Our Freedom Is Your Freedom

I believe that one of the reasons the war against women's reproductive health care and privacy has been allowed to creep forward over the decades is that women are, after all, members of every other civil rights group.  We fight for the rights of workers, of African Americans, of the LGBT community.

But it is time that we ask our fellow freedom fighters to join in our struggle.  Because our struggle is also one of the right to equal rights, to freedom from government surveillance and control, the right to privacy, the right to health care, education and a good job.

When a woman is unable to afford or obtain contraception and a pregnancy is the result, a teenager drops out of school, a young adult is unable to go to college, a working woman becomes unemployed.  A family is disrupted, emotionally and economically.

The right to abortion became the law of the land, just as contraception is legal, because we do not have a militaristic, religious extremist government.

When laws are passed that force a doctor to provide a woman with false information, when teachers are made to provide false health information, when women are required to have unwanted medical procedures, when laws are created to force health care clinics to close their doors due to impossible and unreasonable restrictions, we need to join together against those forces.

When a woman is prevented from access to affordable contraception and abortion services, that woman's economic future is in jeopardy.  The well-being of her family is at risk.

This is not about being pro-life.  Those who are fighting to deny women their reproductive freedom are those who are also fighting to prevent funding for health and nutrition programs.  They are the same people who oppose any gun control.  They have no moral opposition to going to war.

A father, a husband, a son, a friend, all should be united against a government that would shame and control its women because they have the capacity to become pregnant.  If you don't agree with abortion or contraception, you should fight more than ever for the money wasted on restrictions on women to go to programs that provide a better life.  You should nonetheless understand that whatever your position on abortion and contraception, this is a choice that just doesn't belong in the halls of Congress or state legislatures.

When our government is allowed to legislate control of women's bodies, the rights to freedom and privacy of all of us is attacked.

Texas' Fact Challenged Child Protection Act

They actually are calling it the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act" over there in the Texas State Lege.  But the testimony by the gaggle of heart-thumping supporters of forced pregnancy truly makes one wonder just how gullible they think we are.

In 2012 it was called the Women's Health Defense Act, and I just wonder why that bill didn't fly.  So this year, much in the way the tobacco companies bought scientists to prove that smoking was not harmful, but without the scientists, the evangelists of the Texas Lege lined up this year to bemoan the pain that fetuses feel at 20 weeks in a bill comically calling 20 week old fetuses "pain-capable."  Which sounds to me like an extra feature one could have installed for a small additional cost.

And as if this simple-minded, fact-free argument, that fetuses can feel pain, wasn't enough, Michael Burgess stepped up to the plate to argue that fetuses also feel pleasure, and that he has seen fetuses masturbate.  Do we really even need to travel into the recesses of that mind?

This is not a funny topic.  If you've read anything I've had to say about our legislators need to force women to carry pregnancies to term, you know I don't think it's funny.  But there comes a time when the only way to address the absurd is to laugh at it.

Which leads me to Molly Ivins.  She was the hero reporter for the Texas Observer, where she wrote on the Texas State Lege.  She loved those lunatics, and she painted them with the clear strokes of reality, in their full crazy plumage.  If you haven't yet, read the book of collected essays that brought her to national attention, entitled, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?  The story of the title is worth the price of admission.  Hint:  It began with an article in which she had written of a local congressman, "If his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day."

So you can see why I'm wishing Molly were here now to enjoy and comment on the idiots in the Texas Lege.  She would have a laugh riot over her favorite group of idiots as they continue to prove that they can indeed continue to get dumber.

Back to a Dark Future

Yesterday the South Carolina Senate overwhelmingly passed bill S 618, which prohibits employer contributions (i.e. your tax dollars) to contribute to abortion services for state employees enrolled in the State Health Insurance Plan.  Here in SC, this was considered a successful compromise because an employee can choose to place some of their own part of the contribution to the Plan into a special fund to be used only for abortion services.

Wait.  You're not done.  You may think this is immoral and humiliating enough but our wise legislators have added two more critical caveats:

This "special fund" can only be used for abortions in the case of rape, incest or the endangered health of the 'mother'," by which I'm assuming these creeps mean the pregnant woman.

And finally, during annual enrollment, the employee may check the box that reads:

 'By checking the box, I am declaring that I do not want any portion of my premium to be used to reimburse the expenses of an abortion, including ancillary services, performed in cases of rape, incest, or where the mother's medical condition is one which, in the opinion of her physician within a reasonable degree of medical certainty, so complicates the pregnancy as to necessitate an immediate abortion to avert the risk of her death.'

The  big coup I suppose for the pro-choice among us is that women who do want to contribute to that fund do not have to indicate by checking a box.  As far as I know.

So, let's suppose I am younger than I am, and I am sitting in the HR office contemplating my health care options.  I have learned that this employee portion of the fund is only to be used for abortions.  Does that mean that I will be cut off from some other future health care needs?  Well, I certainly am not planning on needing an abortion, am I?  So I opt out.  And then I get pregnant.

Not to worry, they won't cover you even if you are contributing to the special fund unless you are raped or in danger of losing your life.  In which case in order to be covered you have to prove rape or that your life is in danger. Which apparently has only happened six times since 2006.

And the best part of this bill is that all but two members of the Senate (who both had excused absences, really) voted in favor.  And now, I suppose on to the House.

Meanwhile, in another part of the country, a man named Kermit Gosnell, an abortion doctor, is being tried for murder. The testimony leaves the most gruesome images of live births and lives taken.  Within the run down building, the clinic offices were dirty.  We don't know if Gosnell was once a good man who did his job out of compassion, but that is surely not the case now.

If our legislators have their way, there will be more of these "clinics," albeit more well hidden.  We have bills pending that will make abortion illegal after six weeks, and if that one doesn't make it, twelve weeks.  We have bills that place birth at the moment of conception.  We have bills that prohibit good qualified doctors from crossing state lines to perform abortion services in South Carolina.

These men who obsessively work to limit and eventually ban abortion are not smart men, they are not scientists, and they erroneously call themselves "Christian."  What they are is narcissistic and prideful.  And despise those who are in need.  They will force a pregnant woman to carry to term and then withdraw any help for that infant once it's born.  They do not ever flood the dockets with bills aiming to provide nutrition or pre-natal care.  They are the punishers of the twenty-first century, whose goal is to bring suffering to women who have had sex resulting in an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy.  They would ban contraception if they could, but that is for another term.

If they were as clever as they think they are, they would know that history proves that abortions will not be banned.  They will continue.  Men like Lee Bright can take a victory lap whenever he is able to chip away at a woman's right to reproductive freedom, but what he is celebrating is the return of the back alley, and more "clinics" like that of Dr. Gosnell.

When abortions are banned, it will be in clinics like that of Dr. Gosnell that abortions are performed.

Forced Pregnancy

Here in the state where our legislators are working with the NRA to put a gun in every home, bar and school, this land where individual rights are supposedly sacred (literally, as in "God-given"), the battle continues to be fierce over controlling those among us least able to fight back.

While our governor is hard at work cutting health benefits for the poor and making sure that a woman of limited means can't buy a birthday cake with her food stamps, we have a whole slew of bills in both houses of the legislature which aim to make sure that if we get pregnant, we are forced to carry that pregnancy to term.

Lee Bright, Senator from Spartanburg, has been called sanctimonious and "not that bright."  Which is a deadly combination for women, children and the poor in general.  And he has set his mind on sending Lindsey Graham the dreaded "challenge from the right."

Graham, bless his heart, has determined he will out-crazy Bright, and particularly in the area of arming every one of our citizens.  To protect them from our government.  Which he represents.

Senator Graham has filled the void left by the moronic Jim DeMint this year, with a memorable quote on gun rights always at the ready.  You just can't out right-wingnut someone who argues against banning high capacity magazines this way:

"Would I be a reasonable American to want my family to have the 15-round magazine in a semi-automatic weapon, to make sure, if there's two intruders, she doesn't run out of bullets?" he asked. "Am I an unreasonable person for saying that in that situation, the 15-round magazine makes sense?"

So God apparently told Senator Bright to stay away from gun rights and take on that other enemy of the people of South Carolina -- women.

He has right out of the starting gate sponsored the Personhood Act (S 83), and just in case we didn't get it, the Life Begins at Conception Act (S 87), along with a lot of other batshit paranoid bills involving Sharia law (S 81) and funding of prisoners wanting sexual reassignment therapy (S 80).

But then he was quiet.  Too quiet.

Because this week he was back at it with three new forced pregnancy bills:

S 618 seeks to insure that if you work for the state of South Carolina, your health insurance will not cover abortions.  So only state employees of means -- for instance someone like Lee Bright -- would be able to afford to pay for a family member to terminate a pregnancy.  Assuming you work in a lesser capacity for the state of South Carolina, and don't have the financial wherewithal of Senator Bright, you not only will not be able to afford an abortion, but you likely won't be able to afford the baby you have been forced to have.

If not having insurance coverage doesn't work, there are two other bills brought to you by Senator Bright:

S 623 is lovingly called the Human Heartbeat Protection Act (sigh), and its companion forced pregnancy bill is S 626, the incredibly named Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.  What they really do is prohibit abortions at 12-weeks and 20-weeks.

Make no mistake.  Lee Bright is not much different than the Taliban who have radicalized the concept of Shariah law to control Muslim women.  He seeks the power and notoriety of fellow wackos Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham.  One would hope that on the national stage he would become as neutralized as Todd Akin after his "legitimate rape" pronouncement.

But meanwhile, we have to deal with him here, in South Carolina, as he attempts to make his name by decimating the rights of women.

I believe the very first thing we should do is more appropriately name this fight.  By calling it abortion, we have allowed ourselves to be focused on the fetus, and whatever aspect of "life" the religious radicals want to speculate upon.

What we really have here is forced pregnancy.  What is being legislated is the right of the lawmaker to control a woman's body, and her trained medical doctor's treatment of her.

We don't have here anything like a concern for infants and children, and surely no concern for the welfare of a pregnant woman.  These laws come from ignorance and seek to coerce.  Whether a woman is being forced to wear a veil so as not to enflame the desires of men who cannot be expected to control themselves, or to carry to term a pregnancy that is not of her choice, the purpose is the same.

We need to loudly oppose these bills, and Senator Lee Bright.  We need to tell our legislators to stop forced pregnancy legislation.  We need to inform the people of South Carolina that this is going on, else we become the next state to fall victim to these most un-Christianlike religious freaks.  Our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, our friends and neighbors, are at the edge of the precipice, where their bodies and their lives will be under the control of the State.

If you asked Lee Bright, what he stands for is freedom from state control.  But what he means is the freedom to control.