Women, Watch Your Back: Anti-Choicers Are Gambling With Your Life
In a medical emergency, the last thing we should be worried about is whether a hospital is going to put ideology ahead of the care we need to protect our lives and health. But if anti-choice lawmakers get their way, women and their loved ones will have to watch their backs.
Yesterday the House passed an unprecedented bill that would allow hospitals to let women die at their doorsteps. It sounds almost unbelievable — but utter disregard for the well-being of women who need abortion care has tragically reached new levels in the House.
The bill, the so-called “Protect Life Act” does anything but. Indeed, it gambles with women’s lives. It could allow hospitals to ignore the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) which requires that patients in medical emergencies receive appropriate medical treatment, including abortion care if that’s what’s medically indicated.
The bill’s proponents will first tell you that this is necessary to protect religiously affiliated hospitals, and then claim that there’s no such thing as emergency abortion care (which begs the question of why they’re so intent on overriding it). They’re wrong on both fronts.
First, the denial of appropriate medical care to a woman suffering from emergency pregnancy complications can be devastating. The following story recorded in the American Journal of Public Health is just one example:
A woman with a condition that prevented her blood from clotting was in the process of miscarrying at a Catholic-owned hospital. According to her doctor, she was dying before his eyes, her eyes filling with blood. But even though her life was in danger, and the fetus had no chance of survival, the hospital wouldn’t let the doctor treat her by terminating the pregnancy until the fetal heartbeat ceased of its own accord. She ended up in the I.C.U.
Second, even the Catholic Health Association, the leadership organization for Catholic hospitals — hardly an anti-religious or pro-choice lobby — has told Congress that they don’t “believe that there is a need for the [refusal] section to apply to EMTALA.” The very institutions on whose behalf this heinous provision has been proposed are saying “don’t do this.” But so far, the bill’s sponsors remain unmoved.
Every representative who voted for this bill should hear from you and be made to think about the woman, mid-miscarriage, bleeding and scared out of her wits, who rushes to the nearest hospital only to be told by her doctor that he’s not allowed to treat her. Think about that woman, and then tell us — what are you going to do?
By: Sarah Lipton-Lubet, Policy Counsel, ACLU Legislative Office, Published in RH Reality Check, October 14, 2011
President Rick Perry’s America: No Country For Women
Rick Perry has been governor of Texas since before I was old enough to vote. As a native Texan born in the millennial age, I put Rick Perry in the same category as a cassette player or an AOL subscription — something that has seemingly always been around, but has long since lost its purpose. Coming of age as a woman in Rick Perry’s Texas is sort of like living in the wild, wild west, like an Annie Ovary of women’s health, dodging old men wielding vaginal probes and vaccine mandates. With a governor who has a women’s health record that’s a bumpy country mile long possibly becoming our next president, what would it mean for women across America? Allow me.
First order of business in the Perry presidency would be the creation of the Department of Interior Contraception, or DIC. DIC would oversee approved contraceptive devices under Perry’s watchful eye, the top item on the list being the most widely accepted, reliable option available to God-fearing Americans these days: abstinence. Now, while it’s true Texas has the 3rd highest teen birth rate in the country and also true that a 2005 study found teens in Texas were actually having more sex after undergoing an abstinence-only program, Rick Perry still stands by the practice. Why? Not because there are actually any studies backing him up but “from my own personal life,” Perry told the Texas Tribune’s Evan Smith in an interview earlier this year. Comforting, isn’t it? Rather than President Perry making decisions based on studies and figures, the free world will instead hinge on the regularity of his wife’s cycles.
But don’t take Rick Perry’s word for it. Starting in 2012, women (and their partners — suddenly that cowboy vote doesn’t sound so good, does it gentlemen?) will get their very own chance to practice an abstinence-only approach when the recent law that requires health insurance companies to cover birth control will no doubt be rolled back by President Perry.
That brings us to the question of how Perry plans to punish women who don’t fall into line with his tried and true abstinence methods. After all, without threat of punishment, I think it’s safe to say Perry will probably be the only person in America abstaining from sex. For the sinners, Perry has already started a little pilot program right here in Texas.
The state now requires mandatory transvaginal sonograms for women who are 8 to 10 weeks pregnant and seeking abortions. The bill, which Perry declared a piece of “emergency legislation” during the last legislative session, requires the doctor to describe the fetus and play audio of the heartbeat prior to the abortion procedure. President Perry’s version of this bill will include an amendment to play Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” during the procedure.
Alas, if all of this has you feeling down, ladies, don’t fret. Think of all those cute babies we’ll get to have. But in Rick Perry’s America, you may want to home school. Texas ranks first in the nation in adults without high school diplomas. The future also doesn’t look so bright for all those precious little ones when it comes to health insurance and potential jobs: Texas boasts another first in the nation in the percentage of children without health insurance and, in 2010, Texas tied with Mississippi for the highest percentage of workers employed in minimum-wage jobs. No wonder Governor Perry wants Texas to secede. It’d sure make us look less stupid.
At a speech given to the United for Life group in June, Perry bragged about Texas’s recently-passed sonogram law and told attendees, “In Texas we have pursued policies to protect unborn children whenever possible.” And you can bet your left Fallopian tube that, if elected, he’ll continue to do the same for the unborn children of America. I just hope there’s a Plan B pill for what happens when all these children grow up — because President Perry, just like Governor Perry, certainly doesn’t plan to care for them.
After all, where Rick Perry comes from, that’s women’s work.
By: Rachel Farris, AlterNet, August 19, 2011: This essay originally
appeared at MeanRachel.com.
Gov Rick Perry’s Abysmal Record On Women’s Health
If you’re a woman from Texas—or indeed, any woman—there’s a lot to dislike about Gov. Rick Perry.
The vanity. The boorishness. The belief you’re too stupid to make your own medical decisions. The weird resemblance to Animal House’s Niedermeyer in his college photo.
Perry reminds me of the scene in Thelma and Louise in which Thelma (Geena Davis) says of her n’er-do-well husband, “He kind of prides himself on being infantile.” Louise (Susan Sarandon) responds, “He’s got a lot to be proud of.”
So as we all prepare for the media barrage surrounding Perry’s presidential announcement on Saturday, and in tradition of my idol Molly Ivins, I’m going to start a new group, Texas Women Enraged by Rick Perry—TWERP for short.
As TWERP’s organizer, I feel obliged to point out that on a practical level, Rick Perry has made it pretty lousy for women in Texas, especially for women at the bottom of the economic ladder. He’s also made it pretty lousy for anybody who doesn’t look like him. As Eileen Smith wrote in the Texas Observer, “In just one session, Republicans managed to screw children, women, gays, immigrants, teachers, the elderly, Hispanics, the unemployed and the uninsured. The only people who got off easy were white guys. Can’t imagine why.”
The numbers tell the tale. Texas is dead last in the number of non-elderly women without health insurance, and 6th nationally in the percentage of women in poverty, according to the Texas Legislative Study Group. One in five Texas children lack health insurance, the highest rate in the nation. And if that weren’t bad enough, Perry tried to opt out of Medicaid, which provides healthcare to the most vulnerable Texas populations, including pregnant women and children.
When it comes to reproductive healthcare, the state budget guts family planning, leaving 284,000 Texas women without birth control or access to basic reproductive healthcare. This will also likely increase the abortion rate, sonograms or no sonograms. And of course there’s the standard right wing assault on Planned Parenthood. Women needing prenatal care fare no better.
As reported in the Texas Tribune, “Texas has the worst rate of pregnant women receiving prenatal care in the first trimester, according to the report commissioned by the Legislative Study Group…And though Texas has the highest percent of its population without health insurance, the state is 49th in per capita spending on Medicaid, and dead last in per capita spending on mental health, according to the report.”
So if you’re a working class Texas woman, Rick Perry doesn’t want you to have access to birth control or reproductive healthcare to prevent unintended pregnancy, but once you’re pregnant the state mandates a sonogram and a lecture to convince you of the error of your ways. After that sonogram and lecture, if you need prenatal care, you’re SOL. And once the baby is born, Texas is 47th in monthly benefit payments under the Women, Infants, & Children program, which provides nutrition assistance.
This is Rick Perry’s vision for women in the United States. Limited healthcare, little birth control, low income women and kids left to fend for themselves, a bunch of bureaucrats telling you what to do—and the very real human suffering that goes along with it. TWERP might be an understatement.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, August 11, 2011
Does He Hate Everyone?: Rep Allen West’s Anger Issues
Does Allen West hate women? That’s a question explored by Michelle Goldberg at the Daily Beast, and the answer seems to be more that Allen West hates everyone. That doesn’t spare him from being a sexist, however, since his hatred for women has an ugly, gendered tone to it, as evidenced by his strange war on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whose main sin seems to be a willingness to disagree with West while in possession of a vagina, causing West to claim she’s “not a Lady.” This, in turn, has caused a lot of speaking from feminist-minded women who are sick to the teeth of grown women being addressed in exactly the same terms that my grandmother used for me when I displayed bad manners … and I was five years old.
That said, calling a Democrat “not a Lady” and claiming that liberal women are the source of the country’s economic woes because we supposedly neuter men are, if anything, the least worrisome parts of the entire Allen West phenomenon. More disturbing is the evidence that West is unhinged and may have a personality disorder, but this not only doesn’t bother the voters who elected him into office, but seems to delight them. As Goldberg recounts, West acts erratically, lashes out randomly, has a victim complex that makes Sarah Palin look thick-skinned, and has acted out violently from his rage issues. But the space between Tea Party ideology and unhinged rage is whisker-thin.
West is a symptom of a larger problem: The most famous political force in the country right now, the Tea Party, has embraced a conservatism that is defined by being angry, bigoted, ignorant, and proud of it. It’s less about coherent politics and more a club for people who have a chip on their shoulders because they confuse getting the stink-eye for saying nutty, mean-spirited things with actual oppression.
It’s not that I’m clutching my pearls at colorful rhetoric and blatant mockery, two avenues of political discourse I enjoy quite a bit. But there is — or should be — a difference between a willingness to be abrasive and unhinged anger issues like West’s. The line should be drawn long before lionizing people for doing things like torturing prisoners of war, something West was disciplined by the Army for doing. Instead, we now live in a country where such vicious behavior can make you a hero in the eyes of the Tea Party, to the point where it elevates you to Congress.
By: Amanda Marcotte, Slate, July 22, 2011
GOP Wheeling And Dealing May Come Back To Bite Them
Wednesday was the anniversary of the day in 1944 when Democrats nominated Franklin Roosevelt for a fourth term. If he could see the wheeling and dealing in D.C. during the current budget deficit debate, FDR wouldn’t be surprised. Republicans are still trying to kill Social Security, and the GOP is still cozy with bankers, billionaires, and big business.
Tea Party House Republicans, under the leadership of Eric Cantor, are doing everything they can to protect their BFFs on Wall Street from paying their fair share of taxes. If majority Leader (and presumptive peaker) Cantor and the rest of the Tea Party types were really concerned about the budget deficit, they would support President Obama’s effort to save money by ending billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies to big oil and for corporate jets. Tax breaks for corporate jets with full bars don’t stimulate the economy, but they do stimulate corporate jet setters.
Republicans did score one victory this week which may come back and bite them on the butt. President Obama passed over consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren for the job of director of the new federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after Senate Republicans said they would filibuster her appointment. Warren’s crime was her fight to protect consumers from the big financial firms that rip off working families. Today is the first anniversary of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act which Congress passed to curb predatory behavior by Wall Street.
Warren will return to her home in Massachusetts, and she may run against Republican U.S. Senator and Cosmo centerfold, Scott Brown. If the GOP has any hope of taking control of the Senate next year, Brown must win. But polls show that Brown is vulnerable, and Brown has the chops to show blue collar Democrats that Wall Street is the enemy of the working families who have lost their jobs and then their homes in the wake of the great recession, a downturn caused by big business and the bad boy bankers and billionaires that Warren has fought to regulate.
And one last date for all you American history buffs, Tuesday was the anniversary of the day in 1848 when a pioneering women’s rights convention met in Seneca Falls New York. The convention paved the way for way for women like Elizabeth Warren and Michele Bachmann to run for office. By the way, Representative Bachman, the convention was in Seneca Falls, N.Y., not Seneca Falls, N.H., if anyone asks.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, July 22, 2011
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