Kids going to colleges! Episcopalians not being Southern Baptists! States separating from churches!
It’s hard out there for Santorum.
And women, oy, women, fooled by feminists and secularists into wanting jobs and guns and contraceptions and everything! Amirite, Republican ladies?
Now, to be fair, he wouldn’t actually mandate that women remain barefoot and pregnant, but there’s no reason for the government to make it easy to women to purchase footware, is there?
No good can come from that.
My college roommates and I once asked the assorted male guests in our apartment if they hung to the left or to the right.
Answer (unanimously): left. (We theorized it was because they were all right-handed and so put their keys and whatnot in the right pocket.)
We also asked those who had been on swim teams what they did if they got aroused in their Speedos.
Answer: it was usually too cold for this to be a worry, and, anyway, that’s what judiciously-wrapped towels were for.
You’re welcome.
h/t PZ Myers, Pharyngula
Let’s not talk about contraception—oh no, no no no.
Can’t talk about contraception—except, as in the case of Senator Lynn Blankenbeker, a Republican legislator in New Hampshire, to talk about not using birth control:
“People with or without insurance have two affordable choices, one being abstinence and the other being condoms, both of which you can get over the counter,” she said. [. . .]
“Abstinence works 100 percent of the time,” she said.
Blankenbeker also asserted that condoms and abstinence offer married couples a wider range of family planning options than oral contraceptives.
“If you decide you want to get pregnant you can refrain from abstinence,” she said.
Uh-huh.
If nothing else, Blankenbeker helps to remind us that women may also qualify for the title as American idiot.
Anyway, let’s talk about all of those who don’t want to talk about what everybody’s talking about: sex and not-making babies. Let’s start with an inquiry into how many children these got-my-fingers-in-my-ears-lalalalalala-can’t-hear-you legislators have.
There are a lot of legislators, of course—100 senators, 435 voting representatives, plus hundreds more state legislators—so why not start small, with, say Representative Darrell Issa (he of the all-male panel on not-contraception) and the 112th Congress’s Full Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:
Democrats
So what can we tell from this august group? Of the 40 members, 4 are women, 38 are some variety of Christian, and, apparently, damned near all of them almost certainly practice some form of birth control.
“Almost certainly”: I do not know and do not want to know the sexual habits or fertility of these men and women, whether they or their sexual partners have miscarried or had abortions, or whether there were any health problems during pregnancy or with any of their children.
None of this is my business. None.
But what is my business is the public activity of these 36 men and 4 women and what they prescribe to the rest of us in terms of our own, private, business. And while I tend not to make much of the usual gaps between private behavior and public pronouncements—I don’t actually know if any of these representatives have voted against making birth control more accessible—it is nonetheless worth noting that evidence suggests that these representatives (or, perhaps, their wives) have accessed birth control themselves.
________________
*Joe Walsh deserves special mention, and not just because he’s been sued by his ex-wife for child support and chastised by a judge for his non-cooperation; at the not-contraception hearing he stated This is not about women. This is not about contraceptives. We know, you’ve said it, we’ve said it up here. This is about religious freedom. This is about religious liberties.
Because women and religion have nothing to do with one another. Perfect.
(Biographical info from Wikipedia, Project VoteSmart, official home pages)
Delegate Marshall, meet Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA).
Representative Issa put together the following panel of experts for “Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?”
photo via Planned Parenthood Action Fund
Notice anything about this panel? Uh-huh.
The one woman who was invited (by Democrats) to testify, third-year law student at Georgetown Susan Fluke, was blocked from doing so by Issa.
Democrats Elijah Cummings (MD), Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC), and Carolyn Maloney (NY) responded by walking out.
Issa offered his own response to the criticism of the all-male panel by Twittering a photo of Martin Luther King and noting We hear from religious leaders whose positions might not be popular, like MLK’s was not so long ago.
Yes, the anti-birth control men on this panel are exactly like Martin Luther King.
Oh, and should we talk about Foster Friess, the genius moneypot behind Rick Santorum’s candidacy? Y’know, the guy who joked (?) to Andrea Mitchell that On this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s so inexpensive. You know, back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly* ?
Okay, let’s not.
Finally, the reproductive specialists in the Virginia House of Delegates have been joined by the embyrologists in the Oklahoma Senate, which just passed its own personhood bill.
Unfuckingbelievable—in no small part because it is all too fuckingbelievable.
Anyway, I give the last word on bad laws to Dahlia Lithwick at Slate, who hammers (surprise!) Virginia’s new ultrasound-before-abortion law, one which will require most women to have a trans-vaginal ultrasound:
. . . Since a proposed amendment to the bill—a provision that would have had the patient consent to this bodily intrusion or allowed the physician to opt not to do the vaginal ultrasound—failed on 64-34 vote, the law provides that women seeking an abortion in Virginia will be forcibly penetrated for no medical reason. I am not the first person to note that under any other set of facts, that would constitute rape under state law.
What’s more, a provision of the law that has received almost no media attention would ensure that a certification by the doctor that the patient either did or didn’t “avail herself of the opportunity” to view the ultrasound or listen to the fetal heartbeat will go into the woman’s medical record. Whether she wants it there or not. I guess they were all out of scarlet letters in Richmond.
. . .
Evidently the right of conscience for doctors who oppose abortion are a matter of grave national concern. The ethical and professional obligations of physicians who would merely like to perform their jobs without physically violating their own patients are, however, immaterial. Don’t even bother asking whether this law would have passed had it involved physically penetrating a man instead of a woman without consent. Next month the U.S. Supreme Court will hear argument about the obscene government overreach that is the individual mandate in President Obama’s health care law. Yet physical intrusion by government into the vagina of a pregnant woman is so urgently needed that the woman herself should be forced to pay for the privilege.
. . .
Of course, the bill is unconstitutional. The whole point of the new abortion bans is to force the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade. It’s unconstitutional to place an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, although it’s anyone’s guess what, precisely, that means. One would be inclined to suspect, however, that unwanted penetration with a medical device violates either the undue burden test or the right to bodily autonomy. But that’s the other catch in this bill. Proponents seem to be of the view that once a woman has allowed a man to penetrate her body once, her right to bodily autonomy has ended.
During the floor debate on Tuesday, Del. C. Todd Gilbert announced that “in the vast majority of these cases, these [abortions] are matters of lifestyle convenience.” (He has since apologized.) Virginia Democrat Del. David Englin, who opposes the bill, has said Gilbert’s statement “is in line with previous Republican comments on the issue,” recalling one conversation with a GOP lawmaker who told him that women had already made the decision to be “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.” (I confirmed with Englin that this quote was accurate.)*
A-yup. As Lithwick noted, Today was not a good day in the War on Women.
_____
*I actually heard this for the first time when I was 16 or 17 and one of the women at the NOW meeting I attended joked that this was the birth control advice she had been given. She lay down on the couch and demonstrated how it was supposed to work; the visual made all the difference.)
(Photo h/t Melissa McEwan, Shakesville; Issa Tweet h/t Alex Seitz-Wald, ThinkProgress; and one, too, for Emily Hauser, just because.) (Update: and dmf! dmf, who commented on the OK bill yesterday.)
This man will not be president:
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
He will not be president because he will not win the Republican nomination, and he will not win the Republican nomination because he has no money, no organization, and an agenda which causes jaws to slacken, genitals to shrink, and the uncontrollable urge to giggle.
And no, I’m not talking about his Google problem.
ThinkProgress has a nice rundown of the top ten terrible tenets of the former senator from Pennsylvania, but I’d like to point out just one: the man is opposed to contraception. For everyone.
One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.
I remember my eight grade science teacher (a thoroughly decent man) try to teach sex ed by asking us to submit—anonymously—any questions we may have about sex in writing, which he would then try to answer.
Poor man. He never had a chance. I didn’t know a person’s face could turn that shade of red.
Yes, a class of mostly virgins somehow managed to come up with questions about “things in the sexual realm” which were “counter to how things are supposed to be.”
Santorum may also be a thoroughly decent man—although, given the nasty things he says about people who aren’t just like him, I doubt it—but unlike the stifled sniggers which greeted the science teacher, the ex-senator will be met with full-blown guffaws the moment he decides to engage the country in his version of sex education.
The sweater vest won’t help.
So I’m going to enjoy both Santorum’s moment in the media-sun and the evisceration soon to follow, a disembowelment made all the more sweeter because it will be performed by his fellow Republicans.
Ah, the carnage of campaign politics: couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.
I’ve started and stopped posts on abortion mebbe half-a-dozen times, wanting to craft an elegant justification of leaving the decision of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy to the woman herself.
Well, fuck that. I won’t give up on that elegant argument, but I won’t let it get in the way of writing anything about abortion, either.
Y’all have read about the nine-year-old rape victim, and the Catholic Church’s chilling response to her pregnancy and its subsequent termination. The Church says it won’t excommunicate her, but out are her mother and doctors. As C. noted, ‘Fuck them.’
(And yes, this is the same Church which could be partially shamed about the anti-semitism of schismatic Bishop Williamson, but didn’t give a shit about the misogyny of Williamson and his cohort and their denunciations of women wearing pants and, oh yeah, getting university educations.)
But they’re hardly the only ones who dismiss the risks of pregnancy to girls and women. Remember John McCain and his famous mockery of any health exceptions to laws outlawing abortion? He used scare quotes around ‘health’, as if it were some kind of game or dodge.
Scare quotes. Now THERE’S an argument.
Or what about the groups, like the Family Research Council, which reacted to the good news of an effective HPV vaccine by worrying that taking away the risk of sexually transmitted disease would make girls promiscuous?
Kinda like making contraception widely available would lead to promiscuity and general mayhem. Nope, let ’em get pregnant or an STD—that’ll show ’em!
This is of a piece with the argument of those who consider pregnancy a just punishment to promiscuoussex—because all sex which leads to an unwanted pregnancy must of course be promiscuous. No, no married women ever want an abortion, nor women in stable relationships. Just those whores who get knocked up just to knock off the fetus, or those poor, poor victims of the abortion industry, seeking to turn those poor, poor women into barren dykes.
Got that?
Yes, this is a rant, which means there ain’t no elegance and not much argument, either. This is just me screaming at the notion that any woman who chooses to live her life, to assert her ability and liberty to live her life, is somehow a morally depraved human being. Or too stupid to recognize that this is a decision with consequences (until it hits her at some unspecified point in the future, at which point she’ll collapse in a heap of regret).
Even those mildly pro-choice can take a mild version of this line. As any number of bloggers at Feministing, Pandagon, and the Pursuit of Harpyness, among others, have pointed out, William Saletan of Slate is willing to extend to women the right to terminate their pregnancies only if they’re really really sorry for it. Rights in exchange for shame.
Well, to repeat: fuck that.
Abortion is morally complex—and so are women. No, not every woman who decides to terminate (or carry the pregnancy to term, for that matter) engages in Properly Certified Reflection, but when have we required such certification for the legalization of any number of other complex moral activities?
Or is the problem that to state the complexity of pregnancy is to admit that there is more than one morally justified decision?
Or or or is it more basic than that: That to leave the decision to the woman is to. . . leave the decision to a woman?
‘My Body, My Choice’ has long seemed too reductive a slogan to me, but I don’t suppose ‘My life, My life’ has quite the same zing to it.
*UPDATE*
The righteous women at Pandagon have a post on this very issue, along with an embedded vid of three men (including Saletan) talking about abortion and women’s sexuality. Haven’t yet watched the vid—and given my mood tonight, may wait.
On the other hand, since I’m already pissed off, what’s another increment of outrage?
Those fuckers have done it. Everybody knew it was coming, but it’s so egregiously bad that, somehow, I thought it might disappear into the trailing vapors of the soon-to-be-ex Bush administration.
From a story by David Stout, of the New York Times:
“Doctors and other health care providers should not be forced to choose between good professional standing and violating their conscience,” Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said in a statement on his department’s Web site.
The rule prohibits recipients of federal money from discriminating against doctors, nurses and health care aides who refuse to take part in procedures because of their convictions, and it bars hospitals, clinics, doctors’ office and pharmacies from forcing their employees to assist in programs and activities financed by the department.
Excellent. Never mind professional standards, fiduciary responsibility, and, oh, patient health and well-being. Nope, if you’re too wobbly, er, conscience-stricken to deal with birth control or IVF or emergency contraception or even letting a woman know that there’s this procedure known as (shhh!) abortion, and that the doctor down the hall might just be willing to provide you with one, you now have an executive-branch rule to NOT DO YOUR JOB. And still get paid, presumably.
I was never much of a fan of the so-called conscience rule (dating back to the 1970s Church amendments and to a 1996 directive), believing that if you choose to enter a particular discipline, then you agree to adhere to the standards of that discipline. This is particularly important in medicine, insofar as your primary duty is to your patient, i.e., not a theoretical construct but an actual, mortal, human being.
If you want to practice medicine, then you ought to think about what that entails. I briefly considered trying to earn a spot at the US Air Force Academy, but as my pop (who put in his own stint as an Air Force enlistee) pointed out, once you’re in, you do what you’re told. I don’t particularly like to be told to do anything, and the thought of carrying out the policies of the then-Reagan administration really didn’t work for me. My efforts ended with those stray thoughts. (For the record, I doubt I would have passed the psych tests.)
I’m not saying that all doctors have to perform abortions. However common a procedure, it’s a fairly narrow one, unlike, say, drawing blood or inserting a catheter. In other words, it’s pretty damned easy to avoid doing abortions. Not all doctors want to cut someone open, or examine children or work with old people; the appropriate response to these disinclinations, then, is to avoid surgery, pediatrics, and gerontology. That said, there may be times, however rare, when surgery, children, or old people are unavoidable: you then have a duty to care for that patient until you are able responsibly to hand that care over to another doctor. Along those same lines, then, it seems to me that knowledge of how safely to perform abortions should be a basic part of medical education—not even that every resident must induce abortion, but that each should know the process for doing so.
Still, mine is a minority opinion: the conscience clause for abortion seems pretty well set in American medical ethics. And I guess that as long as those who decline to do abortions are willing to refer a patient to a willing doctor, it is a reasonable compromise.
It is not clear to me (I’ll try to find this out) that the old conscience clause require such willingness to refer; what is clear is that new regs not only do not require this, they protect a wide variety of ‘health care providers’ from their refusal to assist in any way with procedures they find morally objectionable—including not only abortion, but also sterilization and the provision of contraception (including emergency contraception), and undefined research activities. (cf. p. 15 of the pdf doc in the above link).
I’ve only skimmed the document, so my rant is based more on impressions than a good, critical read. Key sections appear to be II. Comments on the Proposed Rule (pp. 13- ; esp. 14-25 , 34-60, 68-77). Let’s just say that even this preliminary once-over is. . . GAH! I can’t even detail how fucking awful it is! Mealy-mouthed in its refusal fully to define or limit terms! Blandly dismissive of counter-conscience claims (and yes, Mr. Secretary, health care providers who perform abortions, prescribe contraceptives, and fill those prescriptions also have consciences!)! Condescending in its approach to patient concerns! Stupidly ignorant of how actual human beings make use of actual medical services! Derisive in its approach to informed consent and standards of medical care! And on and on and on. . . !
One more perverse invocation from an administration far more in love with its own mirrored image than the people it purports to serve.
AbsurdBeats 