Houston indictments of anti-choice smear merchants show how their claims fall apart under the slightest scrutiny

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Center for Arizona Policy, not dealing well with Monday’s news

So many anti-choicers were having a bad day on Monday with the announcement that a Republican witch hunt of Planned Parenthood in Harris County, Texas had gone hilariously awry, with the perpetrators of the video “sting” being indicted by the grand jury while Planned Parenthood was cleared, that it’s difficult to pick just one to highlight but I’ll go with Andrew Napolitano of Fox News. Napolitano, a former judge, had a meltdown over a Republican prosecutor not just going after Planned Parenthood out of opposition to legal abortion irrespective of whatever evidence came forth in the case.

“The grand jury does not turn around and indict your witnesses, the people who brought you the case, without the prosecutor wanting this to happen!” Napolitano exclaimed.

He continued: “So, why would this prosecutor, appointed by Gov. [Rick] Perry, a former judge, a Republican woman, why would this prosecutor want to do this other than to send a message like, ‘I might be a Republican but leave Planned Parenthood alone’?”

“Leave it alone?” Napolitano shouted. “They’re using tax dollars to kill babies and sell their body parts!”

Read more

What we pro-choicers said would happen

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Clayton DykstraYoung “pro-lifer” Clayton Dykstra helpfully explains to me how lazy women would rather stick coat hangers into their cervixes than drive a few miles to obtain those super-easy-to-get abortions in places like Tennessee.

In case you missed it, a woman in Tennessee has been charged with attempted first degree murder for attempting to perform an abortion on herself with a coat hanger.

After losing a great amount of blood, Yocca was taken to the hospital — where she delivered a 24-week-old baby boy. His puncture wounds from the hanger will likely leave him permanently hooked up to an oxygen tank, according to local reports, and leaves Yocca facing attempted homicide charges.

Read more

Hard to call something “terrorism” when so many people seem to agree with the perpetrator

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

In case you were unaware, shortly after the Planned Parenthood attack there was a committed effort by right wingers to deny the shooter was even targeting a clinic, hence the lingering desperation of the likes of this chap who replied to Jake Tapper

The angry man who shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs two weeks ago, killing three and wounding several others, was arraigned on Wednesday and made it crystal clear that his target was abortion providers.

Read more

The anti-choice movement is not about “life”. Never has been.

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Monica Potter quote
“Pro-life” leader in a moment of honesty of what this is all about.

Since last Friday when a deranged man murdered three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic and injured several more, even some veteran pro-choice people have been stunned at the response by anti-choice people to it, which has been equal parts callous and defensive.

“After all these years and millions of babies that have gone to their death, violence is to be anticipated,” said Judie Brown, president of American Life League, in a phone interview with MSNBC. “Because it’s acceptable to violently kill a baby, so why isn’t it acceptable to violently kill other people?”

“We never approve of violence against anybody, whether it’s the unborn babies or the clients of Planned Parenthood or anybody else,” Ann Scheidler, vice president of the Pro-Life Action League, told MSNBC. But, she added, “it’s not the fault of the pro-life movement that someone found out that Planned Parenthood is doing these things. It’s the fault of Planned Parenthood for selling the baby parts.”

Planned Parenthood is a villain,” she said. “They undermine the integrity of families and the morality of young teen girls and kill babies on a regular basis, day after day. We’re not going to say, ‘Oh, poor Planned Parenthood, we should never say anything negative about what they call ‘services.’ Because they are a blight on our culture.”

Read more

MSM bias toward anti-choicers needs to stop.

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

I blame both for contributing to the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting but SportsGirl101 does make an excellent point about the mainstream media’s complicity in anti-choice violence due to their giving them a mostly uncritical platform to peddle lies about reproductive health and insidiously attack women’s autonomy. Because it’s often done under the banner of “balance”, news people who do this don’t see themselves as playing an aiding and abetting role. But they are. Witness how it’s done in this Reuter’s piece:

Planned Parenthood said on Sunday that news reports that the gunman who attacked its Colorado health clinic had uttered “no more baby parts” during his arrest showed that the suspect was motivated by an anti-abortion agenda.

The remark attributed to suspect Robert Lewis Dear was an apparent reference to Planned Parenthood’s abortion activities and its role in delivering fetal tissue to medical researchers, a hot button issue in the 2016 race for the presidency.

“We now know the man responsible for the tragic shooting at PP’s health center in Colorado was motivated by opposition to safe and legal abortion,” the organization said on Twitter.

Conservatives have accused Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit that provides a range of health services, including abortion, of illegally selling baby parts, an accusation it has strenuously denied.

Read more