The Rise of Jane Crow

Not since the country experienced the havoc of Plessy v. Ferguson have so many states done so much to actively restrict rights recognized by the Supreme Court under the context  of promoting  imaginary state interests.   A number of laws and constitutional amendments were passed during reconstruction that were meant to right the wrongs done to both free people of color as well as former slaves. Shortly there after, slave state after slave state tried to enact laws to chip away at the constitutional rights of black Americans under the same pretext that states had some compelling  interest.  In a similar action, we now see a variety of laws that imply that the state needs to protect a woman from her presumed bad judgment.

Lawyers argue that this is nothing more than an attempt to find doctrinal loopholes in three court cases.  That would be Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, and Gonazles v. Carhart.  Each of these cases sought to compromise the constitutional rights of women and clearly inject the state into a woman’s right to self-determination.  The latter cases have clearly laid out weirdish pretenses like phantom fetal pain or third term deliveries t mislabelled as abortion that have no connection to science, medicine or fact.

The Carhart case has activated 916 Anti-abortion measures in the first three months of 2011.  Justice Kennedy owes every single American woman a huge apology. The Guttmacher Institute has a succinct list of trends resulting from the nonscientific meanderings of an Opus Dei adherent that feels the need to subject women to all kinds of harassment in order to exercise their constitutional rights just because he can’t keep his personal mythology out of his job duties.

To date, legislators have introduced 916 measures related to reproductive health and rights in the 49 legislatures that have convened their regular sessions. (Louisiana’s legislature will not convene until late April.) By the end of March, seven states had enacted 15 new laws on these issues, including provisions that:

• expand the pre-abortion waiting period requirement in South Dakota to make it more onerous than that in any other state, by extending the time from 24 hours to 72 hours and requiring women to obtain counseling from a crisis pregnancy center in the interim;
• expand the abortion counseling requirement in South Dakota to mandate that counseling be provided in-person by the physician who will perform the abortion and that counseling include information published after 1972 on all the risk factors related to abortion complications, even if the data are scientifically flawed;
• require the health departments in Utah and Virginia to develop new regulations governing abortion clinics;
• revise the Utah abortion refusal clause to allow any hospital employee to refuse to “participate in any way” in an abortion;
• limit abortion coverage in all private health plans in Utah, including plans that will be offered in the state’s health exchange; and
• revise the Mississippi sex education law to require all school districts to provide abstinence-only sex education while permitting discussion of contraception only with prior approval from the state.

In addition to these laws, more than 120 other bills have been approved by at least one chamber of the legislature, and some interesting trends are emerging. As a whole, the proposals introduced this year are more hostile to abortion rights than in the past: 56% of the bills introduced so far this year seek to restrict abortion access, compared with 38% last year. Three topics—insurance coverage of abortion, restriction of abortion after a specific point in gestation and ultrasound requirements—are topping the agenda in several states. At the same time, legislators are proposing little in the way of proactive initiatives aimed at expanding access to reproductive health –related services; this stands in sharp contrast to recent years when a range of initiatives to promote comprehensive sex education, permit expedited STI treatment for patients’ partners and ensure insurance coverage of contraception were adopted. For the moment, at least, supporters of reproductive health and rights are almost uniformly playing defense at the state level.

This is clearly a shocking conspiracy to deprive women of their autonomy and to inject the state directly into the middle of personal medical decisions.  Op-ed columnist Gail Collins puts a human face on these statistics.  She singles out the case of Texas which appears to lead the country in a lemming like march against science, contraception, and the idea that women are capable of making adult, moral decisions without the state giving them lectures, time frames, and measure after measure of harassment. An effort by one state senator to simply ensure that information handed out was medically accurate died in committee.  It’s obvious these folks aren’t interested in facts.  It’s a crusade back to the days when male high priests determined the will of the angry sky god and every one else just had to deal with it. There is no such thing as a lie to outrageous when it’s about a fertilized egg.

Meanwhile, on the House floor, anti-abortion lawmakers were stripping financing for other family-planning programs. Representative Randy Weber successfully moved part of the money into anti-abortion crisis centers for pregnant women.

“There’s been research done. … It actually shows the highest abortion rate is among women actively using contraceptives,” Weber insisted.

“These folks are anti-abortion, anti-contraception and anti-science,” said Representative Mike Villarreal, who tangled with Weber during the debate.

Villarreal has had a rather dark view of the rationality of some of his colleagues ever since he tried to improve the state’s abstinence-only sex education programs by requiring that the information imparted be medically accurate. It died in committee. “The pediatrician on the committee wouldn’t vote for it; he was the swing vote,” Villarreal recalled.

Welcome to the fact-free zone. This week, U.S. Senator John Cornyn gave an interview to Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune in which he claimed that the battle in Congress to defund Planned Parenthood “was really part of a larger fight about spending money we don’t have on things that aren’t essential.”

Remember, Senator Kyle claiming 90% of Planned Parenthood’s business was abortions when number is more like 3%?  That’s just par for the course for the fetus fetishists.  He later backtracked by saying his speech given on the house floor and entered into the record was  “not intended to be a factual statement.”  Well, that’s the problem.  These folks are WAY short of factual statements.  That’s not stopping them from passing laws based on pure fiction. After weeks of Stephen Colbert taking Kyle on via twitter and many news outlets, we still have right wing, Republican politicians completely lacking the facts.  Here’s representative in Florida made yet another misstatement to the press about this today.

PolitiFact says state Rep. Ronald Renuart, R-Ponte Vedra Beach, was wrong when he said Planned Parenthood received more than a third of its income from providing abortions.

The national debate over funding for Planned Parenthood spilled into state politics in a recent House committee debate over a bill to require ultrasounds before having an abortion.

Renuart said, “almost 37 percent of the total income from Planned Parenthood is from abortions. And to me, it sounds like they don’t want to lose business.”

PolitiFact Florida rated the claim false.

Reporter Aaron Sharockman said Renuart is quoting from a Planned Parenthood study, “but he’s leaving out whole chunks of how Planned Parenthood gets its revenues.”

He said a better estimate might be 13 percent, but no one knows for sure because Planned Parenthood doesn’t release that information.

“Renuart’s overstating the number by not including other sources of income, things like private contribution, as well as the federal funding Planned Parenthood receives,” Sharockman said.

Renuart’s statement came during debate over a bill requiring women to get an ultrasound before having an abortion. It is awaiting a vote by the full House. A similar bill is working its way through the Florida Senate.

I think these guys think that some sort of 2 day fully complete mini-me will pop up in each huge projection of the ultrasound. They can’t possibly have even seen an ultrasound let alone know anything about gestational development. You would think that people that are so concerned about keeping government out of everyone’s lives would realize that they and the state are not the best decision makers on a medical procedure.  But no, state lectures are the prescribed way of telling women they couldn’t possibly make a good, moral decision.

At this point, we’re all on the defensive.  It’s obvious that there’s a nest of these vipers in every statehouse in the country and we’ll need to vote them out.  Until then, be prepared for more fiction-based accounts of human development and laws based on them.