Bitter Knitters Unite!
Posted: March 27, 2012 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, abortion rights, Civil Liberties, fetus fetishists, Health care reform, Human Rights, legislation, Planned Parenthood, PLUB Pro-Life-Until-Birth, religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Republican politics, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights 37 Comments
Okay, for all you knitters out there—this one’s for you. And it’s a Doozie.
A new group has formed in response to the unapologetic Republican Crusade Against Women: The Snatchel Project with the goal of sending all howling male members of congress their very own hand-knitted uterus or vagina because:
If they have their own, they can leave ours alone!
I love the humor of these women!
And look at the variety!
Still, there are many deniers of the ongoing Holy Crusade. Yesterday, I mentioned a piece in The Hill by one conservative writer Sabrina Schaeffer, who scoffed at the very notion of a War on Women beyond a false narrative hatched in devious Democratic minds. Another woman writer joined the chorus in the Wall Street Journal, a Mary Eberstadt, who mused whether the Sexual Revolution Had Been Good for Women, answering with a firm ‘No.’ What a surprise. Ms. Eberstadt presumably explodes four myths in her own mind ala the Phyllis Schlafly tradition—women are restless, unhappy and dissatisfied ever since the Pill changed the world and sex was severed from procreation.
I’m sure this point of view makes Rick Santorum swoon with absolute pleasure. Or whatever the Rick Santorums of the world do when they experience joy. To think you could convince women, any woman to voluntarily march herself back to the Middle Ages is quite incredible. A monumental feat. No wonder Mr. Sanctimonious refuses to give up!
But I do sense a certain retreat by the zealots, who seem to squirm mightily under the harsh glare of public scrutiny. Here is the letter recently published in the Daily News Sun by Arizona Rep Debbie Lesko defending her bill [HB 2526], where an employer of conscience can insist a woman prove that she is using contraception for ‘nonsexual’ purposes because otherwise said employer would be religiously offended:
My legislation to protect our First Amendment rights does one thing and one thing alone: It allows an employer to opt out of the current government mandate that forces them to include the morning after pill and contraceptives in their employee’s insurance benefits, if and only if, the employer has a religious objection. The current mandate, which has been highlighted by the Obama administration’s actions, forces employers to include the morning after pill and contraceptives in their insurance benefits even if it violates the employer’s religious beliefs.
Employers should not be forced by the government to do something against their religious beliefs. That violates their First Amendment rights.
My legislation does not authorize employers to ask or know about their employee’s contraceptive use, and it does not authorize employers to fire anyone for that use.
The Catholic Church and other faith-based organizations support my legislation. Under it, employers like St. Vincent De Paul, a Catholic-based charity, would be able to opt out of the mandate. Since the legislation was written with the help of a national legal organization that fights for religious freedoms, I believe it will withstand legal tests.
Ironically, most of the controversy surrounding my legislation revolves around language already in Arizona law for 10 years — language that I did not even introduce. Current law allows a woman who works for a church that has opted out of the mandate to have the medicine paid for if the woman uses it for a purpose other than birth control. The insurance company, not the employer, knows that information. The key is that I didn’t introduce that language in my bill. It is already in law and it will still be in law whether my legislation passes or not.
I am not Catholic, and I do not have a moral objection to the use of contraceptives, but I do respect the right of those religious employers that do.
Since I am a woman, I would never create legislation that takes away women’s rights. Women who work for religious employers will still be able to obtain medication somewhere else. Since Walmart sells it for $9/month, the cost may even be cheaper than the insurance co-pay itself.
If the government wasn’t forcing religious employers to do something against their religious beliefs, I wouldn’t be talking about this issue. But protecting our First Amendment right to freedom of religion is one of the most important things we can do. If we lose that, America’s future is truly lost.
It is unfortunate that some in the media are repeating distortions and untruths brought about by the opposition. I wish they would have called me or the lawyers that wrote it so they could report the truth. I guess that wouldn’t make a juicy story. Thank you to the media that are publishing my side of the story.
House Majority Whip Debbie Lesko is the State Representative for LD 9.
Ooooo. A wee bit defensive aren’t we, Ms. Lesko? All about First Amendment Rights? Really? What about the rights of the employee? Why should any employer have the right to demand a doctor’s note, giving a woman permission to take any medication, contraceptive or otherwise? And just because you Ms. Lesko are against abortion [note the mention of the morning after pill] does not give you the right to impose your religious beliefs on your constituents, nor does an employer have the right to know anything about my medical history, which would be necessary in this twisted piece of legislation.
This is not a theocracy. At least not yet.
And why mention the Catholics since you’re not a Catholic yourself? Unless you know what we know: The Catholic Bishops and Religious Right have made an odd couple’s Holy Alliance to rid the world of witches [otherwise known as Fallen Women, wanton sluts and/or the Daughters of Eve].
Note one other thing. As with so many others in this Cult of Procreation, Ms. Lesko points a crooked finger, blames distortions on the press, untruths hatched by the opposition. Rather than taking a long, hard gaze in the mirror.
Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who’s the worst liar of them all?
I have a suggestion for the knitter’s group. I wouldn’t limit these handcrafted items to men only. It’s clear that a number of women need a back up set of anatomically-correct body parts with the scripted note suggested by Government Free VJJs:
Get You Pre-Historic Laws Out of My Uterus!
Better yet, here’s one of your own.
Check out the site. It will make you smile. And Lordy, we need all the smiles we can get right now. Btw, the site provides patterns for your work of art, be it knitted, crocheted or made of fabric. And though the site invites you to hand deliver the items to your representatives, they are quite happy to have a volunteer do the honors. Think of these items arriving in the office of your favorite Congressperson, the item unwrapped and then the expression of . . . well, I‘ll leave it to your imagination.
Let the knitting begin! And remember, these women weren’t polite either:
Have They No Decency?
Posted: March 25, 2012 Filed under: 2012 primaries, abortion rights, birth control, Civil Liberties, Democratic Politics, Feminists, fetus fetishists, Hillary Clinton, Human Rights, Planned Parenthood, PLUB Pro-Life-Until-Birth, Religious Conscience, religious extremists, Republican politics, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights 15 CommentsWomen across the US, even the world have reacted to the steady Republican assault on women’s reproductive rights. There’s no end to the craziness.
For the GOP’s ‘official’ stance? They categorically deny a ‘War on Women.’ Rush Limbaugh went so far to say that the ‘feminazi’s’ don’t really care about his comments on Sandra Fluke. They merely want to make a stink and attack him and his wildly successful radio show.
A conspiracy against the Premier Ditto Head. Poor baby.
Strangely enough, I agree with the GOP argument. This is not a War. It’s a Holy Crusade to chip away, dismantle and destroy all vestiges of gains made by women since the Griswold and subsequent Row v Wade decisions. Glenn Beck’s vicious attacks on Margaret Sanger make perfect sense now. Defame and kill the root, the mother of Planned Parenthood, and you bring down the whole tree, destroying the fruits of Sanger’s effort: universal birth control, sexual education [the earlier the better] and freedom for women to control their own lives and destinies.
Make no mistake, this Crusade has been making headway, which has emboldened the zealots in making increasingly outlandish suggestions and demands.
Terri Proud, an Arizona state representative is a fine example.
Most of us have read about Arizona’s proposed HB2625, a bill that would give employers ‘of conscience’ the right to insist a woman obtain a written doctor’s note, proving she’s using birth control for non-sexual reasons. Otherwise, she could be fired. But wait! There’s more. Arizona’s HB2036 would make sweeping changes to abortion, outlawing abortion after 20 weeks based on . . . fetal pain. Representative Proud, obviously caught up in self-righteous fever, answered a constituent’s request that she vote down HB2036 thusly:
Personally I’d like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a “surgical procedure”. If it’s not a life it shouldn’t matter, if it doesn’t harm a woman then she shouldn’t care, and don’t we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway? We demand it everywhere else. Until the dead child can tell me that she/he does not feel any pain – I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living – I will be voting YES.
So, in addition to requesting that note from your doctor, if you do get pregnant [you wanton slut] and want an abortion– only before the 20-week deadline, of course–Representative Proud would, in her withered zealot’s heart, demand you watch someone else’s abortion. How perfectly twisted. And I so-o-o love the arrogance of this reply. Representative Proud has no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living. La-de-dah. God is on the premises!
Who are these people? More importantly, who do these people think they are?
Well, for one thing they’re cowards. Because when Proud was called out on this response, she claimed it was a Democratic Gotcha Game.
Remember, these were her words, her email but somehow this is a ‘gotcha’ moment. Sound familiar? Poor old Rush smells a set up, too, even though it was his three-day, on-air excoriation of Sandra Fluke that initiated the media firestorm and subsequent advertising retreat.
The Grand Inquisitors morph into sniveling crybabies once exposed to the light.
The list of offensive anti-women assaults just keep coming. Alan Dick [appropriate surname], a state representative of Alaska has suggested ‘paternal permission’ for abortion approval. Reportedly, he has stated:
If I thought that the man’s signature was required … in order for a woman to have an abortion, I’d have a little more peace about it.
Obviously a woman cannot make this decision on her own. She needs the signature of the impregnator to make it official so Representative Dick can have peace of mind. Might get a bit dicey if said impregnation was the result of rape or incest. A similar bill was proposed [and shot down] in Ohio in 2009. A paternal permission rule would make non-permission abortions a crime.
Pennsylvania entered the fray recently. Governor Tom Corbett signed an abortion ultrasound mandate and said as long as it was on the ‘exterior’ as opposed to the ‘interior,’ he was right as rain with the bill. As for insisting that women watch? “You just have to close your eyes,” he quipped with a smile. Pennsylvania’s bill requires doctors to perform the ultrasound, offer patients two copies of the image and describe the fetal heartbeat in detail before performing a requested abortion. Which is still legal, btw.
As maddening as these particular examples are, the far more serious overview comes from the Guttmacher Institute:
Over the course of 2011, legislators in all 50 states introduced more than 1,100 provisions related to reproductive health and rights. At the end of it all, states had adopted 135 new reproductive health provisions—a dramatic increase from the 89 enacted in 2010 and the 77 enacted in 2009.1 Fully 92 of the enacted provisions seek to restrict abortion, shattering the previous record of 34 abortion restrictions enacted in 2005. A striking 68% of the reproductive health provisions from 2011 are abortion restrictions, compared with only 26% the year before.
Several states adopted relatively new types of abortion restrictions in 2011. Five states (Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma) followed Nebraska’s lead from the year before and enacted legislation banning abortion at 20 weeks from fertilization (which is equivalent to 22 weeks from the woman’s last menstrual period), based on the spurious assertion that a fetus can feel pain at that point in gestation. And for the first time, seven states (Arizona, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Tennessee)—all largely rural states with large, scarcely populated areas—prohibited the use of telemedicine for medication abortion, requiring instead that the physician prescribing the medication be in the same room as the patient. Telemedicine is increasingly looked to as a way to provide access to health care, especially in underserved rural areas.
The chart below gives you a chilling visual on what’s been going on:
Despite the evidence, there are conservative writers insisting that the War/Crusade Against Women has been hatched by nefarious Democrats. Another devious conspiracy!
Sabrina Schaeffer for instance wrote that the ‘war on women’ narrative is risky business for the Democrats because Republicans managed to close the gender gap in 2010, the first time in 20 years. Ms. Schaeffer might take another look. The most recent recent polls indicate Democrats opening a 15-point lead with likely female voters. Schaeffer wrote:
But the effort by the White House to position Republicans as openly hostile to women is not only absurd, but also doomed to be a failed strategy. President Obama and Democrats have tried to create a caricature of conservatives in which opposition to the Health and Human Services “contraception mandate” means Republicans are trying to take away women’s birth control and reverse gender roles 50 years.
While this may play to their feminist base, it’s destined to fail with female voters at large. Contrary to what groups like NOW suggest, women today are not interested in playing identity politics; . . .
I agree on one point. Women are not interested in playing identity politics on issues we thought resolved two generations ago. However, unless Rick Santorum is secretly a Democrat, I see neither evidence that he was forced into his rigid Morality Police posture [that would be on your knees] nor that he was set up for a gotcha moment. Nor do I see any proof that the other ‘go along to get along’ candidates had a gun at their heads while taking equally outrageous positions. Only Ron Paul has deferred [for the moment] on the major communal female bashing.
Then there were those grand, unforgettable moments: Congressman Issa’s panel convened to discuss contraception, a panel devoid of women; the Blunt Amendment; the witch hunts on Planned Parenthood.
Sorry, these wounds were self-inflicted, clear cannon blasts to the foot.
That’s not ignoring how the Democrats have happily, even giddily taken full advantage of the GOP’s gender tone deafness. It’s been a gift since the Administration was, in fact, losing support among women [the Stupak Amendment, weaseling on Plan B availability for young girls, tossing Elizabeth Warren under the bus, etc.]. Women have ‘suddenly’ become attractive entities with an election looming. Quelle surprise! Yet the Republicans are doing the heavy lifting for the WH, voluntarily hemorrhaging female votes with their nonstop fixation on our sexual parts and what we do with them.
The ‘why’ of this furor remains a mystery. Yes, the GOP seems to be pandering to the religious right in all their insane glory. Some commenters have suggested [and this has absolutely crossed my mind], the GOP wants to blow the election. Or perhaps, they’re inciting the attacks to appeal to those men who resent autonomous women, who dream of the good ole days, the sepia-tinged era of Leave It To Beaver, where Mother dusted the house in high heels, pearls and matching sweater sets. And Dad, of course, was the font of undisputed wisdom. One blogger suggested this might be the Republicans’ idea of a jobs program—put women back in the kitchen, thereby opening the job market to unemployed men.
Whatever the Republican reasoning, it appears to be backfiring. But the election season is young [it just seems pointless and endless]. Still, if I hear one more story on transvaginal probing, zygote personhood or paternal permission slips, I might take out a full-page ad in the NYT, reading:
Have you no decency, Gentleman. At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
Or anything remotely resembling sanity!
Late Night Rant: Keep your State’s Laws off Women
Posted: March 23, 2012 Filed under: open thread, Women's Rights 10 CommentsThis week the Georgia State Legislature debated a bill in the House that would make it necessary for some women to carry stillborn or dying fetuses until they ‘naturally’ go into labor. In arguing for this bill Representative Terry England described his empathy for pregnant cows and pigs in the same situation.
I have a question for Terry England, Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and too many others: I have three daughters, two of them twins. If one of my twins had been stillborn would you have made me carry her to term, thereby endangering both the other twin and me? Or, would you have insisted that the state order a mandatory fetal extraction of the living twin fetus from my womb so that I could continue to carry the stillborn one to term and possibly die myself? My family is curious and since you believe my uterus is your public property, I am, too.
Mr. England, unlike the calves and pigs for which you expressed so much empathy, I am not a beast of burden. I am a woman and I have these human rights:
The right to life.
The right to privacy.
The right to freedom.
The right to bodily integrity.
The right to decide when and how I reproduce.Mr. England, you and your friends do not get to trade these rights, while “dog and hog hunting,” in return for a young man’s chickens.
My human rights outweigh any you or the state corruptly and cynically seek to assign to a mass of dividing cells that will eventually turn into a ‘natural’ person. Personhood-for-zygote based bills and related legislation, like Georgia’s and hundreds of others, bills and laws that criminalize pregnancy and abortion and penalize women for being women, violate my human rights.
Just because you cannot get pregnant does not mean I cannot think clearly, ethically, morally, rationally about my body, human life or the consequences of my actions. Just because you cannot get pregnant does not mean that I do not have rights when I am pregnant. I have responsibility but am powerless. You have power but are irresponsible with my rights.
By not trusting me, you force me to trust you. And YOU are not trustworthy.
I gestate humans, you do not. I know how it feels to be pregnant. You do not. I know what happens to a fetus in a womb. You do not. I have carried three fetuses to term. You have not. What I experience when I am pregnant is not empathy. It is permeability. The fetus is me. And the state is you, apparently. But, no matter what you say or do I have fundamental human rights. What makes you think that you, who cannot have this fully human experience, can tell me anything about gestation or how I experience it? Especially when you compare my existence and experience to that of brutish animals.
The rest of the civilized world thinks this country has lost its mind. It’s no wonder. Look at this list of frenzied misogyny:
1. Making women carry still-born fetuses to full term because cows and pigs do. This week, Mr England, you supported a bill, the net effect of which, taken tandem with other restrictions, will result in doctors and women being unable to make private, medically-based, critical care decisions and some women being effectively forced to carry their dead or dying fetuses. Women are different from farm animals, Mr. England, and this bill, requiring a woman to carry a dead or dying fetus is inhumane and unethical. By forcing a woman to do this, you are violating her right not to be subjected to inhuman treatment and tortured. And, yes, involuntarily carrying a dead fetus to term, although not torture to you or to a pig, is torture for a woman. It is also a violation of her bodily integrity and a threat to her life and as such violates her right to life.
2. Consigning women to death to save a fetus. Abortions save women’s lives. “Let women die” bills are happening all over the country. There is no simple or pretty way to put this. Every day, all over the world, women die because they do not have access to safe abortions. Yet, here we are, returning to the dark ages of maternal sacrifice. Do really have to type this sentence: this is a violation of women’s fundamental right to life.
3. Criminalizing pregnancy and miscarriages and arresting, imprisoning and charging women who miscarry with murder, like Rennie Gibbs in Mississippi or at least 40 other similar cases in Alabama or like Bei Bei Shuai, a woman who is now imprisoned, is charged with murder after trying to commit suicide while pregnant. Pregnant women are becoming a special class subject to “special” laws that infringe on their fundamental rights.
4. Forcing women to undergo involuntary vaginal penetration (otherwise called rape) with a condom-covered, six- to eight-inch ultrasound probe. Pennsylvania is currently considering that option along with 11 other states. Trans-vaginal ultrasounds undertaken without a woman’s consent are rape according to the legal definition of the word. This violates a woman’s bodily integrity and also constitutes torture when used, as states are suggesting, as a form of control and oppression. Women have the right not to be raped by the state.
5. Disabling women or sacrificing their lives by either withholding medical treatment or forcing women to undergo involuntary medical procedures. We impose an unequal obligation on women to sacrifice their bodily integrity for another. For example, as in Tysiac v. Poland, in which a mother of two, became blind after her doctor refused to perform an abortion that she wanted that would have halted the course of a degenerative eye disease. If my newborn baby is in need of a kidney and you have a spare matching one, can I enact legislation that says the state can take yours and give it to her? No. We do not force people to donate their organs to benefit others, even those who have already been born. One of the most fundamental of all human rights is that humans be treated equally before the law. Denying a woman this right is a violation of her equal right to this protection.
6. Giving zygotes “personhood” rights while systematically stripping women of their fundamental rights. There is too much to say about the danger of personhood ideas creeping into health policy to do it here. But, consider what happens to a woman whose womb is not considered the “best” environment for a gestating fetus in a world of personhood-for-zygote legislation: who decides the best environment — the state, her insurance company, her employer, her rapist who decides he really, really wants to be a father? Anyone but a woman.
7. Inhibiting, humiliating and punishing women for their choices to have an abortion for any reason by levying taxes specifically on abortion, including abortions sought by rape victims to end their involuntary insemination, imposing restrictive requirements like 24 hour wait periods and empowering doctors to lie to female patients about their fetuses in order to avoid prosecution. In Arizona, Kansas, Texas, Virginia, Colorado, Arkansas and other states around the country bills that make women “pay” for their choices are abounding.
8. Allowing employers to delve into women’s private lives and only pay for insurance when they agree, for religious reasons, with how she choses to use birth control. In Arizona, which introduced such a bill this week, this means covering payment for birth control as a benefit only when a woman has proven that she will not use it to control her own reproduction (ie. as birth control). As much as I am worried about women and families in Arizona though, I am more worried about those in Alabama. You see, as recently revealed in a public policy poll in Alabama, conservative, evangelicals who support “personhood” related “pro-life” legislation and are fighting for their “religious liberty” — 21 percent think interracial marriage should be illegal. So, what if they decide that an employee involved in an interracial marriage should not, by divine mandate, reproduce? Do they switch and provide birth control for this employee? Do they make contraception a necessary term of employment for people in interracial marriages? This violates a woman’s right to privacy. My womb is one million times more private than your bedrooms, gentlemen.
9. Sacrificing women’s overall health and the well-being of their families in order to stop them from exercising their fundamental human right to control their own bodies and reproduction. Texas just did that when it turned down $35million dollars in federal funds thereby ensuring that 300,000 low-income and uninsured Texas women will have no or greatly-reduced access to basic preventive and reproductive health care.
10. Depriving women of their ability to earn a living and support themselves and their families. Bills, like this one in Arizona, allow employers to fire women for using contraception. Women like these are being fired for not.
We are not property and breeders. It’s time to stand up for what’s right.
This is an open thread.
The Remarkable Revisionism Of Maureen Dowd
Posted: March 15, 2012 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, abortion rights, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton: Her Campaign for All of Us, Maureen Dowd, Revisionism, War on Women, Women's Rights 24 CommentsI stopped reading Maureen Dowd’s columns after the 2008 election season. Dowd’s attacks on Hillary Clinton, her drift into pseudo-literary
allusions and her love affair with all things Barack Obama was too much to bear.
Life is short, I reasoned. So little time, so much to read. Why waste precious moments on mind-numbing crapola?
But yesterday morning, I found a deadly twofer in the Op-Ed section of the NYT. Thomas Freidman [a man I rarely agree with], waxed eloquent on the future of capitalism, now that the shine on globalization has dulled. Not to be outdone, Dowd led with the Tea Party’s warrior cry: ‘Don’t Tread On Us.’ Her tagline?
For the Republican uncivil war on women, we’ll need a take-no-prisoners Democratic general.
We’ll need? As in Maureen Dowd and moi? As in gender solidarity within the Democratic Party now has meaning?
Oh yes, I’m well aware of the Republican assault on all things female, particularly our sexual parts, our inability to make right-minded decisions when it comes to reproduction or contraception. Women are obviously so clueless it’s a wonder we can tie our shoes. Just to be sure we understand what pregnancy is, what it truly means, women in a number of states will be required to have an ultrasound before terminating a pregnancy, otherwise known as a legal abortion. The forward-thinking Great State of Arizona has suggested legislation where an employer can fire you for using birth control. Amazing!
I’m waiting for someone to suggest arranged marriages. Or foot binding.
That being said, Dowd piqued my curiosity, seduced me to break my no-read vow. I was fascinated with her head-spinning reversal:
Hillary Clinton has fought for women’s rights around the world. But who would have dreamed that she would have to fight for them at home?
And then goes on to say:
. . . Republicans could drive women into Democratic arms. . . .And whose arms would be more welcoming to the sisters than Hillary’s?
This is too rich. Hillary Clinton has spent her entire professional life fighting for the rights of women and girls, here and abroad. But in 2008, none of that mattered. Shortly before the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton spoke to supporters. Her eyes welled up. Maureen Dowd’s reaction? In her Op-ed entitled, ‘Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back To the Whitehouse?’ she wrote:
But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.
And to further skewer:
She became emotional because she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite. All those years in the shadow of one Natural, only to face the prospect of being eclipsed by another Natural?
Yup, that’s what I call a strong dose of sisterly love! A sharp knife right between the ribs. Get the angle right, there’s barely any blood. And the campaign against Hillary was death by a thousand tiny cuts.
But Dowd was not a one-trick pony. She kept it up. In the piece ‘Wilting Over Waffles’:
Now that Hillary has won Pennsylvania, it will take a village to help Obama escape from the suffocating embrace of his rival. Certainly Howard Dean will be of no use steering her to the exit. It’s like Micronesia telling Russia to denuke.
“You know, some people counted me out and said to drop out,” said a glowing Hillary at her Philadelphia victory party, with Bill and Chelsea by her side. “Well, the American people don’t quit. And they deserve a president who doesn’t quit, either.”
The Democrats are growing ever more desperate about the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.
Another warm and fuzzy descriptive: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. What’s not to love?
Dowd whipped it right to the finish line. In a piece entitled: ‘Yes, She Can’:
Hillary’s orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.
And:
Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning portrayals of women … dampen the dreams of our daughters.” This, even though postmortems, including the new raft of campaign memos leaked by Clintonistas to The Atlantic — another move that undercuts Obama — finger Hillary’s horrendous management skills.
Besides the crashing egos and screeching factions working at cross purposes, Joshua Green writes in the magazine, Hillary’s “hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.”
It would have been better to put this language in the platform: “A woman who wildly mismanages and bankrupts a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar campaign operation, and then blames sexism in society, will dampen the dreams of our daughters.”
Dampen the dreams of our daughters???
I’d like to dampen Maureen Dowd’s head, a few dunks in the toilet. But to be fair, Maureen Dowd is not the only one revising past barbs and now hyping the Hillary Clinton train for 2016. I’m hearing the pundit echo machine repeat the refrain that Hillary has reached a pinnacle of respect, equal to . . . Al Gore and John Kerry.
Really?
Hillary Clinton reached that pinnacle long before these born-again cheerleaders took note. Despite the minimizing of her accomplishments–the 80+ countries she visited as First Lady, her participation in Vital Voices during the peace agreement sought in Ireland and her remarkable speech in Beijing—there were many of us who recognized Hillary Clinton as one of the most talented and dedicated political figures of her generation.
The question is . . . why now? Why the sudden gush of Hillary love after years of pot shots?
Well, riddle me this: who desperately needs the women’s vote in 2012? Sure, the Republicans have gone out of their way to play the Grand Inquisitor of the 21st century, but until recently President Obama specifically and Democrats in general were watching the female vote slip into tight-lipped resentment. But then, who can draw genuine excitement in the female electorate [leaving the dwindling Palinistas out of the equation for the moment]?
None other than Hill, who has been voted as the most admired woman for the last 16 years. With good reason.
Hillary Clinton has stated her role as Secretary of State is likely to be her last public position. I’ve resigned myself to that fact though I’d be thrilled if she were to run again. But the possibility of a future Clinton candidacy has not cast mass amnesia, erased what we witnessed and heard–the flurry of demeaning articles, suggestions that Hillary was ‘pimping’ Chelsea on the campaign trail, that someone should drag Hillary into a broom closet where only the aggressor comes out, that her nagging voice was like everyone’s ex-wife, etc., etc., etc.
Or this:
If Maureen Dowd and her colleagues have had a genuine change of heart about Hillary Clinton’s extraordinary career, her achievements and leadership qualities, I’m glad for that. But you’ll have to forgive me. I’m more than a little suspicious of rah-rah revisionism when the ‘Change We Can Believe In’ mantra has grown old and stale.
You’re not fooling anyone, Ms. Dowd. We have not forgotten.
Women, Know THY Doctor Well
Posted: March 15, 2012 Filed under: abortion rights, religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: wrongful birth 7 Comments
Doctor Evil practicing his freaky religious beliefs on you in a hospital near you.
There are so many things that worry me about the current war against women waged by religious fanatics that I don’t know where to start. Some reasons are philosophical, political, and scientific. Others are quite personal. I am a woman and a mother of two daughters. I’ve had one very dicey pregnancy that had a good outcome. It could’ve turned out differently, however. I am also the mother of an ob/gyn living in a state that wants to make shooting abortion doctors justifiable homicide. I’m certain my daughter’s practice will never be based solely on provision of abortions, but I’d like to think she could provide the service when needed without any state interfering with patient/doctor privilege or her medical opinions.
The legislation, LB 232, was introduced by state Sen. Mark Christensen, a devout Christian and die-hard abortion foe who is opposed to the procedure even in the case of rape. Unlike its South Dakota counterpart, which would have allowed only a pregnant woman, her husband, her parents, or her children to commit “justifiable homicide” in defense of her fetus, the Nebraska bill would apply to any third party.
“In short, this bill authorizes and protects vigilantes, and that’s something that’s unprecedented in our society,” Melissa Grant of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland told the Nebraska legislature’s judiciary committee on Wednesday. Specifically, she warned, it could be used to target Planned Parenthood’s patients and personnel. Also testifying in opposition to the bill was David Baker, the deputy chief executive officer of the Omaha police department, who said, “We share the same fears…that this could be used to incite violence against abortion providers.”
Baker’s concern is well-grounded: Abortion providers are frequent targets of violent attacks. Eight doctors have been murdered by anti-abortion extremists since 1993, and another 17 have been victims of murder attempts.
When my second pregnancy looked to be a very difficult one, I got a nice Jewish neonate–who is now working with my daughter–and delivered in a Methodist Hospital. I freaked when I thought I was going to have to deliver at a Catholic Hospital and sent my husband off to Mutual of Omaha to get the insurance to give us an alternative. Like I said, everything went well in the end but there were lots of complications and issues.
You have to have a doctor you can trust to tell you exactly what they know these days. Michelle Goldberg–writing for The Daily Beast— provides some really incredible stories of women whose doctors withheld vital information from them to ensure they’d give birth. Many of these women eventually sue for wrongful birth. These stories are like reading one pregnant woman’s nightmare after another. You’d like to think the doctor would be on the side of the woman giving birth but evidently you cannot depend on it in these days of religious fanaticism and laws that basically reward medical malpractice.
Cases in which doctors deliberately deceive their patients to stop them from getting abortions aren’t common, but they do happen. Abbott Brown, a lawyer who has been trying wrongful-birth cases for 34 years, says he had one case in which an anti-abortion family doctor overseeing a woman’s pregnancy never performed an ultrasound; the child was born without arms. Speaking to The Washington Post in 2009 after the murder of George Tiller, a doctor who performed late-term abortions, his colleague LeRoy Carhart described a case in which a woman learned, very late in her pregnancy, that her fetus had no brain. “Her doctor knew the problem all along but just never told her,” he said.
Kansas’s bill would mean that such a doctor would have the right to keep such crucial, devastating information to himself. “It’s explicitly about preventing women from getting the information that they need to make their own personal and private decisions,” says Jennifer Dalven, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project. “Does this incentivize people to act in a particular way? For the vast majority of physicians, the answer is going to be no. The question is, what about those few cases where it does?”
The concerted effort to remove the ability to make health decisions from women and place them with the state–in many cases giving the doctor the ability to lie or withhold information–comes from the party that supposedly supports small government. Kansas and Arizona–two hellhole states–have decided that the doctor should be held free from liability for doing this and are legislating away the right to sue doctors for ‘wrongful birth’.
In some states, though, anti-abortion activists are pushing legislation to protect doctors who don’t give women all available information about their pregnancies. Arizona and Kansas are considering bills that would ban lawsuits in cases where doctors fail to warn their patients about birth defects. The Arizona law, which is similar to legislation that exists in a handful of other states, would apply only when doctors make a mistake. But the Kansas provision, part of a sweeping, 69-page anti-abortion bill, would allow physicians to lie to women who might otherwise terminate their pregnancies. It is similar to a law in Oklahoma passed two years ago—in concert, ironically, with mandatory ultrasound legislation
We’ll likely see more such laws in the future, spurred in part by widespread conservative outrage over a recent so-called wrongful-birth case in Oregon. Indeed, to understand the reasoning behind the push to disavow a woman’s right to know about her pregnancy in certain circumstances, you have to understand the tricky, ethically ambiguous legal concept of wrongful birth. A type of legal claim, it allows parents to sue when they aren’t given information about a pregnancy that would have caused them to abort. In the Oregon case, Ariel and Deborah Levy sued after a botched chorionic villus sampling test failed to reveal that their daughter had Down syndrome, something they learned only after she was born. On Friday, a jury awarded them $2.9 million.
As some one who has gone through a life threatening pregnancy followed directly by life threatening cancer, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to know that your doctor is not on your side and is deliberately feeding you lies. Just about the time I think these legislators have sunk to some new low, these scum suckers find a newer one. Warn every one you know with a functional uterus about these developments and tell them to interview their doctors carefully. That’s about all I can say at this point.
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