“The Marriage Vow”: The Candidate “Pledge” To End All Pledges
So in the wake of the “Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge” signed by seven Republican presidential candidates, and the “Pro-Life Presidential Pledge” signed by five, along comes Iowa social conservative kingpin Bob Vander Plaats of the Family Leader organization with a new pledge–actually an oath–it calls “The Marriage Vow.”
You have to read this document to believe it. Styled as a “pro-family” platform, the pledge goes far beyond the usual condemnations of same-sex marriage and abortion and requires support for restrictions on divorce (hardly a federal matter), the firing of military officers who place women in forward combat roles, and “recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, [and] greater financial stability.” If that’s not enough, it also enjoins “recognition that robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security.” This, in case you are wondering, is a nod to the “Full Quiver (or Quiverfull) Movement” that encourages large families in a patriarchal structure as a religious obligation, not to mention to those anti-choicers who want to ban some of the most popular forms of contraception.
The preamble to the “Marriage Vow” is even weirder, asserting among other things that “faithful monogomy” was a central preoccupation of the Founding Fathers; that slaves benefitted from stronger families than African-Americans have today; and that any claims there is a genetic basis for homosexuality are “anti-scientific.”
The “Marriage Vow” seems tailor-made to feed the backlash against ever-proliferating “pledges” imposed on Republican presidential candidates by the Right. But Vander Plaats and his group cannot be dissed without risk by anyone wanting to win the Iowa Caucuses. A perennial statewide candidate (his 2010 primary challenge to now-Gov. Terry Branstad won a surprising 41% of the vote), Vander Plaats was co-chair of Mike Huckabee’s victorious 2008 Iowa Caucus campaign, and also spearheaded the successful 2010 effort to recall state Supreme Court judges who supported the 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
Kevin Hall of The Iowa Republican suggests that the “Vow” is a power-play by VanderPlaats to influence the outcome of the August 13 Iowa State GOP straw poll, in which The Family Leader has pledged neutrality, by separating candidates deemed acceptable from those who won’t sign the oath. And indeed, Michele Bachmann, rumored to be Vander Plaats’ current favorite, signed it virtually before the ink dried. What will really be interesting is whether Tim Pawlenty, who has been eagerly accepting every ideological demand made of him by the Right, signs this document. It is certainly designed to freak out the more secular-minded Establishment Republicans he will eventually need if he is to put together a winning coalition of everyone in the party who doesn’t like Mitt Romney. But he has to do well in Iowa for that to matter, so my guess is that he will follow Bachmann in kissing Vander Plaats’ ring and associating himself with a fresh batch of extremism.
By: Ed Kilgore, The Democratic Strategist, July 8, 2011
The GOP Health Care Assault On Planned Parenthood Exposes The Hypocrisy Of The Pro-Life Movement
I tend not to get involved in discussions on abortion because I have never been able to resolve the conflict which comes from understanding both sides of this difficult issue. I understand those who believe in the pro-choice approach. Certainly, a woman wants, needs and deserves to be in control of her own body and make the decisions that she believes are best.
But I also get the pro-life movement. If an individual believes that a life is ‘in being’ at the moment of conception, I can well appreciate the distress such a person would feel over such a life being terminated.
What I cannot understand is how the very people who are so profoundly committed to the pro-life movement seem to lose all care, concern and compassion for that life once the child is born into the world.
Nowhere is this hypocrisy more prominently on display than in the current war being waged by the GOP on Planned Parenthood – the organization that spends 97% of their efforts and money providing millions of impoverished American women with critical front-line health care, essential medical testing to discover disease before it is too late to successfully treat a patient, and the very family planning and sex education services that might help women avoid an unwanted pregnancy and thus moot the question of abortion.
Yes, the remaining 3% of the Planned Parenthood budget is dedicated to providing abortion services but, contrary to what the anti-abortion forces would have you believe, not one cent of taxpayer money – federal or state – pays for so much as an IV needle used in an abortion procedure. The legal prohibition against taxpayer money being spent on abortions is as clearly enforced as the Roe v. Wade decision that confirms a woman’s right to choose in the United States.
Despite the important work done by Planned Parenthood – and the lives they save – the GOP has made it a cornerstone of their social agenda to put this vital service to the working and non-working poor out of business.
Should you doubt that the organization does, in fact, save lives, take a look at this letter written by Maggie Davis of Saratoga Springs in response to her Congressman’s voting to defund Planned Parenthood.
I am writing this in answer to Congressman Gibson’s vote against the funding for Planned Parenthood. I have no idea why he did this. Regardless of the pro and con of Planned Parenthood, they do save lives. I speak from experience.In the early ’70s I went to Planned Parenthood here for a checkup and they found something that was wrong and advised me to see my doctor right away. I did and within one month I had to have surgery to save my life. I would not be here today writing this letter. If it were not for Planned Parenthood and Dr. Streit of Saratoga, I would be dead. I will always be thankful to Planned Parenthood for discovering something and telling me to go to my doctor.
Mr. Gibson, I think you should take another look at how many lives Planned Parenthood does save. When we voted for you, we expected you to work for the taxpayers who pay you.
Maggie Davis, Saratoga Springs
So, how do the pro-life forces defend their position that Planned Parenthood must go because, on occasion, they perform medical procedures that end what these folks perceive to be lives in being while fully understanding that closing the organization’s doors will result in the loss of lives of women we know are in being?
How did the 240 Members of the House of Representatives (a total which included 10 Democrats) justify their votes when they passed a bill in February to defund Planned Parenthood knowing that while their vote may or may not have resulted in a few less abortions had the Senate agreed (they did not), that same vote would also take the lives of people like Maggie Davis as a result of the legislation?
Had the House had their way, how many additional abortions would result – under conditions one shudders to contemplate – due to the loss of the counseling services designed to help women avoid unwanted pregnancies?
Now, as we watch the GOP assault on Medicaid – the federal and state funded health program relied on by over 40% of women who visit Planned Parenthood – one is left to wonder just how much of this drive to destroy the state-based medical safety net is based on actual budgetary concerns or whether budget difficulties are simply a cover for the effort to win the battle against legal abortion.
And while we are looking at the questions, maybe someone can answer how the eleven states that have either passed or introduced legislation this year designed to ban groups like Planned Parenthood from receiving family-planning funding or prevent them from contracting with the state for payment for services provided by these organizations, justify their own actions?
The simple truth is that there is no rational way to conclude that these alleged pro-life forces are, in fact, pro-life as it is difficult to fathom how one can desire to protect the life of the unborn by sacrificing the life of the already born. If you believe in protecting the unborn, does it not necessarily follow that you are equally as concerned about protecting the lives of those already here in the flesh.
What I can work out is how pro-life politicians are, in reality, ‘pro’ their political careers and are more than willing to sacrifice the lives of the poor who rely on the services of Planned Parenthood to burnish their anti-abortion credentials.
Seriously, does it get any worse than that? Making the matter even more despicable is the reliance upon religion as the basis for the pro-life consciousness. I fully understand and respect that religions teach that taking the lives of the unborn is morally wrong just as I understand and respect that it is up to each individual to hear those teachings or not. This is the way we roll in America.
Yet, I am aware of nothing in any of the competing religious tomes suggesting that while is it essential to protect the unborn so that they may have life, protecting those currently here so that they might continue life is no big deal. I’m also pretty sure that the Bible does not endorse allowing people to get sick and die because ‘we can’t afford it.’
Here’s a thought for those dedicated GOP ‘fighters for life’ – show a little consistency and maybe you’ll have more success in convincing the public that your closely held religious beliefs are something more than just the worst kind of cynical and despicable politics.
Show you are as concerned for the lives and health of those already walking the planet as you profess to be for those who have not yet arrived. Then, and only then, can any one willing to scrutinize your motives view you as the God fearing, compassionate human beings you pretend to be.
Failing the same, even the most religious and zealous among us should not, in good conscious, avoid the fact that our elected officials are picking and choosing between the lives they save and the lives they sacrifice in the name of good politics.
If your beliefs lie with the pro-life side of the abortion issue, I respect that. I encourage you to continue your fight just as I heartily support both your right and need to do so.
But don’t effectuate that fight by requiring the taking of the lives and health of others because you have not yet won your battle.
While you may be right that compassion for life must begin with conception, there is no logical or emotional basis that suggests that the same compassion should end with birth.
Tell your elected representatives to back off on Planned Parenthood. Then, and only then can you truly be among those who are pro-life.
By: Rick Ungar, The Policy Page, Forbes, June 13, 2011
The Return Of Back-Alley Abortions
Underground abortions have returned to the United States, just as pro-choice activists have warned for years. And women have started going to jail for the crime of ending their own pregnancies, or trying to.
This week Jennie L. McCormack, a 32-year-old mother of three from eastern Idaho, was arrested for self-inducing an abortion. According to the Associated Press, McCormack couldn’t afford a legal procedure, and so took pills that her sister had ordered online. For some reason, she kept the fetus, which police found after they were called by a disapproving acquaintance. She now faces up to five years in prison, as well as a $5,000 fine.
Idaho recently banned abortions after 20 weeks, and McCormack’s fetus was reportedly between five and six months old. But according to Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, under Idaho law, McCormack could have been arrested even if she’d been in her first trimester because self-induced abortion is illegal in all circumstances. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an 8- or 10- or 12-week abortion,” says Kolbi-Molinas. “If you do what you could get lawfully in a doctor’s office—what you have a constitutional right to access in a doctor’s office—they can throw you in jail and make you a convicted felon.”
While horrific, McCormack’s case is not unique. In recent years, several women have been arrested on suspicion of causing their own abortions, or attempting to. Most have come from conservative rural states with few clinics and numerous restrictions on abortion. In America’s urban centers and liberal enclaves, the idea of women being prosecuted for taking desperate measures to end their pregnancies might seem inconceivable, a never-again remnant of the era before Roe v. Wade. In fact, it’s a slowly encroaching reality.
Even more, these cases demonstrate that criminalizing abortion means turning women who have abortions into criminals.
In 2005, Gabriela Flores, a 22-year-old Mexican migrant worker, was arrested in South Carolina. Like McCormack, she had three children and said she couldn’t afford a fourth, and so she turned to clandestinely acquired pills. (The drug she took, Misoprostol, is an ulcer medicine that also works as an abortifacient and is widely used in Latin American countries where abortion is illegal.) Initially facing two years in prison, she ended up being sentenced to 90 days.
In 2009, a 17-year-old Utah girl known in court filings as J.M.S. found herself pregnant by an older man who is now facing charges of using her in child pornography. J.M.S. lived in house without electricity or running water in a remote part of the state, several hours’ drive from the nearest clinic, which was in Salt Lake City. Getting there would have required not just a car—her area had no public transportation—but money for a hotel in order to comply with Utah’s 24-hour-waiting period, as well as for the cost of the abortion itself.
According to prosecutors, when J.M.S. was in her third trimester, she paid a man $150 to beat her in the hopes of inducing a miscarriage. The fetus survived, but she was charged with criminal solicitation to commit murder. When her case was thrown out on the grounds that her actions weren’t illegal under the state’s definition of abortion, legislators changed the law so they would be able to punish women like her in the future.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have appealed J.M.S.’ case to the Supreme Court, and observers expect it to rule against her. She could still face a trial and prison time.
A woman doesn’t even have to be trying to abort to find herself under arrest. Last year, a pregnant 22-year-old in Iowa named Christine Taylor ended up in the hospital after falling down a flight of stairs. A mother of two, she told a nurse she’d tripped after an upsetting phone conversation with her estranged husband. Though she’d gone to the hospital to make sure her fetus was OK, she confessed that she’d been ambivalent about the pregnancy and unsure whether she was ready to become a single mother of three.
Suspecting Taylor had hurled herself down the stairs on purpose, the nurse called a doctor, and at some point the police were brought in. Taylor was arrested on charges of attempted feticide. She spent two days in jail before the charges were dropped because she was in her second trimester, and Iowa’s feticide laws don’t kick in until the third.
These cases are a harbinger of what’s to come as abortion laws become increasingly strict and abortion clinics harder to access in the more conservative parts of the country. They demonstrate the lengths to which women will go to end unwanted pregnancies. But even more, they demonstrate that criminalizing abortion means turning women who have abortions into criminals.
The antiabortion movement likes to see itself as pro-woman. Most of its spokespeople talk about protecting women from abortion, insisting they’re not interested in seeing them punished. “It’s tragic that this young woman felt that this was her only way out,” National Right to Life President Carol Tobias said in a statement in response to questions about the McCormack case. “The pro-life movement has never supported jail sentences for women who are victims of the abortion culture and abortion industry.”
Tobias said her group calls on Idaho officials “to engage in more publicity about the network of pregnancy resource centers and about the existence of Idaho’s safe haven law—either of which would have helped this young mother and saved her child.” But she didn’t call on them to release McCormack or to change the laws under which she’s being charged. If these sorts of prosecutions aren’t what the antiabortion movement had in mind when it pushed wave after wave of state-level legislation, now might be a good time to speak up.
By: Michelle Goldberg, Contributing Writer, The Daily Beast, June 3, 2011
The Continuing Fight Against Women: House Passes Amendment To Defund Medical Schools That Teach Abortion
Not content to defund health care for women, the Republicans in Congress, who just can’t stop obsessing about abortion, have now passed yet another bill, brought to us by the lovely Rep. Virginia Foxxxxxxxxx, to prohibit government funding of abortion. Only this one also bans medical programs that receive government dollars from even teaching students how to perform abortions. Because taxpayers shouldn’t have their hard-earned dollars spent on training doctors to provide health care to women.
And, in case we didn’t get the message the first gazillion times Republicans mentioned it, the amendment re-reiterates that taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund abortions. Which they aren’t.
But despite the endless parade of bills to make it really, really, really clear that taxpayers should not pay for abortions, Rep. Foxxxxxxxxxx still wanted to make it “crystal clear.” In case the bill they passed three weeks ago didn’t quite get the message across.
The measure is an amendment to H.R. 1216, the Republicans’ latest never-gonna-happen attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Because nothing creates jobs like passing ideologically-driven symbolic measures to appease teabaggers and woman-haters everywhere.
Next up: a bill to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to repair roads that lead to medical schools that teach doctors how to perform abortions, and to re-re-reiterate that taxpayer dollars should not be spent on abortions. And then I’m sure they’ll get around to that jobs, jobs, jobs thing.
By: Kaili Joy Gray, Daily Kos, May 25, 2011
Are There Any Pro-Choice Republicans Left In The House?
Yes, America, there are pro-choice Republicans. But after this week, there’s some question about whether are any left in the U.S. Congress.
H.R. 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act” that passed the House May 4 is not likely to become the law of the land. But the fact that it passed the House with unanimous Republican support means the pro-life members of the party, which includes all the House leadership, can tout their attachment to social issues, even after the supposedly fiscal-first tea party movement helped take over the GOP last year.
For pro-choice Republicans, the vote means embarrassing questions. Basically every pro-choice group says H.R. 3 is an anti-abortion bill that goes far beyond the government’s current prohibitions on abortion funding and actually raises taxes on women who want to seek abortion coverage in their private insurance plans.
That’s a double-whammy for pro-choice Republicans. One, raising taxes under any circumstances is a no-no for anyone in the modern GOP. And, two, the bill has been cast as the biggest assault on abortion rights in years.
Voting against such a measure, then, would seem like a no-brainer. Except it wasn’t. None of the about a dozen House GOP members of the Republican Majority For Choice PAC considered as allies, voted against H.R. 3. In fact, all of them voted yes.
“We opposed the bill, we considered it an anti-choice, big government intrusion and politically we think it’s a bad move for the Republicans to keep focusing on this,” K.R. Ferguson, executive director of the PAC told TPM.
Still, she says that she’s not prepared to say the members who voted for it have given up their pro-choice credentials. She pointed to the refusal of some Republicans to sign on to the House plan to defund Planned Parenthood as the kind of thing that will keep the PAC’s endorsement coming.
“I would not say we would stop supporting any of the members who took this vote,” Ferguson said. She said that though it’s hard to rectify being pro-choice and voting for H.R. 3, support from her PAC isn’t “an all or nothing” prospect.
There are still Republicans who run as pro-choice members, despite the fact that the party in the House is about as far from supporting a woman’s right to choose as it could possibly be these days.
Rep. Robert Dold (R-IL) touted his endorsement from Ferguson’s PAC back in 2010. Ferguson said he might get it again, despite his vote for H.R. 3. Dold’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Though repeatedly expressing her extreme disappointment with the vote, Ferguson suggested Dold and his fellow pro-choice Republicans really had no choice.
“The extreme who was pushing this bill did a masterful job of spinning it as a no taxpayer fundings for abortion [measure] and putting these members in an almost impossible position,” she said. “We don’t like it, we will continue to call on our members to try to educate them” on the truth of the bill.
Illinois Republican Rep. Judy Biggert, a past co-chair of the House pro-choice caucus, says that her vote for H.R. 3 was completely consistent with her pro-choice views.
“Rep. Biggert is pro-choice. She supports a women’s right to chose, but she does not support public funding for abortion,” spokesperson Zachary Cikanek told TPM. “Abortion is a private decision, and it should be paid for with private dollars – without government involvement. That’s why she voted for H.R. 3.”
Cikanek noted that Biggert “has stated publically that she thinks Congress should be keeping its attention focused on spending and jobs, and not spending its time locked in debate on divisive social issues.”
Not all pro-choice advocates are willing to accept that kind of answer. NARAL President Nancy Keenan told TPM that a pro-choice vote for H.R. 3 is a political oxymoron. Though her group is non-partisan, NARAL hasn’t endorsed any Republicans serving in the current House, despite the fact that members like Biggert claim to be supporters of the cause.
“No member of congress can vote for this egregious bill and be considered pro-choice,” Keenan said. “Bottom line.”
By: Evan McMorris-Santoro, Talking Points Memo, May 7, 2011
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