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Be The Change Friday- Contact Your Representatives
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Voting may be the most important duty that a citizen has, but that is not where your voice starts and ends.
Find out who represents you, even if you didn’t vote for them. Collect the phone numbers for your state legislators, for your US congressmen, for your local city councilmen or aldermen. Put those numbers in your phone.
And most importantly, call them. Let them know if they’re doing something you think is wrong. Let them know if they’re doing something you think is right.
Your voice matters. It’s amazing how rarely elected officials actually hear from their constituents. They hear from lobbyists, from special interests, and from each other… but if they heard from each and every person they represented they might have a better idea how good or bad of a job they were doing.
Call your state legislators, and your US congressmen, on a regular basis, even if it’s just to say, “Good job.”
Your voice matters. Your opinion matters. You are responsible for who represents you.
Take that responsibility seriously.
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March 29, 2012
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Doonesbury’s Take on Abortion Restrictions
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This month, Gary Trudeau lampooned one of the most controversial topics in American media. The Republican fight against abortion laws.
His comic strip has tackled hot issues before, but rarely with the sort of directness and specificity of his current satire.
In Doonesbury, a woman attempts to secure an abortion in Texas. This involves being called “slut” by a male state legislator, her doctor reading a legally mandated transcript that attempts to shame both of them, a transvaginal ultrasound with a “10″ shaming wand,” and several last ditch efforts to shame and humiliate her into changing her mind.
It’s almost funny. Except that it’s too true.
Not once does Gary Trudeau discuss why this character is seeking an abortion. He doesn’t talk about her medical history, her personal life, her past experiences. We have no idea what sort of process has gone into her decision to have an abortion. This is relevant, because to the GOP base that is fighting so hard against legal abortion, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if she’s been raped, or if she has a medical condition that would make pregnancy fatal to her, or if she has no money or resources to raise a child.
All that matters is that she be forced to carry a pregnancy that she does not want. Her consent is irrelevant. As Trudeau’s fictitious doctor says before inserting the “10″ shaming wand,”
“By the authority vested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape.”
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March 28, 2012
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Getting a Man’s Permission for Women’s Healthcare
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Not to be outdone by the anti-woman GOP legislators across the country, Alaska State Representative Alan Dick has his own ideas about how women’s place in society. In his version of anti-abortion legislation, a woman seeking abortion would have to get permission from the man that impregnated her.
Yes, she would need a healthcare permission slip. From a man.
Never mind that it is she who would be putting her health, her job, her stability, her livelihood, and her mental state at risk by carrying a pregnancy.
Never mind that he would have no financial responsibility to the pregnant woman, and that states are notoriously bad at helping women collect child support from absentee fathers.
Never mind that this is HER MEDICAL CARE, that this is HER body.
A woman is simply not capable of reaching conclusions for her medical care with her doctor. She has to have a man to okay her choices.
Next, she’ll need his permission to drive.
Or vote.
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March 27, 2012
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No Privacy for Patients in Arizona
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GOP legislators in Arizona just can’t get enough when it comes to abortion restrictions. But their crazy is certainly showing. Take this suggestion from Rep. Terry Proud, for example:
“Personally I’d like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a ‘surgical procedure.’ …don’t we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway?”
That’s right. Because before having open heart surgery, you have to watch somebody have the same surgery. And before having your wisdom teeth extracted, you have to watch somebody else get anesthetized and then have their teeth wrenched from their body.
What’s worse, this is a suggestion to a bill that restricts abortions after the 20th gestational week- a time when almost all abortions are performed because the fetus is dead, nonviable, or the mother’s life is in danger. So the suggestion here is to force a woman to watch the termination of second trimester pregnancy when she herself is no doubt already grieving and in emotional turmoil.
Of course, this suggestion is a gross violation of laws that prohibit spectators in surgeries, patient confidentiality, and other medical privacy issues.
I suppose that if one woman’s health care can’t be just between her and her doctor, why should anybody else’s?
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March 26, 2012
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Crying “Rape” To Get Abortion Access
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The laws that are being passed, being suggested, and being rewritten by the GOP all over this country are enough to make any woman’s flesh crawl. But over and over again, GOP lawmakers continue to top each other by showing off their utter lack of respect, trust, or even concern for women.
One of the latest such outrages is from Idaho State Senator Chuck Windor.
By the terms of his mandatory ultrasound bill, women seeking an abortion would first have to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound at a crisis pregnancy center (an organization dedicated to shaming women out of abortions in the first place) before being given a list of providers who could perform an abortion.
As the typical arguments followed, Windor cut off the debate about rape victims having to follow these rules. How? He suggested that women don’t know the difference between rape and consensual sex, and then followed that by saying that women would LIE about having been raped in order to access an abortion less intrusively.
So not only are women so dumb we can’t tell whether we were raped, but he acknowledges that this bill is so draconian and offensive that women would resort to extreme measures to get around it. And that, according to Windor, is a good thing.
…what self respecting woman VOTES for this kind of monster?
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March 23, 2012
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IllinoisTransvaginal Ultrasound Reality Check
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My home state of Illinois is currently considering a mandatory transvaginal ultrasound law for women seeking abortions. For the people of Illinois, let me make this perfectly clear.
The definition of define “rape” is:
- Forced or manipulated nonconsensual sexual contact, including vaginal or anal intercourse, oral sex, or penetration with an object.
- If a person is forced into sexual contact through coercion, consent is not given.
If the state compels a woman to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound, they have forced her into sexual contact (penetration with an object) through coercion.
Therefore, if a state mandates that a woman seeking an abortion undergo a transvaginal ultrasound that they do not want, they are guilty of attempted rape.
Further, if they succeed in forcing her to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound, she IS a victim of rape and therefore entitled to protections under the law for victims of rape.
…thus inducting every woman seeking an abortion into the realm of exemption for other anti-abortion measures as victims of sexual violence.
I hope that women in states where similar legislation has already passed can make use of this summation. And I hope that the legislators currently considering similar laws in other states, like my own, take a moment to register all of this information and reconsider their criminal intentions.
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March 22, 2012
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Outright Lies in the Face of Public Scrutiny
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As the debate about women and reproductive rights heats up (hard to imagine it can still get hotter), the GOP is getting more and more desperate. Women are fleeing the party, angry about the slurs used against them and against the attacks to their access to health care. So what is the GOP doing? Doubling down on its agenda.
Even if that agenda is to flat out lie. Or even worse, to force doctors to do it for them.
In New Hampshire, the GOP dominated state House has passed a bill that would mandate not only a 24 hour waiting period before an abortion, but also that their doctors read them a statement about the consequences of their actions. Consequences that their doctors would be legally mandated to to fabricate.
Women seeking an abortion in New Hampshire would need their doctors to tell them that getting an abortion will cause them to get breast cancer. Even though that is a lie- no link has ever been made between abortion and breast cancer.
The source for this abortion/breast cancer link? The representative who drafted this legislation- who also believes that if a woman takes birth control, it leads to prostate cancer in her male children.
Nonsense that, at least so far, isn’t legally required to be spread by doctors.
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March 21, 2012
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In North Carolina- It Takes One to Tango
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In the North Carolina country of New Hanover, commissioners have voted to reject state funds to provide family planning resources.
After a day of outrageously offensive statements by men on the board, the chair- Ted Davis- made a statement so completely unfair, unrealistic, and anti-woman that it bears repeating.
“If these young women are being responsible and didn’t have sex to begin with, we wouldn’t have this problem to begin with.”
That’s right. Only women- young, unmarried and irresponsible women- require family planning. Not men. No men are involved when a woman requires family planning services.
Men are innocent victims here, lured into immoral acts by the she-devils who dare consider themselves equal to their male counterparts.
Older, or married, women never use birth control. That’s why the average married woman in America has 2.1 children today, versus 6 when birth control was introduced. That’s why 45% of married women in the USA have an IUD. That’s why 1 in 4 married American women have had a tubal ligation.
But if these “young, unmarried and irresponsible” sluts could only keep their knees together, birth control would be a total non-starter.
Don’t be fooled, women- this is about your sexual freedom, your autonomy, and your rights to equality.
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March 20, 2012
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The Colorado GOP Doesn’t Care What You Think
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Twice now, Colorado voters have rejected so-called “personhood” laws, laws that would define birth as starting at conception and therefore make most forms of birth control illegal. But the elected officials who’s job it is to represent those voters don’t care. They have their agenda, and their agenda is to outlaw abortion.
Late Friday night, the GOP dominated Colorado House of Representatives passed its own personhood bill- “The First Degree Homicide of the Unborn Child Bill.” The bill now moves on to the Colorado senate.
Yes, abortion is a divisive issue. But the fact of the matter is that right now most Americans, and most Coloradans, just don’t care very much about this sort of thing. They care about economic issues, about having adequate police on their streets and decent schools for their children. They care about government spending, stabilizing the housing market, and treating their veterans with dignity.
Yet again and again, all the GOP is able to focus on is criminalizing women’s reproductive choices. From contraception to abortion to parenthood to marriage to divorce. At every step women are painted as criminals for making choices that predominately male GOP legislators consider “immoral.”
People of Colorado, contact your state senators. Contact your governor. Don’t become another casualty of the war against modern life.
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March 19, 2012
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Got Abortion Coverage? Not in Wisconsin.
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On Wednesday, the GOP dominated Wisconsin State Legislature passed a bill that forces private insurance to deny coverage for abortion care.
Not just insurance through an employer, either.
If you’re a woman in Wisconsin, and you pay for you health insurance, and you purchased insurance that WOULD provide that kind of medical coverage, you have effectively thrown your money away. This is a direct undermining of the Affordable Care Act- sometimes known as “Obamacare.”
Any woman in the state of Wisconsin who requires an abortion for any reason is going to have to pay out of pocket.
If she has been raped, and is pregnant as a result, that cost is on her.
If her baby has died in utero, or is otherwise non-viable, her insurance can’t help her.
If her life is threatened by the pregnancy and she will die without removing the fetus, that’s a cost she’s going to have to bear without assistance.
…so thoughtful of Republican Wisconsin legislators to determine how an insurance company is allowed to operate its business- in this one and only respect.
Despite all the needs of Wisconsin residents when it comes to jobs and the failing state economy, it is so compassionate of the Wisconsin GOP to make it their number one priority to police the uteri of Wisconsin women.
Wisconsin… yet another place in the USA where being a woman makes you a second class citizen.
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Related Posts:
- Welcome to the End of National Women’s Health Week
- Good News in Women’s Reproductive Rights!
- The War on Women Isn’t Over
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