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.