anti-contraception

White Christian Nationalists Are On A Religious Crusade To Reverse The Advances Of The 21st and 20th Century

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The Christian Nationalists on the U.S. Supreme Court (curiously all of them Catholics, not fundamentalist evangelicals) are laying a foundation for a White Christian Nationalist America that the Founding Fathers sought to prevent with the First Amendment, given their recent experience with centuries od sectarian religious wars in Europe. Linda Greenhouse, legal columnist for the … Read more

Handmaids protest abortion bans in Phoenix.

SCOTUS Agrees To Hear An Abortion Case Next Term Designed To Overturn Roe v. Wade

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Supreme Court reporter Mark Joseph Stern reports that Project Blitz: The Christian Nationalist Attack on America today has finally achieved its long-desired goal of getting a test case before the U.S. Supreme Court which directly challenges Roe v. Wade (1973). A Supreme Court stacked by Republicans with conservative activist judges favorable to this anti-abortion position, all … Read more

No, anti-choicers, there aren’t thousands of clinics that could easily replace Planned Parenthood

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

PlannedParenthoodIsCritical-HealthAffairs

As anti-choice activists continue to push the now-thoroughly discredited “Planned Parenthood sells baby parts!” story as a ruse to defund the organization and deprive millions of women of contraception and health screenings (since federal funds can’t be used on abortion), you will often hear them speak of “thousands of community health clinics” that are readily available to low income patients who currently use Planned Parenthood. This, it turns out, is a bunch of garbage (as is approximately 99.9% everything claimed by anti-choicers but mainstream news people continue to treat them as a credible movement for dog knows what reason). The Congressional Budget Office commissioned an analysis of health provider availability for women who need contraception and found that Planned Parenthood is a crucial provider of birth control to a large number of regions and the women who live in them, as the graph above illustrates.

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Anti-choicers are out to replace Planned Parenthood with “clinics” that don’t offer birth control

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

What Does Planned Parenthood Do?

A lot of very naive people hold a cherished illusion that the abortion debate can be solved through respectful dialog leading to a truce where the pro-choice side cedes ground on things like later term abortions and parental consent and the anti-abortion side agrees to stop opposing birth control and sex ed. This will lead to a glorious permanent state of first term abortion remaining legal while gradually fading away, as formerly irresponsible women (the trollops!) will have finally reined in their capricious behavior, upon realizing how serious a thing abortion is!

As I’ve exhaustively explained here too many times to count, the naive illusion ignores how those compromises on abortion are actually terrible and imperil real women* and how relentless the anti-choice movement is in its quest to return America to the legal climate of 1964, when it was still legal for states to ban birth control. Opponents to full reproductive rights of women are not interested in a compromise. They are interested in a solution. Theirs. And they are highly adept at exploiting how little average people know about how laws and public policies work, while expertly taking advantage every possible way to game the system in their favor. They have demonstrated this since 1976, when they convinced Congress to ban Medicaid funding of abortion (Hyde Amendment) on the absurd theory that taxpayers should not pay for abortions (as opposed to any other medical intervention). Subsequently, anti-choicers convinced sympathetic majorities in the Supreme Court to allow states to restrict abortion procedures on spurious medical grounds.

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