Dispatches From The War On Women: How Many More Abortion Bills This Year?

Welcome to Dispatches, your round-up of the latest news from the frontlines of the War on Women. Have a story from your state or an idea on how to push back? Share them here and fight back against the War on Women.

We’re about halfway through 2012 and states have already enacted 95 new reproductive rights restrictions. While this number is less than 2011, let’s remember that 2011 was a record year for reproductive rights-restricting legislation and that typically an election year like 2012 sees states focusing on more traditional brick-and-mortar types of bills. Since this is the second year in a row of such a laser-like focus on restricting women’s health care, and since Republicans have also attacked equal pay and collective bargaining laws, it’s safe to say that the GOP is pretty much set on rolling the clock back to at least the pre-suffrage era.

Wow, Mitt Romney. After being met with boos while addressing the NAACP convention for promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Romney took a swipe at the organization saying “if they want more stuff from the government tell them to go vote for the other guy–more free stuff.” Tell me again that the Republican party doesn’t have a race problem. Please.

Republicans like Romney talk a big game when it comes to repealing the Affordable Care Act, but here’s an argument for why they won’t actually go through with it.

You win some, you lose some. 71% of Utah voters now support gay partnerships, but in Texas a gay couple was arrested for requesting a marriage license.

The FBI report on the Penn State child sex abuse cover-up was released and let’s just say the NCAA needs to shut the program down. Coach Joe Paterno and the entire institution showed a stunning and criminal disregard for the victims and only concern for the reputation of the football program. In some ways the report is simply confirmation of what we all knew had to be the truth, but that doesn’t make it any less tragic.

Is there a for-profit prison motive for criminalizing pregnancies?

The latest installment of Teaching Feminism looks at summer reading and how to best get boys and girls reading all summer long.

The first-of-its-kind Lesbian Political Action Committee (LPAC) was launched this week to champion lesbians’ and women’s rights in the 2012 election cycle. Among LPAC’s most visible supporters are Jane Lynch and Billie Jean King.

Finally, Missouri Gov. Jay Dixon (D-MO) vetoed a bill that would have allowed employers or health insurance providers to stop coverage for contraception, abortion, or sterilization if coverage violated their religious or moral convictions. Nixon said he vetoed the bill because “we want families making these decisions, not insurance companies.” Word.

Thanks for checking back and don’t forget to send in your stories, suggestions and comments. We’ll be back each weekday with the latest in the best and the worst from the War on Women. So long as the battle rages, we’ll cover the latest, so please check back!

Photo from Valerie Everett via flickr.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Jessie R.

3:29PM PDT on Jul 22, 2012

I dont know, I guess I will ask you the same question.

July 22
send a green star

3:14PM PDT on Jul 22, 2012

I posted something that described my feelings exactly, whether you think its "over the top" is not really my problem. We are supposed to post our feelings on the subject are we not? I did that.

You can make all the "you have issues" assumptions all you want, but I said what I wanted, deal with it.

3:05PM PDT on Jul 22, 2012

Micheal, you need to get over yourself and stop talking down to and being rude to people who dont agree with you. I actually had respect for you until you started treating me like I was mentally incompetent because I didnt see things like you. This is a place where we should be able to state what we beleive and not have to worry about being insulted by people who cant handle disagreement. We are not in kindergarten.

2:50PM PDT on Jul 22, 2012

Micheal T writes "Get some help Jessie."

Are you getting pissed off that I dont agree with you or what? I would say every bit of what I posted but that formerly pro-choice woman said it so much better.

2:44PM PDT on Jul 22, 2012

'Abortion is not, never has been, and never will be, “health care”, and I hereby publicly challenge and charge every abortion provider and supporter to cease from using that deceptive and unsubstantiated term to describe abortion.

I refuse to support the state-sanctioned, intentional, taking of any human life, for any reason whatsoever, and there is no "religion" in any of these above reasons. My religious position on abortion is private and completely separate and apart from these reasons. I wrote this specifically to refute the oft-cited excuse by the prochoice abortion industry that the pro-life movement objects to abortion for religious reasons more than any other, while deliberately ignoring the fact that even secular, non-religious persons often object to abortion.

Mary Anne Gunter
June 29, 2012"

2:43PM PDT on Jul 22, 2012

"27) I cannot support an act that dishonorably treats the product of abortion, a dead human being, as nothing more than mere medical waste, when even abortionists themselves categorically admit that that “medical waste” is a human being, a person. Any deceased human being, born or unborn, is deserving of proper handling / burial and dignity, which the abortion industry deliberately ignores and refuses to honor.

28) I cannot support an act that calls itself “reproductive healthcare” and then works hard to be allowed to use non-physician staff members to perform abortions that can sometimes kill a female patient, sometimes with nothing more medically responsible than televised physician supervision via “web abortion”, sometimes on an interstate basis.

29) I cannot support an act that deceptively and intentionally often claims, with no empirical, medicoscientific, biological supporting evidence whatsoever, that the unborn human being is “not human until birth”. It remains consistently incapable of definitively citing at what precise moment during birth the human being supposedly gains its status as a human being. It deliberately and obstreperously ignores the irrefutable, biological fact that no one, in the world’s history, in opposition to overwhelming, long-substantiated biological evidence otherwise, has ever been able to prove that a human fetus is not human at anytime before birth (and therefore a person deserving personh

2:40PM PDT on Jul 22, 2012

"25) I cannot support an act that was legalized by highly-questionable, Constitutionally-dubious 1973’s Roe v. Wade when even the original plaintiff of the case is horrified by and disagrees with it and has devoted the remainder of her life to refuting it.

26) I cannot support an act that works harder to guarantee a girl or woman the legal freedom, including freedom from threat and harassment, to have an abortion, and then, fully cognizant, deliberately remains silent and ignores the equal legal freedom of a teenage girl being harassed and threatened into having an abortion against her will. “Reproductive freedom” is ostensibly supposed to be about the freedom to have - or not to have - an abortion, without threat or harassment, and therefore all females should be equally respected and protected. Most often the prochoice movement works harder to protect a female only if she chooses abortion, over that female who does not want to abort and is being pressured into it by others. The number one cause of death to pregnant females in the United States is not illness but homicide, perpetrated by her male partner who does not want her pregnant, and the industry is doing nothing if very little to protect her from having that abortion when she often does not want to have one. Quite simply, it is financially motivated to not help her avoid abortion, and offers her little to nothing in the way of counseling, tangible help, etc. in the instance of domestic abuse. The ma

2:37PM PDT on Jul 22, 2012

"22) I cannot support an act that is performed by the organization Planned Parenthood more than any other provider in the world – an organization founded by Dr. Margaret Sanger, a documented racist and eugenist who also endorsed forced sterilization, and today the most prevalent cause of death to African-Americans is not violence or illness but abortion.

23) I cannot support an act that, at its very foundation, wholly flouts the sacred physician’s promise in the ancient Hippocratic Oath to not perform an abortion. Humane and dignified healthcare and its providers are charged to uphold, protect, and respect all human life – not to intentionally end it and certainly to never financially profit from ending it. I hereby publicly charge and challenge every abortionist, and particularly Planned Parenthood, if they insist upon performing abortion, then to perform it for free, refusing any payment, monetary or otherwise, for the deliberate taking of human life.

24) I cannot support an act that wholly ignores and runs roughshod over the timeless principles of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, which guarantees the sacred right to life of the human being. The abortion industry astutely realizes that, to admit the unborn is in fact human, is to require its being acknowledged as possessing inalienable rights – and so proceeds to manipulatively and deceitfully work hard to deny the unborn human being is even a “person”; ergo, if it i

2:35PM PDT on Jul 22, 2012

"18) I cannot support an act where its perpetrators are financially motivated to carry it out and legislate on its behalf.

19) I cannot support an act that propagandizes itself as being "pro-woman" - then those same "supporters of women" disingenuously endorse sex-selective abortion of specifically and only female fetuses, simply and only because they are future women.

20) I cannot support an act that has worked so diligently to legally guarantee that even a 14 year-old child can have an abortion against and without her parents' wishes and knowledge - and then helps her do it behind her parent's back, then promptly abandons her after the abortion. It has worked harder to divide and help alienate pregnant children from their parents than it has to help the parents and their daughter to positively handle her pregnancy. Yet if there are medical complications post-abortion, the only one legally responsible for that child’s healthcare costs and provision is not the abortion industry who helped her get that abortion behind her parents’ back – but the parents themselves.

21) I cannot support an act that describes itself as “reproductive health”, then works hard to avoid and circumnavigate reasonable, ethical, and humane medical competency and proficiency standards, same as any legitimate healthcare provider, hospital or medical clinic treating any other human illness or injury or performing any other medical procedure is legally and ethically req

2:32PM PDT on Jul 22, 2012

"14) I cannot support an act that self-righteously and eugenistically claims, with no supporting clinical evidence whatsoever, that some humans deserve to live more than others; i.e. the special needs child, or the child of a female who was impregnated by incest / rape, when the evidence has confirmed otherwise.

15) I cannot support an act that takes it upon itself to decide what human being would have a "better life" than another - and kills it based on that philosophy, again, with no supporting clinical evidence whatsoever.

16) I cannot support an act that intentionally and advantageously focuses performing abortions on the youngest, most vulnerable, uneducated, and naive population. Statistically abortion is performed on the 15-24 year-old girl and young woman more than any other population – a group least likely to understand and monitor for medical and psychological risks, have enough supportive resources, education, many times options other than abortion, ability to self-help post-abortion; a group least likely to ask penetrating questions and understand legalese / rights surrounding abortion.

17) I cannot support an act that so often falsely assures a girl or young woman that her "problems will all be over" with abortion - and doesn't tell her that often her problems are actually only beginning. And when they do, is almost always nowhere around to help her."