President Obama cares about women and women’s health.
Yesterday in Virginia, President Obama demonstrated, yet again, that he actually gives a crap about women and women’s health. Mitt “Planned Parenthood — We’re Gonna Get Rid of That” Romney, on the other hand, doesn’t.
[read full post at ABLC]
Maxwel
The local Chick-fil-a had a sign announcing a Cornhole Tournament.
Svensker
Isn’t it “wavered”? Otherwise, it’s a free pass, or something.
Otherwise, yes, yup, too right, etc., etc.
Chris
Good for you, Mr. President. Yet another reason why it sure as hell does matter who wins in November.
mark
fp this!
http://youtu.be/U9G8XREyG0Q
Snarki, child of Loki
Please, “preventive”, not “preventative”.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Why any woman votes for a party who’s platform is “women should be barefoot, pregnant, and chained to the bed with just enough slack to get to the kitchen” is beyond me.
Kinda like black, gay Republicans, just doesn’t make sense.
Violet
Abortion rates plummet with free birth control
If Republicans cared about unborn babies, they’d be all for birth control. What they really want is to control women.
Roger Moore
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
Why do you hate baby Jesus?
Wally Ballou
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: I usually operate on the assumption that they think voting GOP is the best way to make/keep lots and lots of money, and assume that said money will insulate them from the social policies of the party base.
Then, of course, there are such things as racist gays, homophobic blacks, Islamophobic women, etc.
Villago Delenda Est
@Violet:
This.
A million times, this.
Babies are irrelevant. PUNISH THE SLUTS!
Chris
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
Except that Republican women, for whatever reason, seem to be a lot more common than Republican black or gay people.
Violet
@Villago Delenda Est: Yep. It’s slut punishing, not caring for unborn fetusus.
What I found most interesting about the study was this:
So they expected providing free birth control would lower unintended pregnancy rates, but the impact was far greater than expected. So, yeah, if wingnuts really wanted women to not have to even consider abortion, they’d be all for this. But they’re not. Because they don’t want women to have agency over their own bodies. They want to control what women do.
geg6
@Violet:
The GOP has turned into just another branch of the Red Beanie Club. The RCC and GOP both are terrified of women and can think of nothing they won’t do to keep us prisoners of their whims.
I hate them all, with a white hot hate that will never end until they do.
Chris
@geg6:
It’s an open question who’s controlling whom and who’s becoming more like whom. But at this point they’re attached at the hip…
Yeah, so do I. Which scares me sometimes if only because I know it’s not healthy and not good for my objectivity. But I really don’t know how the hell else I’m supposed to react to people who dedicate as much time and effort as they do into fucking me and millions of others over for reasons beyond reason.
Mnemosyne
@Violet:
Of course, this study will make no impact on the forced birth crowd, because their position is that it’s morally bad to give people information about and access to birth control, so any proof that it works to reduce the abortion rate doesn’t matter since that reduction occurred through morally bad means.
Sort of like how they don’t give a shit that “abstinence only” sex education leads to more teenage pregnancies — giving kids the right information is intrinsically morally wrong, so those kids will just have to suffer in ignorance rather than being corrupted with the information they would need to protect themselves. It’s really fucking maddening.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Violet: Also it is demographics, white guys in the GOP know that whites are not reproducing fast to keep up with the Latinos and the Asians. The GOP is now run by White Nationalists ordained by God to save their “people” so to speak.
Chris
@Violet:
Two anecdotes come to mind. One is Paul Weyrich, the hardcore right-wing Catholic activist who after Roe v. Wade toured the “heartland” trying to form alliances with fundiegelical leaders based on opposition to abortion. He received no enthusiasm for his ideas, and it wasn’t until after Jimmy Carter revoked the tax-exempt status of all-white “Christian” academies that the people he’d contacted started to get back to him, and that the religious right was born.
The other is when Pat Robertson was asked about birth control in the PRC (not only abortion but state-run forced abortion, you’d think the ultimate nightmare for a pro-lifer) and responded “I don’t agree with it, but at the same time they’ve got 1.2 billion people and they don’t know what to do. If every family over there was allowed to have three or four children, the population would be completely unsustainable.”
Two anecdotes that seem to indicate that the “mainstream” religious right really doesn’t give a shit about abortion per se: as Stagger Lee says, it was all about race. (And gender).
Linda Featheringill
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Is it too soon to go Godwin?
Amir Khalid
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Wait. I’m not seeing how that’s supposed to work out for the white people. Forbid birth control to all women, means the birth rate stays up for everyone. And white people will keep on diminishing as a fraction of the US population.
Roger Moore
@Wally Ballou:
I’m pretty sure that denial is a big part of it, too. Bad things only happen to bad people, not to good people like us. God punishes sluts with unplanned pregnancies, lazy people with unemployment, sinners with illness, etc. Since I’m not a slutty, lazy sinner, I don’t have to worry about those things and it’s just fine to cut off the elements of the safety net that protect against them.
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
I will explain, but I’m afraid it will make you think even less of the right wing:
The assumption is that nonwhite people are too stupid to use birth control correctly, even if they get it for free, so they will continue to “breed” at their current rate while white people have fewer and fewer children.
Chris
@Amir Khalid:
I think the logic is that if white women are more likely on average to have abortions than nonwhite ones, we must ban abortions so that our “race’s” birth rates will keep up with that of these others.
Given the obsession you see on wingnut blogs with the idea that Hispanics are “outbreeding” whites so that they can take over the country, I think that is in fact a factor, at the very least, in white conservatives’ obsession with outlawing abortion.
AdamK
Preventatatatative.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
The belief is that white people are more prone to use contraception, especially when compared to Latinos, so that banning it for everyone will even things out. They really don’t want to talk too loud about the other things they want to do to ensure that whites are dominant, at least where anyone who doesn’t completely agree with them can hear.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
Deport all illegal immigrants, AND all the children born to them!
Abolish the right to vote for all
low-income peoplemoochers, which just by happenstance will disenfranchise a lot more nonwhite than white people!Take away health care, food stamps and social safety nets for these same people and let them just fucking die if they’re too morally deficient to be able to afford it!
Etc…
Linda Featheringill
@Chris:
I wish I could disagree with you, but I can’t. Damn.
MikeJ
@Roger Moore:
The other night the local news had a story on food banks and the people who use them now. They seemed to think that when people who had been middle class at one time and then lost a job had to use a food bank it was a much bigger tragedy than when the regular old poors used it. The former middles classers were *embarrassed* to be there, unlike the regular moochers.
I so wanted to strangle the twit reporter.
fuckwit
It’s amazing to me that something I’ve been saying for over 10 years now, people are finally starting to figure out, and realize is true:
These “pro-life” fundamentalists are NOT pro-life, they are anti-sex.
That’s all it is. That’s all it ever has been. Abortion is just a ruse, a bullshit story. What they’re after is total and complete control of your sex life.
This has never been more obvious then just recently when the Catholic bishops had a shit-fit over birth control funding in Obamacare.
They don’t want to reverse Roe v Wade, they want to reverse Griswold.
RedKitten
It’s not just that. It’s the whole “free” thing that gets their knickers in a knot. The very IDEA of people not paying out of pocket for their own birth control just drives some people insane. Again, though, I think this comes down to punishment. If people are going to have sex and don’t want to procreate as God intended, then they’re going to have to pay…either via punishment or financially.
Mnemosyne
@fuckwit:
Every once in a great while, you will run into someone who is genuinely anti-abortion, but not anti-sex.
A study like this is an easy way to tell the difference, because someone who is only anti-abortion will embrace it and start talking about how we need to get free birth control to people right away.
Anti-sex people will start bitching about how awful it is that Those People are getting free stuff and their tax dollars are paying for it.
RedKitten
@Mnemosyne: And my guess is that the latter group outnumbers the former group by a ratio of about 20-1.
MikeJ
@RedKitten:
They’re willing to do anything, *anything* to prevent abortion. Picket, protest, even murder. Just make sure that nobody gets something. That’s the line in the sand.
1badbaba3
@mark: In a perfect world this would achieve ubiquity. You should put it in every thread until the angry disembodied voice of a very drunk John Cole asks you nicely to stop, or calls you a dirty name. Bets will be placed on which would be the more likely scenario.
RedKitten
@MikeJ:
Quoted for (depressing) truth…
Linda Featheringill
@Mnemosyne: #30
But their tax dollars aren’t paying for contraception. Offering free birth control saves the insurance companies a ton of money because of fewer pregnancies. The companies like the idea.
I know, facts have a liberal bias.
swbarnes2
Remember the bit in Romney’s speech where he spoke as if it was simply unthinkable that poor people thought themselves deserving to food, housing, jobs, and healthcare?
I think there is a large part of the country who thinks that no one but them and theirs is good enough for any of those basics, or life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness either.
They think if anyone but them has sex, those people are taking liberties, they are imposing by reaching for something that they should not have, so if an illness, or an unwanted pregnancy, or an unwanted miscarriage happen, well, those people shouldn’t have been having sex in the first place, because sex is too good for those people.
If your medical insurance is crappy, well, health is too good for the likes of you, so it’s wrong for you to complain as if it’s something you have a human right to.
I was reading Howard’s End a few weeks ago, and while neither of the lower middle class characers lives to see the sunny union of the middle middle and upper middle classes the emerges in the end, I got the feeling that at that time in England, there was a feeling among the better off Enlgsh people that poor English people were English too, and that if they were badly off, it was bad for the English people as a whole, and that something should be done. We don’t have that sense here in America. We have whole swaths of the country who do not see whole other swaths as being really American, largely for racial reasons, and resent it when those other Americans are anything but dirt poor and miserable. I don’t know what, short of an alien invasion, will change that.
Wally Ballou
@Mnemosyne: I’ve felt for a long time that these “pro-lifers” would have no problem at all with abortion if they could somehow be assured that only blacks, browns, poors, and other demographic undesirables would seek out and obtain them.
Even the slut-shaming, pro-patriarchy part of the movement is motivated chiefly by obsession with middle class white women’s sexual purity, gender conformity, and precious precious babies.
LanceThruster
@Wally Ballou:
I also feel there’s an element of that in regard to financial security and prosperity. I think that the old guard is afraid that undesirables will flourish like weeds if they’re not struggling too much to survive.
Can’t let that happen.
Chris
@swbarnes2:
Jennifer had a 4th of July post a couple years back where she made the very true point that nations are made up of people, that patriotism to a large extent means looking out for your fellow citizens, and that if people adopt the idea of “every man for himself,” you’re basically turning your back on your country.
One of the best blog posts I’ve ever read and the point it makes applies to what you were saying. A huge part of the country has bought into the idea that patriotism means “me me me,” which effectively destroys the actual patriotic principle of “we’re all in this together.” I’m not sure what the cure is or if there even is one.