abortion

Center for AZ Policy continues to be terrible

by

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com Unsurprisingly, Arizona Rep. Trent Franks, who is reviving the 20 week supposed “pain-capable fetus” abortion ban, has the unflagging support of our state’s most prolific God-botherers, the Center for Arizona Policy Note how they claim that 137 post-20 week abortions take place in Arizona with no context outside of “horrors” and Kermit … Read more

Trent Franks is being terrible again

by

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

The GOP-led Congress is back with another attempt at banning abortion at 20 weeks. This one is supposed to be an improvement over the one rejected by a few female GOP Reps a couple of months ago over a lack of exceptions for rape and incest. The new version does contain those exceptions but the woman would be required to receive counseling 48 hours prior to the abortion (from a provider approved by the anti-choicers, natch). Gosh, thanks. LifeNews.com explains how the exceptions will be written so as not to leave loopholes for lying harlots to exploit.

Read more

Gay is the new abortion?

by

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

This remarkable item has gone viral:

Columnist Dan Savage calls it a “new variation on the “straight people are terrible” argument against marriage equality.”

Religious conservatives have already argued that straight people will stop getting married if gay people can and that marriage must be reserved for straight people because only straights can get pregnant by accident, and without the special inducements of marriage (a big party, a special cake, a honeymoon), straight people won’t take care of all those babies they’re having by accident. Now they’re arguing that straight people will abort their babies if gay people get married.

Man, straight people are terrible—why were they ever allowed to get married in the first place?

The anti-choice movement is an entire parallel bizarro world of crackpot bullshit so it would be easy to dismiss this as yet another weird myth, like the belief that abortions can be reversed, that has taken hold there. But there is an important context for this. The argument is being put forth in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court as it considers the latest challenge to same sex marriage.

Read more

The centrist fantasy on abortion rights is a dangerous farce

by

The folks at Vox commissioned a poll on attitudes toward abortion, asking more nuanced, and specific, questions than are usually asked and the results are fascinating.

Vox’s Sarah Kliff was intrigued enough about the responses that she contacted some of the respondents for further clarification.

“From my point of view, I believe all babies go to heaven,” King told me when I asked him to explain how both labels fit his viewpoint. “And if this baby were to live a life where it would be abused … it’s just really hard to explain. It gets into the rights of the woman, and her body, at the same time. It just sometimes gets really hazy on each side.”

King’s perspective is, in a way, unique: he has a distinct and nuanced view on when abortion should and shouldn’t be legal, one that takes in all sorts of personal and circumstantial factors. He’s generally anti-abortion, but not completely. He doesn’t fit neatly into either side of the debate.

In another way, though, King’s viewpoint is common: in our poll, we found that 18 percent of Americans, like King, pick “both” when you ask them to choose between pro-life and pro-choice. Another 21 percent choose neither. Taken together, about four in 10 Americans are eschewing the labels that we typically see as defining the abortion policy debate.

Vox also asked some people on the street how they felt about abortion:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssSIUVPjDns&w=500&h=356] Link, in case video didn’t embed

Read more

Farm Animals 1 Women 0 in Arizona. Woman sentenced to decades in jail for stillbirth in Indiana

by

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Indiana

Bad day for women’s rights on Monday.

People in the Arizona animal rights community are happy, and rightly so, with Governor Doug Ducey’s veto of a bill straight out of Big Ag that would loosen animal cruelty restrictions. Yay for farm animals! Boo for women, though, since Ducey also signed SB1318, that idiotic pile of misogynistic garbage that turns women’s own damn money into “taxpayer dollars” and requires doctors to inform women about some hooey about “abortion reversal” concocted by anti-choicers.

###

Read more