“Coat Hanger Legislation”: Virginia Passes Sonogram Bill After All
Protests and national attention couldn’t stop legislators from ushering ultrasound legislation through the statehouse.
In the end, even Jon Stewart couldn’t kill the Virginia ultrasound bill. After more than a week of protests and national attention, the state Senate passed an amended version of the measure Tuesday afternoon which will require women seeking an abortion to get an ultrasound 24 hours ahead of the procedure. The Senate did unanimously pass an exemption for victims of rape and incest, but other amendments fell flat, including one to mandate insurance coverage of the sonograms. The House has already passed a version of the bill and it appears now to be headed for law.
Much of the protesting focused on “transvaginal” ultrasounds, highly invasive procedures that would be required to get a clear image of a fetus in the very early stages of pregnancy. Opponents called the bill a “state rape” mandate. The Daily Show even had a bit on it. Public support for the measure tanked and, under pressure, the state’s socially conservative Governor Bob McDonnell announced he opposed requiring transvaginal sonograms for women. It looked like a victory, until Republicans came back with a revised version of the bill, mandating transabdominal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. The governor has said he’d support an amendment bill.
The new requirement may be less invasive, but the bill lacks basic logic: if a woman gets an ultrasound early in her pregnancy, the transabdominal ultrasound won’t show anything. “I might as well put the ultrasound probe on this bottle of Gatorade—I’d see just as much,” said Democrat state Senator Ralph Northam.
As the only doctor in the chamber, Northam was particularly vehement in criticizing the measure. “It’s telling me, it’s telling my colleagues how to practice medicine,” he said. “And it’s coming from nonphysicians.
“Nobody in this room would choose or like to have a woman have an abortion,” Northam continued. To actually decrease abortion rates, “we need to talk about things like education, promoting abstinence amongst our children before marriage, about access to healthcare, and contraception for our young women.”
Democrat Louise Lucas gave the most impassioned speech against the measure. “This is a veiled effort to guilt women, ” she said. “Women who want to have abortions will go to back alleys. Women will die.”
The bill’s sponsor and those supporting the measure didn’t say much to defend the bill. They just passed it.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, February 28, 2012
GOP’s Sexist “Mad Men” Worldview Threatens Women’s Health
The new season of Mad Men is upon us, but my mother, a fan of PBS and quality television, still can’t bring herself watch it. Mad Men brings back too many bad memories for her of a time when women were second-class citizens, belittled on a daily basis. Many Republicans, on the other hand, seem to view Mad Men and its ritual humiliation of women as an instructive documentary. The Republican presidential field is in a race to the bottom on who can most obnoxiously turn back the clock to the pre-Griswold 1965. House Republicans don’t think women are qualified to testify on their own healthcare.
This week brings us the Senate hearings on the Blunt Amendment, which would allow any employer to deny healthcare coverage because of “moral objections.” There’s some question as to whether women will actually get to testify this time, or just patted on the head and allowed to fetch coffee. And if the amendment actually goes anywhere, I can’t wait for the first meeting of Women CEOs Against Viagra.
And in the states, it’s even worse. Utah House Republicans just passed a bill allowing state schools to opt out of sex ed and mandating those that keep it refrain from any mention of contraception. Nationwide, state legislators have introduced a slew of “personhood” measures that would ban hormonal contraception and ultrasound bills designed to shame women into changing their mind. And let’s be clear: these bills aren’t designed to “inform” women. They’re designed to punish them.
The tide of public opinion— or perhaps his own political ambitions—finally persuaded Gov. Bob McDonnell that Virginia’s internal ultrasound bill was a bad idea. But this month, the threat in Virginia became reality in Texas when its ultrasound law took effect. Furthermore, Texas just threw 130,000 poor women off of a healthcare program and the state is 50th in women getting prenatal care in the first trimester. So the only “healthcare” poor women get in Texas is a medically unnecessary procedure and a lecture from a complete stranger if they choose to get an abortion because they couldn’t get contraception or prenatal care.
Here in Colorado, Attorney General John Suthers has signed on to a letter with 11 other Republican AGs objecting to the contraception coverage requirement under the Affordable Care Act, even though state law already requires insurers cover birth control. Apparently Suthers doesn’t think the opinions of thousands of Colorado women who voted no with more than 70 percent margins on two anticontraception ‘personhood’ measures count for much.
And Republicans wonder why they’re losing the women’s vote. Much of the Republican argument seems predicated on the same judgmental discrimination at the root of the Komen debacle, as noted by my U.S. News colleague Susan Milligan: good girl healthcare vs. bad girl healthcare. Good girls get breast cancer. Bad girls get birth control.
Here’s a clue: Reproductive healthcare is healthcare, and contraception is an economic issue, especially when you’re usually the one determining what to use and how to pay for it. There is no more basic financial decision than determining the size of your own family. And no amount of public humiliation will alter a woman’s decision—in the words of the sage Lyle Lovett, “There’s nothing as resolute as a woman when she’s already made up her mind.”
I’m still able to fit into one of my mother’s beautiful vintage dresses from the Mad Men era and in fact have worn it to several costume parties. But much as I love the clothes, I have no desire to return to raw sexism of that era, and neither do most women—a concept Republicans increasingly seem unable to grasp.
BY: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, February 28, 2012
“The Snooty Eastern Establishment”: Rick Santorum Didn’t Restart The Culture War–It Never Stopped
Since the firestorm over contraception and religious freedom erupted, there seems to be some kind of consensus that the “culture war” has returned to the fore of American politics. The consensus is wrong. The culture war never stopped.
In fact, former Sen. Rick Santorum explicitly says so himself!
While campaigning in Columbus, Ohio, Santorum said President Obama’s “agenda” is,
not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.
I’ve been trying to make this case (though not in the way Santorum is making it) all along.
Out of political convenience or cultural distance, Beltway conservatives refuse to see this: Hardcore conservative opposition to Obama has always been cultural and theological. The pop-theological mainstream of American evangelicals has so thoroughly assimilated the ideal of American capitalism that any deviation, however modest, from it is tantamount to radical godless humanism. And, in an extension of an older intradenominational debate, conservative Catholics like Santorum deeply mistrust the ideal of “social justice” as championed by the Catholic left.
As I’ve argued before, the line between culture and economics is disappearing. Santorum has muddied this picture somewhat with rhetoric aimed at blue-collar voters to the effect that he doesn’t believe that if we just cut taxes, “everything will be fine.”
But such rhetoric, while interesting, is hollow; his economic agenda is full of tax cuts, and I see nothing in it that’s affirmatively different from Republican orthodoxy.
There’s a sense in which the proxy cultural war is nothing new. In Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment: Where History and Literature Intersect, historian Peter Viereck argued compellingly that the long strand of populism, from William Jennings Bryan to Robert La Follette to Joseph McCarthy, was all about “smashing Plymouth Rock” (i.e., the snooty Eastern Establishment). What McCarthy really hated about the likes of Alger Hiss wasn’t the communism per se, but his resemblance to the likes of Dean Acheson.
As McCarthy said in a famous 1950 speech in Wheeling, W.Va., the ones “who have been selling this nation out” were those
who have had all the benefits … the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in government that we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth are the ones who have been worst.
Unlike McCarthy, the Tea Party never felt it had to define Obama as an “enemy within”; born in Kenya, he was the “enemy without”!
Make no mistake. Such has been the animating spirit of the Tea Party all along. That’s what is fueling the Santorum “insurgency” right now. Culture war is the big picture. Fail to see it, you won’t fully understand the 2012 presidential campaign.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, February 22, 2012
“Regurgitating Rick”: The Separation Of Church And State Makes Santorum Want To Vomit
Appearing on both ABC’s This Week and NBC’s Meet the Press this morning, Rick Santorum claimed that he “almost threw up” while reading President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech on the separation of church and state. When asked by an incredulous George Stephanopoulos to respond, Santorum held firm: “I don’t believe in an America where separation of church and state is absolute,” something that Kennedy explicitly called for. “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square, absolutely that makes me want to throw up.” And since such a barrier disenfranchises the religiously-minded while protecting secular opinion, Santorum claims, it is also a violation of the First Amendment.
Except, that is not at all what Kennedy was advocating.
I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office. I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty; nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so.
It’s right there. People’s First Amendment rights to practice and preach their own morals or religious beliefs should never be subverted, rather it is a preach-y president that Kennedy warns against, one who lets his (or her) own religious views affect the decisions they make in office. And, as Kimberley Strassel pointed out in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, that possibility is exactly what frightens voters most about Santorum, who seems perfectly willing to govern the entire country on the basis of his personally-held beliefs.
Mr. Santorum’s mistake is in telling people how to live. His finger-wagging on contraception and child-rearing and “homosexual acts” disrespects the vast majority of couples who use birth control, or who refuse to believe that the emancipation of women, or society’s increasing tolerance of gays, signals the end of the Republic.
And it is a vast majority of Americans. A recent study by the First Amendment Center found that 67 percent of Americans agreed that there should be a “clear separation of church and state.” This is at least one issue where Santorum seems to be badly out of stop with not only the rest of the country, but the march of history.
By: Andre Tartar, Daily Intel, February 26, 2012
Denying Women Coverage Under Any Guise Is A Big Step Backward
Maybe you saw the pictures. Five middle-age men seated at a congressional hearing table to discuss freedom of religion and contraception. And not a single woman was on the panel. Unbelievable. Do you think Congress would ever have a hearing on prostate cancer and only have women speak? Of course not.
Washington is so out of touch with what’s happening to families across this country that the Senate is about to vote on an amendment that would allow any insurance company or any employer to claim a vague “moral conviction’’ as an excuse to deny you health care coverage. Here’s the really astonishing news: Senator Scott Brown is not only voting for this amendment, he is fighting to get it passed.
What does this mean? If you are married and your employer doesn’t believe married couples should use birth control, then you could lose coverage for contraception. If you’re a pregnant woman who is single, and your employer doesn’t like it, you could be denied maternity care. This bill is about how to cut coverage for basic health care services for women.
Let’s be clear what this proposed law is not about: This is not about Catholic institutions or the rights of Catholics to follow their faith. President Obama has already made sure religious institutions will not be forced to cover contraception – at the same time that he has made sure women can get the health care they need directly from their health care insurers. Carol Keehan, the president and CEO of Catholic Health Association, said that Obama’s approach “protects the religious liberty and conscience rights of Catholic institutions.’’
I support Obama’s solution because I believe we must respect people of all religious faiths, while still ensuring that women have access to contraceptives. Brown has rejected this compromise. Instead, he has cosponsored a bill that will let any employer or any insurance company cut off contraceptive care, maternity care, or whatever they want, and leave women without coverage at all for this basic medical care. This bill is about how to cut coverage for basic health care services for women.
It is shocking that in 2012, Brown and his Republican colleagues would try to pass a law to threaten women’s access to birth control and other health care. Women all across this Commonwealth should have the right to use birth control if they want to. Giving corporate CEOs and insurance companies the power to dictate what health care women can and cannot get is just wrong. Those decisions should be up to women and their doctors.
Our goal should be to ensure that everyone has access to affordable, high-quality health care. At a time when families are struggling with the costs of health care, we should be trying to strengthen our health care system – not finding ways to create loopholes that threaten the rights of women to obtain the health care they need.
Massachusetts has been a leader in every aspect of health care: increasing access, reducing costs, and engaging in the innovations and research that make higher quality care better. We need to keep moving forward – not take a big step backward.
By: Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Candidate for US Senate (MA), published in The Boston Globe, February 24, 2012-
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