The War on Women is Real

[neadods]

By refusing to comply with a federal law allowing women to choose their own providers of basic wellness care health services (one of those providers being Planned Parenthood), Texas has lost federal funds and denied some 70,000 women of the funded services.

Wisconsin has reinstated a strict limit on the time women are allowed to sue over wage discrimination, eliminating a law that had been written when a specific woman was denied her rights because she found out about the wage discrimination "too late."

Mississippi, which has the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, has laws banning the discussion of condoms in sex education *except* to discuss failure rates. Mississippi lawmakers are also trying to rewrite laws to force the state's single abortion clinic out of business. (For the purposes of overseas comparison, Mississippi state is roughly half the land mass of the island holding England, Scotland, and Wales. One. Clinic. In. The. Whole. State.)

Arizona just banned abortion after 20 weeks... which is calculated not by conception, but by the woman's last menstrual period, making the actual cutoff somewhere 16-18 weeks, depending on when the woman conceived.

Georgia tried to ban abortion for any reason after 20 weeks, including health of fetus or mother. When it was pointed out that this prevented removal of a stillbirth, one of the bill's supporters compared women carrying a dead fetus to the livestock on his farm. After the backlash, the overall ban went into affect, although with a codicil exempting mother's health or "medically futile" pregnancies.


I put on an orange vest and stood in a parking lot. (Fraulein and Father Corleone were uncharacteristically quiet today.)

We have to vote this upcoming election. But voting is not the only action we can take to fight back.

Comments

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Here's (http://blog.chron.com/nickanderson/2012/04/war-games-2/) a good summary (in cartoon form) of the pearl-clutching by the Republicans whose fee-fees are hurt at the SUGGESTION that they're engaged on a war on women. It's by Nick Anderson of the Houston Chronicle (I believe) and I actually saw it first here (http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/04/14/early-morning-open-thread-willard-got-nuthin/) at Balloon Juice.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

That is an excellent cartoon - and very true! I've already seen someone trying the "false issue" handwave, denying the facts as a "laundry list" that distracts from the real problem, the economy.

Problem was the guy was trying that gambit on the liberal mother of a daughter...

[faireraven.livejournal.com]

I don't really call myself liberal. I am socially liberal and fiscally conservative, which means that both sides of the current election debaucle piss me off... But the conservative side pisses me off more.

But he really should have known better.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I know you don't... but all of the anti-woman laws are direct social engineering, and you are, as you say, a social liberal.

It was a bit fascinating -- in a welcome to the Brave New World way -- to realize a few days later that this was the new official Romney platform being launched into the wild.