When 20-Week Abortions Are Banned

There are some rumors that H 3114, the bill that would ban abortion at twenty weeks, could come to a vote in the South Carolina House this week.  Debate began on it last week and was adjourned to this Wednesday, February 11.  I know I have only been tracking bills in South Carolina for a couple of years, but it seems to me that some bills just don't want to be tracked, and there are ways to keep the public from learning when and where and what happens next.  This is one of those bills.

The twenty week ban is a sneaky proposition.  Its premise, the "pain-capable" nonsense is false science; legislators, prompted by a National Right to Life model bill, bring up the same outlier research, and ignore the consensus of the medical and scientific community, that is, that pain receptors are not developed until 24 weeks at the earliest.  This is the kind of fake science that slings about emotional and suspect terms like "unborn baby" and "preborn" (which never fails to remind me of the "pre-owned" leased-car-for-sale euphemism).

This is the kind of science that is used when cigarette manufacturers try to prove cigarettes don't cause cancer, and fracking doesn't pollute the environment.  A doctor, a scientist, a "medical expert" is paraded about.  (Remember the joke about "What do they call the medical student that graduates at the bottom of the class?"  "Doctor.")  And the testimony is repeated, and becomes "fact."

And then there are the not just false, but crazy, claims that we have heard from actually elected officials, of masturbating fetuses:  "If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe they feel pain?"  Yes, laugh so we don't cry at the horror of these bizarre fantasies wending their way into legislation which could destroy lives.

If this bill passes in South Carolina, what effect would it have?  In fact, for most of us, it would have no effect at all.  Because the reality is that an abortion at or after twenty weeks is extremely rare.  It occurs when there are severe complications in a wanted pregnancy.

Let me repeat that:  At twenty weeks or later, an abortion is extremely rare, and occurs when there are severe complications in a wanted pregnancy.

But the inflammatory rhetoric has resulted in most of us assuming that late-term abortions happen all the time, that they are frivolous, and that actual viable human life is snuffed out at the whim of the woman and her abortion doctor.

It was exactly this type of deception that brought us the "partial birth abortion" con job, and the subsequent federal law of 2003 which the Supreme Court upheld in 2007.  The term "partial birth" is not a medical term but a successfully inflammatory political one.  Given its success, it is not surprising that the next step on the war to ban abortion would be to save the "pain capable" twenty week fetus.

And what would happen if that bill were to pass?  For most of us, nothing.  Because the procedure is rare, it would not affect most of us.  But for the small percentage of women who suffer through the awareness that something serious is wrong with their pregnancy, this law would be a travesty and a tragedy.  It means doctors feeling the cold breath of the law watching and demanding documentation, and the possibility that they will be falsely accused of committing murder.  For the woman, it will mean adding to the crisis the fact that the government is surveilling her medical decisions.  It may mean that she is unable to make the decision to abort as soon as possible, adding days and weeks of agony to this already horrific situation.  It could mean that she is not allowed to have the abortion at all.  

In Georgia the law grudgingly allows for "medically futile" pregnancies, but not for exemptions for a woman's emotional or mental condition.  State Representative Terry England felt that there should be no exceptions:

“Life gives us many experiences,” England said in response to concerns that a woman would have to carry a fetus to term that was not expected to live. “I’ve had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive -- delivering pigs, dead and alive. … It breaks our hearts to see those animals not make it.”

And in the US House of Representatives, Texas idiot Louis Gohmert agrees, actually telling a witness during hearings that she should have carried her pregnancy to term even though it had been determined that the fetus had no brain function.

This nightmare scenario that dim-witted legislators and the anti-abortion movement like to call life-affirming, means the possibility of carrying a fetus to term that will not be able to sustain life, or will be so severely disabled that it would require a life-until-death of pain and surgical interventions.  It would mean a family torn to shreds in emotional despair and financially devastated.

None of us begin a pregnancy assuming the worst could happen.  If it does, the last thing we need is Wendy Nanney or Lee Bright telling us what we should do about it.

So we need to shout, all of us, against this bill.  We need to call and email our legislators, over and over, and tell them why this bill is false science, and that it is not the business of our legislators to determine medical issues.  We need to fight for those who may need someday to have the freedom to choose a late-term abortion.  It is indeed a rare occurrence, but it is something that could happen to any of us.

Spread the word by email, Facebook or Twitter.  Write or call your legislators.  Write or call any legislators you know.  We people of reason really do outnumber those on the other side of this war on women's medical freedom and privacy.  Now is the time to let them know it.

Saving the Future -- for Paul Ryan's Kids

I had the misfortune to happen to turn on the television, which for some reason I can't fathom, I have tuned to C-Span.  They were pounding out rhetoric about that twit Paul Ryan's budget, but at the moment it was the Democrats' turn so I left it on while I looked at the Guide, so I could see what movies I could watch during the weekend's free HBO preview.  But then, as would happen, it became the republicans' turn at the podium, and that hot-airbag Louis Gohmert stepped up.

You certainly can't accuse Gohmert of not enjoying hearing himself speak, because he seems to be on the floor spouting nonsense most of the time I turn the TV on.  I imagine he does not have much of a home life.

Anyway, who knows why I didn't immediately turn the volume down, so I had the great bad luck to hear him thanking -- profusely -- his friend on the other side of the aisle for agreeing with him.  His "friend" had been talking about the future of our children, and how we need to provide the foundation for our children to build on (my words, but you know what I mean, or, I mean, he meant).  Gohmert of course was talking out of the seat of his pants.  He was not at all in agreement, but was twisting the words around so bad that they were not recognizable.  Gohmert was saying that it is irresponsible for the government to spend money to help people by providing them with social services.  That this was actually denying our children a future.  By "our children" of course, he meant his children -- his and Paul Ryan's.

This is the way it works.  If the government does not spend money on social services, like education, health care, nutrition, unemployment benefits, then my kids and maybe yours, will have less with which to get a fair start in their lives.  But Louis Gohmert's kids will do great.  And so will his grandkids.  And that's what he and Paul Ryan are talking about it.

I wish I could say that even that was at all accurate.  Most of our Senators and Representatives are pretty well off, in fact, the majority are millionaires.  So unless they take a family member out of their will, or figure out how to take it with them when they go (always a possibility), their kids will do just fine even if they pay a lot more in taxes than the amount they are currently whining about.

On the other hand, the kids whose parents have to sacrifice to provide a college education will have to count on some good fortune as well as brains and hard work.  Even more so for those living in poverty, where hard work often doesn't even result in a living wage.  And when parents have to work two jobs to make ends meet and aren't there with the kids when they get home from school, or lose a job and have to scrape by on a miserly amount of food stamps, and a child goes to a "minimally adequate" school without the books, technology, or extracurricular activities that would motivate a kid to hope for college and a future, well, I don't think we have to worry about spending their future wealth.

And that's just it.  You could go into how spending money to improve lives now improves everybody's future, but you can't convince Paul Ryan that spending any of his "hard-earned" income so that our kids will have a chance at a good future makes economic sense for the country.  Because his rationalizations don't go any farther than his wallet.  And his own kids' future.  He can't hear your worry about paying your bills, or about your child's health.  And he doesn't have to.

Win-Win for the NRA

I'm not really impressed with our dysfunctional Congress slowly coming around to background checks for gun purchases.  For one thing, it's nowhere near enough to change the tragic increase in gun violence.  For another thing, this is going to likely be an attack on that catchall  category of people we call the "mentally ill."

The shooter at Sandy Hook took one of his mother's guns.  Now, call me cynical but a woman who has had some problems with the school but maintains what sounds like an armory maybe was a contributing factor in this tragedy.  After all, she did take her mentally ill son out to target practice as a way of attempting to bond.  Either way, she would not have been affected by a background check law.

The Aurora shooter had apparently stolen a gun from a friend or acquaintance.

The Tucson shooter was allowed to buy a gun because his name did not appear when a background check was performed, although he had been suspended from college due to "mental health problems."

And this is where the right to own a semi-automatic weapon smacks into the right to be mentally ill.

Most people who are mentally ill, even those who are suspended from colleges, are not going to go on a shooting rampage.  Their right to private medical records is being trashed so that we can continue to buy and sell assault weapons.

In a country that does not want to pay for mental health care, we are now branding a very large and diffuse group who also have constitutional rights.

And the reason has nothing to do with the right to bear arms.  It has to do with the right of arms manufacturers to increase their profits.

And let's make no mistake about the NRA's position here.  The NRA has no particular need to be rational, much less compromise.  If the idiots in Congress can be hooked into supporting having armed guards in schools, that's easy profit for the NRA's constituency, the arms manufacturers.  To hell with the deficit, war is war.  And if we don't get armed guards, it doesn't matter.  Because every time Wayne LaPierre or Lindsey Graham open their mouths about the Second Amendment, that small percentage of paranoid individuals who own all the guns in the country just head on out and buy a few more weapons, and a lot more ammunition.

So it's a win-win for the NRA and for our gun industry.

But I would like to get back to the slippery slope of identifying who is mentally ill.  If you are going to keep arms out of the hands of irrational and aggressive people, we need to look at some of the crazier statements made by some with power and celebrity.

We have Senator Graham bragging on how fast he can reload as an argument against limiting gun capacity.

And then there is Louis Gohmert who equates gun deaths with death by hammer.

Of course, there is Wayne "bad guy with a gun" LaPierre, whose vision for American is one of everybody locked and loaded.

Please don't forget Alex Jones, who turns apoplectic at the thought of someone taking his gun.

There's a very large leap when you decide to add the mentally ill to the NICS Index.  It's a fact that the dangerous mentally ill walk among us.  It's also a fact that they have the right to privacy.  They have the right to not take meds or get into therapy.  And, in fact, it is more likely that the dangerous mentally ill will be far harder to identify than those who are not dangerous.  So background checks will either be useless or a witch hunt.  Or both.

Now doesn't it make far more sense to take assault weapons off the streets?

Identifying the Killers

Let's not talk about the stupid stuff, like how Martin Luther King, Jr., would have promoted the freedom to carry guns, and black people would not have been slaves had they had guns.  Or dumb as a hammer Louis Gohmert's contention that more people are murdered by hammers than guns, so if anything gets outlawed it should be hammers.  And let's not visit Wayne LaPierre's fictional neighborhood, where the only defense against bad guys with guns is good guys with guns.

Instead, let's talk about how to identify shooters and keep the guns out of their hands.

Can't be done.

For example, in the most horrific instance of gun violence where twenty six-year-old children were killed, the shooter did not own the guns.  The assault weapons belonged to his mother, who was presumably sane and had not ever assaulted another person.  Had the guns been outlawed, she would not have had them.

Training sights on the mentally ill rather than the ability to obtain assault weapons will not lead to less gun violence.  In fact, our ability to identify those with homicidal tendencies is just plain awful.  The better the psychopath, as with Columbine killer Eric Harris, the better they are at masking their ideation.

The craziest looking people will not ever attempt to assault another human being, although their language may lead us to believe they are dangerous.

And all too often, the most dangerous people are untouchable, with special interest groups like the NRA protecting their right to bear arms.

If we were to attempt to keep guns away from those who appear the most dangerous, this guy would be number one on my list: