how best to reshape society.
WereBear
@jl: Tay Sachs is one of the toughest there is. My heart goes out to her.
Cruelty is not a family value.
I do not know enough bad words to express the sick smile on Rick Santorum’s face when he talks about his daughter’s suffering; I feel strong it is in no way his suffering. And that’s sick.
WereBear
@NancyDarling: When I found out it sprang from Ms. Atwood’s visit to a Southern US area, I said to myself, “Of course! One of the top five reasons I fled.”
In order, they are:
*Misogyny
*Racism
*Classism
*Anti-Intellectualism
*No one in the immediate dating pool except men who think belching behind a covered hand and opining that they would “bend me over” constitutes a gentlemanly compliment
stormhit
@Brachiator:
Everything west of Ann Arbor and North of say…Flint, has always been nuts.
What happened is that Democrats stupidly stayed home in 2010.
PurpleGirl
From Wikipedia:
Making the 20th week the dividing line is important and is a feature not a bug. Too early and you might not get the most accurate data; right on top of the 20th week means it is too late to have the abortion due to the obstacles put in place to make it more expensive and inconvenient.
And of course, there is the problem of the ectopic pregnancy — it is never viable, the fetus is not going to continue down into the uterus and the woman and fetus will die when the fallopian tube rips open. Many people like to view pregnancy as a natural state, safe, wonderful, perfect and not at all the mine field it can be.
Original Lee
@Brachiator: They’ve gone mad with power. The Repugs have a majority in each chamber and the governorship, and they’ve been railroading bills through like there’s no tomorrow, at the behest of the Tea Party and ultraconservatives, who appear to be holding the rest of the party hostage. There is starting to be some pushback from ordinary citizens – there’s a ballot initiative for the Emergency Manager law that might actually make it on the ballot (it’s tied up in court over the size of the font).
Oort Cloud
@jibeaux: Unless and until it happens to them.
scav
Attwoods nutjobs always seemed thoroughly bible-based nutjobs with not a whiff of uniquely Islamic about them.
Brachiator
@scav:
Every religion and ideology has its share of fundamentalists. It’s a human thing.
Villago Delenda Est
These people are not sane.
They are a danger to themselves, and particularly to others.
We NEED to have FEMA camps for these mentally ill people.
tybee
@LanceThruster:
if men got pregnant, you could get an abortion while you got your oil changed.
scav
@Brachiator: Agreed, that’s why I was slightly surprised at NancyD dragging in Islam.
ETA: That’s why I tried to pull in when I said something about nothing uniquely Islamic. ‘F course, you may be agreeing with me, I seem to be having trouble with basic communication to humans today. Had some grand conversations with the coffee pot but bipeds? sheesh.
polyorchnid octopunch
@dedc79: Yeah, but they won’t be willing to pay for it… oh no.
harlana
and a woman sponsors this bill.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
Forced birth. Voter suppression. Union-busting (where the most basic of rights, freedom-of-association, is being questioned).
Plus, now the GOP House going after the most basic information sources: De-budgetizing the OMB (who needs facts and figures? you’ll believe what we tell you), and preventing ordinary citizens from finding out who’s paying for all those PAC ads.
All these different policy positions orbit a common theme:
Shame it won’t fit on a bumper sticker, because it encapsulates what the GOP is all about these days.
NancyDarling
@scav: Scav, That was the supposition in the book as to who carried out the assassinations. Or at least, that is what the people were told. In the confusion following, the right-wing xtianists took over.
harlana
@Califlander:
i think it’s a requirement!
Mnemosyne
@NancyDarling:
I was getting a little confused myself, because I remembered Gilead as being Christian-based, but now I get what you were saying — Islamists were blamed for the assassinations, which triggered the formation of the fundamentalist Christian society as a reaction to that event.
g
@Califlander: How else would they increase the voter rolls without these creatures.
g
@PurpleGirl: I believe I read somewhere that in El Salvador, a women with a ectopic pregnancy may not abort the fetus until after she has suffered injury or is at risk of death. I could go look it up if I weren’t too lazy.
NancyDarling
@PurpleGirl:
@g: It happens here. Back in the late 60’s my sister-in-law was taken to a Catholic Hospital ER with severe pelvic pain. Her doctor suspected an ectopic pregnancy and had her moved to another hospital just in case an abortion was needed. Some Catholic hospitals in the US won’t allow them until the mother’s life is in danger.
dcdl
@PurpleGirl:
And don’t forget most women don’t get ultrasounds until 20 weeks to find out the sex. A lot of times they don’t know that anything is wrong. Also, with dealing with insurance it takes time to deal with getting referrals to see the specialist. 20 weeks gets closer and closer &/or it’s gone past when the woman is trying to figure out what is going on and what to do.
I think I read somewhere (can’t remember the link, about the time Sullivan posted all those late term abortion stories) that the majority of the women who have an abortion after 20 weeks actually wanted the baby, but it’s not viable and/or her life is in danger. Which makes sense. You go into find out what sex of child you are having at 20 weeks all excited and whamo something is completely wrong with your baby.
These anti-choicers are completely obsessed and not in the good way about no abortions pass 20 weeks. It’s to bad there isn’t more push back.
andy
Right wingers feel that a woman risking her life just so she can deliver a corpse must be god’s will. It’s kind of too bad that that too many of those who disagree can’t be bothered to show up to vote on election day.
Left Coast Tom
@Linnaeus: Having grown up in Genesee County…I’m not sure I agree with the “socially diverse” tag for SE Michigan. I thought Kildee, as a solid liberal on economic issues and a neanderthal otherwise, was quite well suited for not only his district, but much of the region with some specific exceptions (e.g.: Ann Arbor (though not the rest of its county)).
Moving outside SE Michigan…I really wasn’t surprised to learn that Stupak (D-MI) chose to live in a “Christian” brothel.
Cain
@Politically Lost:
They don’t care, the whole point is to protect them until they come out of the womb. Then their support ends and in fact the attack begins after all if it is a welfare baby, they will make sure that child’s life is a living hell. A form of torture I think.
Cain
@eemom:
I’ve been there, although I couldn’t really tell much. I didn’t interact wtih any of em.. I should ask my brother. He lived there for awhile.
TenguPhule
In other words, a Republican.