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

[big-wired.livejournal.com]

Up here in Canada, there is going to be an hour long debate by Conservatice MP Stephen Woodworth on how to change the law that states when a human being is a human being. Currently, Canadian law says that a human being is a human being AFTER a woman gives birth to them, but he is trying to change that law. I'm doing my part to fight that and tell my own MP that to change the law is to deny a woman her rights and make them second class citizens.

So you and all your friends, the ones who actually have common sense and sympathy and compassion and understanding that women ARE human beings, hang in down there and keep up the good fight. I'm gearing up for one up here, and if need be, we'll keep this place nice and safe for you in case you need to vacate the US.

Because this is some serious backlash against women...

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Good golly, don't say he's arguing the person-from-conception law. You know it's a bad idea when a state as conservative as Mississippi's response is "Fuck no!"

Because this is some serious backlash against women...

Uppity bitches, thinking we're people and all.

[big-wired.livejournal.com]

It's not quite person-from-conception law, not like in Arizona, but it is trying to place that the fetus is a person at the expense of the rights of the ACTUAL PERSON giving birth to it.

He's basically looking to reopen the debate in Canada about when a human life begins, and my Prime MInister, who said he would, so long as he was PM, NOT REOPEN THE DEBATE, is letting someone else reopen the debate.

*sigh* That's what we get for letting an emotionless android become Prime Minister.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

the fetus is a person at the expense of the rights of the ACTUAL PERSON giving birth to it.

*headbang*headbang*headbang*

Y'know, there was some n00b at Pharyngula who jumped into a discussion of women's rights and wanted to turn it into a discussion of exactly when the woman has to cede her bodily rights to the fetus' right to life, apparently trying to pin down an exact day in the last trimester when it was "too late" - and often bringing up the fanciful hypthetical of a woman who "just changes her mind" at 8.5 months.

The Pharyngulites tore him limb from virtual limb for the triple crimes of trying to derail the conversation, demanding that the (male) blog owner answer while ignoring the many women pointing out their actual experiences, and the overall inability to grasp that a woman has bodily rights that cannot be ceded to another at any time, period, end of sentence.

You cannot legally compel a woman to donate an organ to anyone, including her own child. This is simply reiterating that point as the goal posts move.