It’s been a hell of a shitshow for women’s rights. Planned Parenthood has been under attack for a long time, now, but these days, the attack has ramped up a thousand-fold.
There’s a few stories recently to pull it all together. Let’s start, of course, with Agent Orange…
From Reuters…
President Donald Trump on Thursday signed a resolution that will allow U.S. states to restrict how federal funds for contraception and reproductive health are spent, a move cheered by anti-abortion campaigners.
“This is a major pro-life victory,” said the most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives, Speaker Paul Ryan, adding that a regulation enacted under Democratic former President Barack Obama had forced states to fund Planned Parenthood, a national non-profit that provides contraception, health screenings, and abortions.
Under the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to repeal newly minted rules, both the House and Senate had passed a resolution killing Obama’s regulation that had protected federal grants for clinics in states wanting to block the funding.
States such as Texas in recent years have kept the grants from going to clinics as part of the country’s longstanding fight over abortion. Broadly, many Republicans seek to restrict abortion or make it illegal while Democrats have fought to keep abortion legal.
The resolution had narrowly passed the U.S. Congress, with Vice President Mike Pence called to the Senate on March 30 to break a tie vote in the chamber, where Republicans hold a slim majority. The federal government can never again create a “substantially similar” regulation under the review law.
Great. Just fucking great. And lawmakers across the land are getting disturbingly misogynistic about it…
Like Oklahoma State Rep George Faught…
In defending his controversial antiabortion legislation, Oklahoma state Rep. George Faught said that even in pregnancies that result from rape or incest, “God can bring beauty from ashes.”
I’m sorry… fucking excuse me?!? Fuck you, asshole.
Faught made the statement during a debate on the Oklahoma House floor earlier this week. Faught’s bill, which overwhelmingly passed the House on Tuesday, would outlaw abortions sought by women based solely on a diagnosis of Down syndrome or other genetic abnormalities. A fellow lawmaker criticized the Republican from Muskogee for not including an exception for pregnancies that resulted from rape and incest.
In a heated exchange, Rep. Cory Williams (D-Stillwater) asked Faught whether rape or incest is the “will of God.”
“Well, you know, if you read the Bible, there’s actually a couple of circumstances where that happened. And the Lord uses all circumstances. I mean, you can get on that path, but you know it’s a reality, unfortunately,” Faught said, adding that rape and incest have nothing to do with his legislation.
Williams fired back, saying that because Faught is “proffering divine intervention” as the reasons he won’t include exceptions for rape and incest, fellow lawmakers deserve to know whether he believes that such acts are God’s will.
“You know, it’s a great question to ask,” Faught responded. “And obviously if it happens in someone’s life, it may not be the best thing that ever happened. … So you’re saying that God is not sovereign with every activity that happens in someone’s life and can’t use anything and everything in someone’s life, and I disagree with that.”
This is why we need a more well-defined separation of church and state. This asshole is using fucking God as his excuse for his misogynistic bullshit.
And then there’s Missouri State Senators Rob Onder and Wayne Wallingford… and their… “jokes”…
In Missouri, restrictions on abortion providers are so strict that only one clinic in the state can perform abortions: a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis. But on the State Senate floor Wednesday, two Republican lawmakers joked that women seeking abortions should go to the St. Louis Zoo because it’s “safer” and more regulated than abortion clinics.
“The St. Louis Zoo gets inspected once a year,” said State Senator Bob Onder to his colleague, State Senator Wayne Wallingford, who added, “Maybe we should send the people that want an abortion to the St. Louis Zoo, because we know it’ll be safer.”
Onder then pointed out that zoos have a waiting period of five days before euthanizing animals, whereas Missouri requires women to wait three days after meeting with a doctor to get an abortion.
“Let’s think about this. Babies, it’s three days,” Onder said. “So although there are members of this body who don’t agree with that three days, babies are three days. So zoo animals, it couldn’t be more than 24 hours, right?” He went on, “[It’s] five days, Senator. [And] I believe there’s some sort of requirement to notify in case some other zoo wants to adopt that animal. Isn’t that interesting?”
There aren’t enough facepalms in the world…
And we still need more! Because Iowa State Senator Brad Zaun has basically come out and said that he thinks men should be the ones making decisions for women…
Anti-choice lawmakers are at it again, this time led by Iowa State Senator Brad Zaun. Zaun is that special kind of guy who apparently believes that women can’t be trusted to make decisions about our bodies. Especially if we are unmarried. That’s what mom and dad are for!
State Sen. Zaun is a sponsor of some particularly gross bills in Iowa that would grant the parents of an unmarried woman the right to prevent a woman from choosing to have an abortion, no matter her age. And it gives similar rights to the man who impregnated her.
Oh, and one of these bills would put abortion providers behind bars for providing abortion care after 20 weeks, and doesn’t even include an exception for rape or incest survivors. So there’s that.
Here’s my legislation for you:
If it’s not your body, it’s not your decision.
Hey dudes? Fuck off! Abortion isn’t our issue, got it?
This is not hard to understand.
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