Erick Erickson Reveals More of the Despicable Me Strategy of the GOP
Last night, the Texas legislature voted to approve a strict new abortion law, in spite of state polling that noted opposition to this bill and to special sessions to enact it. After an evening of confiscating tampons and maxipads from women entering the Capitol building, Texas Senators took their vote and decided that Texas Government needed to be big enough to interfere with women’s health decisions. After the vote, one of CNN’s stable of brain-dead conservative commentators posted this on Twitter:
Contemptible and despicable. Utterly. (And this is the full link to the site he sent people to: http://www.storesupply.com/c-480-hangers.aspx)
Because what this shows us is that their opposition to abortion is not about principle or about values or even about LIFE. It is about restricting the control of women over their own bodies, and making sure that those of us who insist on our own choices are always at maximum risk for doing so. Dead and injured women wouldn’t be dead or injured if they had just done what they were told and not had sex in the first place. I wish I could tell you how horrific I think this is — mainly because this is pretty clear that this is all punitive, breathless cheerleading for the harm they actually do wish for women who want some say over their reproductive lives.
Erickson should be fired over this, but I’d bet he won’t.
In the meantime, we have this letter from Rep. Doug Cox (R-OK), who is a physician, to his colleagues making the case for being for better contraceptive choices if you want to reduce abortions:
What happened to the Republican Party that felt that the government has no business being in an exam room, standing between me and my patient? Where did the party go that felt some decisions in a woman’s life should be made not by legislators and government, but rather by the women, her conscience, her doctor and her God?
Indeed, where is that party? That party is all up in the uteruses of American women, working at enforcing their own Sharia Law. The party of small government, less regulatory interference and personal opportunity becomes unabashed hypocrites when they have the chance to control women’s decisions and punish them for having sex.
Just before the Texas vote, Bloomberg reported on one way poor women get their abortions without clinics or adequate health care. They go to Flea Markets to buy pills that induce miscarriages. This is a very risky business, but the women that have been first targeted by conservatives to loose their health care rights are those that need government-supported health care. But the lesson here is that women who find themselves in need of an abortion will work to get it. Many people pointed out during the Gosnell trial that the horrible treatment of women in his clinic is a window to what women will endure to get the families they can afford. The poor women of color who went to Gosnell’s clinics did so at very great risk — and did so because instead of helping to ensure that they have a wide range of contraceptive choices available, governments have been withdrawing this health care from these women to satisfy the so-called “principles” of the people who specifically want to see poor people suffer. Women taking dodgy medications or handing over money to the Gosnells of the world won’t stop abortions, as Erickson’s tweet seems to recognize. Actively cheering for women to suffer for unwanted pregnancies is apparently the face of this GOP that can’t afford to lose more women voters.
You just don’t get it, do you? Right wingers don’t believe that coat hanger abortions ever happened, they think it’s a myth, Google it, you will get tens of thousands of hits, like this one from right here in Delaware:
http://www.delawarepolitics.net/coat-hanger-abortion-myth/
Reality, facts, history has all been rewritten by these Republicans wackos.
Allow me to post a link to the truth:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/health/views/03essa.html?_r=0
June 3, 2008
ESSAY
Repairing the Damage, Before Roe
By WALDO L. FIELDING, M.D.
With the Supreme Court becoming more conservative, many people who support women’s right to choose an abortion fear that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave them that right, is in danger of being swept aside.
When such fears arise, we often hear about the pre-Roe “bad old days.” Yet there are few physicians today who can relate to them from personal experience. I can.
I am a retired gynecologist, in my mid-80s. My early formal training in my specialty was spent in New York City, from 1948 to 1953, in two of the city’s large municipal hospitals.
There I saw and treated almost every complication of illegal abortion that one could conjure, done either by the patient herself or by an abortionist — often unknowing, unskilled and probably uncaring. Yet the patient never told us who did the work, or where and under what conditions it was performed. She was in dire need of our help to complete the process or, as frequently was the case, to correct what damage might have been done.
The patient also did not explain why she had attempted the abortion, and we did not ask. This was a decision she made for herself, and the reasons were hers alone. Yet this much was clear: The woman had put herself at total risk, and literally did not know whether she would live or die.
This, too, was clear: Her desperate need to terminate a pregnancy was the driving force behind the selection of any method available.
The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous “coat hanger” — which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in — perhaps the patient herself — found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it.
We did not have ultrasound, CT scans or any of the now accepted radiology techniques. The woman was placed under anesthesia, and as we removed the metal piece we held our breath, because we could not tell whether the hanger had gone through the uterus into the abdominal cavity. Fortunately, in the cases I saw, it had not.
However, not simply coat hangers were used.
Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion — darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.
Another method that I did not encounter, but heard about from colleagues in other hospitals, was a soap solution forced through the cervical canal with a syringe. This could cause almost immediate death if a bubble in the solution entered a blood vessel and was transported to the heart.
The worst case I saw, and one I hope no one else will ever have to face, was that of a nurse who was admitted with what looked like a partly delivered umbilical cord. Yet as soon as we examined her, we realized that what we thought was the cord was in fact part of her intestine, which had been hooked and torn by whatever implement had been used in the abortion. It took six hours of surgery to remove the infected uterus and ovaries and repair the part of the bowel that was still functional.
It is important to remember that Roe v. Wade did not mean that abortions could be performed. They have always been done, dating from ancient Greek days.
What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such.
Waldo L. Fielding was an obstetrician and gynecologist in Boston for 38 years. He is the author of “Pregnancy: The Best State of the Union” (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971).
Erickson is a CNN contributor and a member in good standing of the DC media elite. Conservative “pundits” can say literally anything and keep thier press pass.
This makes me so upset it actually makes me nauseous.
And that doesn’t even take into account this sort of tragedy (from a Texan commenter over at Jezebel, which has been doing some great coverage of this):
“one of my best friends develop[ed] CERVICAL CANCER because the shitty shitpie that is HealthCare and health insurance industry in Texas- she could not afford regular paps. She used to be able to…when she was able to go to Planned Parenthood where they have programs, sliding scale fees, etc. But then her reliable place got DEFUNDED. when she was finally able to get a check up, her high-grade lesions were difficult to remove. and it kept coming back. and now she has cancer.
so much for pro-life.”
These stupi ” pro-lifers” are NOT pro-life they are pro-baby
What happens to that baby after birth? They could give a Sh**
No education, no food stamps, no health care no social safety net
And when they become criminals to survive?
Lock e up in prisons owned by corporations or execute them
It’s like a Mad Max World in thunderdome.
I have tried to explain to my anti-abortion friends and relatives — and I have many — that one of the reasons they do not get more support is because of approaches like we’ve seen in the last week or two and comments such as Erickson’s. All he does is hurt his side’s position by making a sick joke of the fact that women will now have to endure dangerous procedures while trying to terminate a pregnancy. Ha ha, my ribs hurt from laughing so hard.
He would have gotten more traction from a wider segment of the community by saying to women, “I understand you disagree with this law, but we will be there to assist you in any way we can.” But to get a reaction and to further energize the base, as well as to be his usual dickish self, he resorts to that tweet.
As for approach, in Texas we saw debate cut off and a filibuster ended in part because someone helped Wendy Davis put on a back brace. Ohio hid its abortion restrictions in a budget bill. North Carolina had to do the hidden bill trick twice.
Rather than argue the merits of proposed legislation, this is what governing looks like in 2013.
A.M. I agree. Especially when the sponsor of the Texas bill said it was just to provide better health care for women. If opponents of Roe just told the truth they would have more credibility.
They don’t even care about the health of a fetus — the author of this Texas law made the case for NOT treating the unborn as people, if they wanted state-provided health care.
Got that? The unborn are living and worth protecting until their pregnant moms show up looking for subsidized health care.