A glimmer of sanity in America

Could it be that Americans have already had enough of the Tea Party?

In Ohio, voters smacked around Governor and former Fox News-bot John Kasich, who came to office last year in a wave of Tea Party rage, only to overplay his hand and decide to strip unions of their collective bargaining rights. It seems that Ohioans are still cognizant enough of what unions did for their manufacturing-oriented states in the days before outsourcing and at least for a day, realized that "I Want You To Get Screwed As Badly As We In The Private Sector Have Been" really isn't a formula for a thriving middle class. That almost 40% of Ohio voters still believe that "I Got Mine And Fuck You" is a good governing philosophy is disturbing, but a 20% smackdown of this dictatorial governor is a good thing. Of course the Ohio Legistature is going to try to sneak this thing through piece-by-piece through legislation next year, so continued vigilance is important.

In Mississippi, voters weren't quite ready to decide that women of reproductive age are nothing but incubators, defeating the state's "Personhood Amendment", which would have amended that state's constitution to declare every fertilized egg a person (making every menstrual period a suspected homicide, since up to 2/3 of fertilized eggs never implant). ABC's "The Note" frames this as "Liberals Victorious", as if no one thinks women have any function in our society except the Occupy Wall Street crowd, even though the linked article is written by a woman.

Of course this battle isn't over. Personhood USA, the group behind this insanity, has gained enough signatures to put this travesty on the ballot in six states next year, and is working on all fifty states. Of course this group lies in its web site (to which I refuse to link), claiming that Amendment 26 wouldn't have given rights to fertilized eggs, but it is right there on the Mississippi Secretary of State's site that it did, in fact, define personhood as starting with a fertilized egg.

This is not going to go away. Personhood USA is framing its agenda using the verbiage of the civil rights movement, that change happens slowly. The fertilized egg issue is only part of what this movement is about. Les Riley, head of the Mississippi chapter is also chairman of that state's theocratic Mississippi Constitution party. Mississippi may be able to exhale for at least a little while, but we are going to be fighting this battle in perpetuity.

I remember when abortion was illegal, and high school girls who became pregnant were sent to "stay with grandma for a while". I remember even after Roe, girls in my dorm making deals with the fates, just please let them not be pregnant. Of course in those days, you could also go to free clinics in college towns were you could obtain contraceptives for free. Now we have people bombing Planned Parenthood. The anti-abortion crazies were always around, but they used to leave birth control alone. Then one day they started with trying to repeal Roe, and when that didn't work, some of the smarter political minds around them realized that Roe's existence made useful idiots out of the fetophiles, and they started working on the state level. But it's only in the last decade years that the fetophiles have completely gone off the rails, and that's what their plans to eliminate birth control and declare fertilized eggs to be people with rights that supersede that of their hosts. (I wonder what would happen to a woman with cancer who is pregnant. Would she have to forego chemotherapy if it might hurt a fertilized egg? And since chemotherapy usually takes place over a series of months, and birth control would be redefined as murder, wouldn't potentially every reproductive age cancer patient be a potential murderer?)

It's OK to exhale today. But after today, it's time to get back to work. Because these people are not about Teh Baybeezzzzzz. They view the fact that our economy is being systematically destroyed for the benefit of a very few as something that can somehow be healed if we just put woman back under the thumb of white Christian men where these people feel we belong.

I wish someone would explain the right-wing obsession with women's reproductive systems

It's sort of like their obsession with gay sex, you know? Ask a homophobe why he hates gays so much and he'll say, "I just don't like thinking about how they have sex." Do YOU spend time thinking about how gay people have sex? I don't. I don't spend time thinking about how straight people have sex either. Do you look at a couple holding hands on the subway platform and think about them having sex? I don't. What is this obsession with other people's sex lives? It's one thing if you're writing a novel and you're writing a sex scene. But this automatic trip that the right-wing brain seems to make from the visual cue of a couple of any sort in any context, directly to their bedroom, just seems weird to me.

I can understand if you really and truly believe that abortion is the murder of a human being. I don't agree with you, because until a healthy baby can breathe on its own, it's essentially a parasite. And I don't agree with you because I don't believe there is ever a time when a woman should be regarded as nothing but a vessel, an incubator, a mindless, unfeeling, unimportant housing for a life form deemed by religious or government fiat to be more important than she is. But at least I can understand where you're coming from. But it rarely seems to be that simple, because all too often, such sentiments are accompanied by the Rhetoric of Punishment: "She went and got herself pregnant" (which is my personal favorite). "She made her bed, let her lie in it." "She shoulda kept her legs closed." For all that we live in a nation soaked with pornography, often viewed furtively by the very same people who decry the sex lives of others; there's still this strange obsession on the right with the ladyparts of women.

For decades I've been saying that once they get Roe v. Wade overturned, they're going to go for Griswold v. Connecticut. But the fetophiles (or vagophobes, if you prefer) have realized that you don't need the Supreme Court to take us back to a time when evil sluts got their just punishment in the form of the "sacred life-affirming gift" of unwanted pregnancy. With a number of states, most recently Mississippi, trying to enact laws that would declare a fertilized egg to be a person, with all rights thereof, the forms of birth control most women use would become illegal.

Thoee ignorant of the basic processes of how pregnancy occurs tend to be aquishy about what "conception" means, and toss it around to mean a variety of things. In medical terms, a pregnancy does not take place until a fertilized egg implants in the uterus. So "implantation" would seem to be a more medically correct definition under right-wing dogma of when human life begins. But sometimes the fertilized egg implants in the fallopian tube, and an ectopic pregnancy results, which must be removed. The NIH is unequivocal about this: "Ectopic pregnancies cannot continue to birth." Ectopic pregnancy creates a serious conundrum for those who consider themselves to be "pro-life", because as soon as you allow for removal, you've created a loophole in the absolutist view that there are NO EXCEPTIONS.

the other night, Rachel Maddow explained the basics of How Pregnancy Happens, and what it means for contraception, for those who forgot sixth grade health class:



Mitt Romney, who's a bit squishy himself on just about everything, thought he could just say "Life begins at conception" and be done with it. But those who want to declare a fertilized egg to be the same as a person know exactly what they're doing, and just like those like Mitt Romney, who want to remain a bit squishy on the matter, they aren't thinking of the implications. The first implication is that ALL methods of contraception, other than condoms and diaphragms, become by definition illegal, since all others have at least some hormonal action, and to one degree or another prevent implantation.

In 2010, the Guttmacher Institute cited a figure of 89% as the percentage of women using birth control in this country. That's just about nine in ten women who do not wish to become pregnant at any given time who use birth control. Some of them are even pro-life. Others would probably never have an abortion if they became pregnant, even if they're pro-choice. ALL of them use birth control because they don't want abortion to even be an issue for them.

But the fear and loathing of women and their sexuality becomes evident and manifest the minute you bring birth control into the equation, and there's no better example of this than Mr. Frothy himself, Rick Santorum. Here's a video (via ThinkProgress) in which Santorum talks about the "dangers of birth control" and says:

“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country,” the former Pennsylvania senator explained. “It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be”:

SANTORUM: [Sex] is supposed to be within marriage. It’s supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal…but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen…This is special and it needs to be seen as special.

And Rick Santorum thinks it's HIS job to MANDATE that you think of sex exactly the way he does, and practice accordingly. But I wonder if his view extends to men also, or just to women. Stephen over at Addicting Info wonders too:

But here’s a question I’d like to ask the former senator. If sex is just for procreation, does that mean Santorum has only had sex eight times in his life? That’s not exactly a healthy sexual relationship with the woman he’s married to. Perhaps they secretly use contraceptives? Some may think these questions are an invasion of Santorum’s privacy. But as long as Santorum continues to violate the private sex lives of millions of women and men across the country, we have the right to ask questions about his own. Fair is fair, right Rick?

And I would also ask if he demands that men think of sex as only for procreation too. Does he think men should be prepared to provide financial support for the children they help to conceive? Or does he too blame women who "got themselves pregnant"?

UPDATE: If Jim DeMint has his way, this post will become illegal as well.

Making having a period a crime

There are times when I wish Abraham Lincoln had just said "Don't let the door hitcha where the good Lord splitcha."

Mississippi is about to vote on an amendment to its state constitution to bestow personhood on fertilized eggs:

A national effort to put abortion bans into state constitutions is looking for its first victory next month in Mississippi, where voters are being asked to approve an amendment declaring that life begins when a human egg is fertilized.

Supporters hope the so-called personhood initiative will succeed in a Bible Belt state that already has some of the nation's toughest abortion regulations and only a single clinic where the procedures are performed.

The initiative is endorsed by both candidates in a governor's race that's being decided the same day. While Mississippi is the only state with such an amendment on the ballot this fall, efforts are under way to put the question to voters in at least four other states in 2012.

[snip]

"We feel like the docs and the patients are getting caught in the middle of a war between the anti-abortion folks and the pro-choice folks," said Dr. Wayne Slocum of Tupelo, head of the Mississippi section of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a group that opposes the initiative.

It's one thing to declare that human life begins at implantation of a fertilized egg, since that's when a pregnancy actually begins. That too has its problems, because of the possibility of making miscarriage a criminal, or even capital, offense (something the state of Georgia has already considered).

The American College of Obstetricans and Gynecologists has stated unequivocally that pregnancy does not occur intil a fertilized egg is implanted, and that up to 1/3 to 1/2 of fertilized eggs never implant. These then dissolve and become part of the so-called "products of menstruation."

Of course science and medicine have absolutely no place in the misogynist dogma of the Christofascist Zombie Brigade. What's imiportant is that the evil sluts who won't keep their legs closed must be punished by bearing a child -- and those who harbor that 1/3 to 1/2 of eggs that never implant must be investigated, and perhaps criminally charged, if they have a period.

There's only one way to deal with this, and that is for women of reproductive age to start sending their used sanitary products to the Mississippi statehouse, along with letters asking if legislators of that state plan to examine every woman's menstrual fluid in a futile search for dissolved fertilized eggs....or if they just plan to jail every woman who ever has her period on the grounds that she might have "murdered" a fertilized egg.

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Is It Friday Yet? edition

Well, I've already run over Maggie's tail with the chair casters, so today's not off to a great beginning. And to make matters worse, she insists on sitting on the floor in the same place. Life is like that around here sometimes as Maggie heads into her dotage, one that finds me trying, far too belatedly, to correct her incessant yowling before she get senile and it never stops.

So what's going on?

A week without Driftglass skewering David Brooks ls like a week without sunshine. (WARNING: Some seriously disturbing Photochopping to be found at the link.)

Once upon a time, two nice young men had a blog called Pandagon. Ezra Klein may have gone on to Pundit Stardom, but the OTHER original Pandagonist, Jesse Taylor, does a nice job of pointing out how Herman Cain's Say No Three Times in German plan will make people more expensive to employ. Can we say "Job-Killing Tax CUTS" now?

I really, really, really hate to link to anything at HuffPo, but this is a good one (and Amanda Terkel DID used to be with ThinkProgress): Scott Brown may have plagiarized his web site from Elizabeth Dole, but Herman Cain may have lifted his from Sim City. (More on this from Southern Beale.)

Michael J.W. Stickings blogs even earlier than I do, this time on Rush Limbaugh's War On Romney.

Laffy sets the record straight.

CheezWhiz: The Occupy movement need look no further than FDR's 1944 State of the Union address.

Some "Elsewhere" from the You Can't Make This Up file: The son of the late Bo Diddley, who carries his father's name, was arrested last night as part of Occupy Gainesville (FL), in Bo Diddley Park.

Rick Ungar on Congressional Republicans' relentless drive to kill women.

And on that same subject, I'll leave you with Congresswoman Jackie Speier from last night's Rachel Maddow Show, telling it like it is on the Republicans' war on women:

Expect a massive shitstorm over this

Not that it will make a difference to the teabagger population which has already turned its back on actual science, but the Institute of Medicine has advocated that insurance companies be mandated to provide contraception coverage in the interest of having better-spaced pregnancies to foster healthier mothers and healthier babies (NYT link):

A leading medical advisory panel recommended on Tuesday that all insurers be required to cover contraceptives for women free of charge as one of several preventive services under the new health care law.

[snip]

Administration officials, who say they hope to act on the recommendations by Aug. 1, are receptive to the idea of removing cost as a barrier to birth control — a longtime goal of advocates for women’s rights and experts on women’s health.

But the recommendations immediately reignited debate over the government’s role in reproductive health. Women’s groups and medical professionals applauded the recommendations while the Roman Catholic Church raised strenuous objections.

Why does the Catholic Church get to dictate national policy? If we're grandstanding about sharia law, how about we put Papal law under the same category?

In addition to contraceptive services for women, the panel recommended that the government require health plans to cover screening to detect domestic violence; screening for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS; and counseling and equipment to promote breastfeeding, including the free rental of breast pumps.

The panel also said all insurers should be required to cover screening for gestational diabetes in pregnant women; DNA testing for the human papillomavirus as part of cervical cancer screening; and annual preventive-care visits. Such visits could include prenatal care and preconception care, to make sure women are healthy when they become pregnant.

Defending its recommendations on contraceptive coverage, the panel said that nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States were unintended, and that about 40 percent of unintended pregnancies ended in abortion. Thus, it said, greater use of contraception would reduce the rates of unintended pregnancy, teenage pregnancy and abortion.

Gee, ya think? Of course the objections of thd denizens of wingnuttia to contraception have nothing to do with babies or life and everything to do with punishing the dirty sluts living in poverty. Check out these comments that were posted on MSNBC.com's article yesterday:

"Here is a birth controll method that will work:

•No welfare after the first child.
•No welfare after 2 years lifetime.
"

"I don't understand why birth control is a cost that needs to be covered by the government. People don't choose to get sick, you can choose to have unpredicted sex and get pregnant. I know you don't choose to get pregnant but it turns out if you don't have sex you will get pregnant 0% of the time, there isn't another medical condition that can boost that kind of prevention rate."

We already have a no-copay birth control---say NO

Maybe we shouldn't pay for welfare for people that can't adhere to simple birth control practice... see how many pregnancies happen when these girls (and guys) know that there will be no help for them in they are stupid enough to have unpredicted sex and get knocked up

And the single most idiotic comment of them all:

m of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's cheaper to pay for the birth control then for a pregnancy and/or abortion. On the other hand, I don't use birth control and see no reason why my premiums should go up to pay for everybody else's, when it's an expense they ought to be able to factor in. I think the definition of insurance is to pay for something unexpected. I have no problem with the yearly preventatives because in comparison those are lower in price and save more money in the long run.

I'll bet that last commenter has never had a blood transfusion, or a stent installed, or a coronary bypass, either. But I'll bet she's not sitting up at night grinding her teeth in rage about having to pay permiums to cover these procedures in other people.

What comes through in these comments (and the many others I haven't quoted) is the way contraception is linked with "sluttishness" ("Just say no") and the fundamental inconsistencies of wanting women who have sex to be punished by pregnancy, and at the same time have no help with said pregnancy. And it's this dichotomy, which we hear verbalized over and over again by those who profess to only be concerned with TEH BAYBEEEEZZZZZ, that shows them to less concerned with America's children than with thinking Eve wasn't punished enough for eating that apple.

In case you thought the expression "Republican war on women" was overly dramatic

This is WORSE than anything Margaret Atwood ever came up with, and this is actually happening:

This year, the Georgia legislature considered a bill that would require women to prove their miscarriages “occurred naturally” and weren’t secret abortions. In a similar vein, the Guardian reports that states including Mississippi and Alabama are charging dozens of women with murder or other serious crimes who have miscarried or had stillbirths:

Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.[...]

In Alabama at least 40 cases have been brought under the state’s “chemical endangerment” law. Introduced in 2006, the statute was designed to protect children whose parents were cooking methamphetamine in the home and thus putting their children at risk from inhaling the fumes. Amanda Kimbrough is one of the women who have been ensnared as a result of the law being applied in a wholly different way.[...]

The baby was delivered by caesarean section prematurely in April 2008 and died 19 minutes after birth. Six months later Kimbrough was arrested at home and charged with “chemical endangerment” of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy – a claim she has denied.

“That shocked me, it really did,” Kimbrough said. “I had lost a child, that was enough.”

Kimbrough is now facing a 10-year sentence if her case is not reversed on appeal — a 10 year sentence that will deprive her three other children of their mother.

A common tactic by prosecutors is singling out a group of women who are unlikely to draw public sympathy — women who may have used drugs while pregnant — to blur the line between abortion and homicide. Rennie Gibbs, for example, was 15 when she became pregnant and lost her baby in a stillbirth. Prosecutors charged her with a “depraved heart murder” after they discovered she had used cocaine, although there was “no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby’s death.” She now faces life in prison in Mississippi.

Targeting women who use drugs while they are pregnant is exactly the wrong policy for protecting the health of their future children. When a woman who is addicted to drug becomes pregnant, she needs immediate treatment to ensure that her addiction does not lead to serious birth defects for her child. But the threat of criminal prosecution — especially for a crime as serious as murder — will only drive her into the shadows. For this reason, dozens of public health organizations including the American Public Health Association have all denounced these prosecutions as harmful to both woman and child.

Other prosecutors are twisting laws designed to protect pregnant women and their unborn children into attacks on childbearers themselves. At least 38 states have introduced fetal homicide laws that were intended to be used against violent attacks by third parties like abusive male partners. But in South Carolina, only one case has been brought against a man for assaulting a pregnant woman, while up to 300 women have been arrested under the law, according to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

If this was truly about TEH BAYBEEEEEEEEZZZZZZZZ, Republican legislators would be advocating treatment and a support structure for these women so that their babies may be born healthy and have a better shot at a good home life. But this is not about babies, nor is it about motherhood. It is about two things: punishment of women who do not live according to right-wing rules, and also, more ominously, about putting into state custody large numbers of women who have demonstrated that they are capable of conceiving. That the most ominous sign yet that we are headed towards Gilead.

Next up: Scarlet Letters

This morning when I read this I felt a strong need to go over and see what Amanda was saying about it.

A New Mexico man's decision to lash out with a billboard ad saying his ex-girlfriend had an abortion against his wishes has touched off a legal debate over free speech and privacy rights.

The sign on Alamogordo's main thoroughfare shows 35-year-old Greg Fultz holding the outline of an infant. The text reads, "This Would Have Been A Picture Of My 2-Month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To Not KILL Our Child!"

Fultz's ex-girlfriend has taken him to court for harassment and violation of privacy. A domestic court official has recommended the billboard be removed.

But Fultz's attorney argues the order violates his client's free speech rights.

"As distasteful and offensive as the sign may be to some, for over 200 years in this country the First Amendment protects distasteful and offensive speech," Todd Holmes said.

The woman's friends say she had a miscarriage, not an abortion, according to a report in the Albuquerque Journal.

Holmes disputes that, saying his case is based on the accuracy of his client's statement.

"My argument is: What Fultz said is the truth," Holmes said.

The woman's lawyer said she had not discussed the pregnancy with her client. But for Ellen Jessen, whether her client had a miscarriage or an abortion is not the point. The central issue is her client's privacy and the fact that the billboard has caused severe emotional distress, Jessen said.

"Her private life is not a matter of public interest," she told the Alamogordo Daily News.

Jessen says her client's ex-boyfriend has crossed the line.

Damn fucking right. We are living in a country in which unhinged people are killing abortion doctors, and one state is talking about investigating women who have miscarriages. If this guy had put up a billboard saying "Please Kill My Girlfriend Because I Don't Have the Balls To Do It Myself", his goal could not be more clear.

So I went over to Pandagon, as is my wont when encountering such stories, to find that while she hasn't mentioned this story in particular, she has written two very goods post that those of you who perhaps think that the story of Anthony Weiner's schlong is really worth bumping the clusterfuck at the Fukushima nuclear plant, drug-resistant e-coli, and the dangerous situation in the Middle East out of the news entirely might want to read. Because the pearl-clutching over Anthony Weiner's penchant for online sex isn't taking place in a vacuum, but in a culture in which the worst kind of judgmental prudery -- the kind we read about in high school when we read The Scarlet Letter -- has become mainstream. Some of this is just the obligatory hippie-punching, some of it from Gen-Xers who will spend the next thirty years hating baby boomers who got to have lots of sex before AIDS came along because they think we had all the fun. But much of it seems to be coming from highly sexually-confused people with serious power issues who want to work out on women's reproductive systems their own self-loathing and need for power in a world in which ordinary people are becoming more powerless. Because every time a Washington Republican talks about "family values", it almost always seems to be accompanied by a Deep Dark Secret. In Anthony Weiner's case, it's about a sexual peccadillo involving consenting adult females that is iin no way in conflict with any issues for which he has fought in office. And that's something that should not be forgotten, even though we don't want to start heading down the road that Randi Rhodes did last night in her non-nuanced defense of Weiner, in which she started painting the women involved as some kind of terrible people for participating in this with him. Do we really have to paint the women who were involved as whores in order to provide some perspective? Af course the fact that one of them, Megan Broussard (from Texas, of course) immediately went running to Fox News makes the word "setup" worm its way into my brain and is an ominous indication that in America, where celebrity is the only currency that has any value, it's difficult to resist the 15 minutes an involvement in a story like this gives you. I would hope that the dollar bills being thrown around doesn't result in consenting adult women trying to paint themselves as helpless victim of a powerful man. Because then we get right back to prudery and to Amanda's OTHER article, about just how much damage culture warriors can do simply by putting their nonsense out into mainstream public discourse. We saw it in the Clinton foofarah of the 1990's, in which an adulterous House Speaker tried to impeach an adulterous president. God knows we see it in Rick Santorum, who's the most virulent anti-contraception advocate out there.

Which of course brings us back to Greg Fultz, the man who bought a billboard because his girlfriend dares make a decision about her future without giving him final say-so. Right now Greg Fultz is news. But in a climate in which any sexual activity that doesn't involve missionary position heterosexual intercourse within marriage for the sole purpose of begetting children is regarded as perverse and unseemly, it's only a matter of time before Greg Fultz and what he did become simply part of a revival of woman-suppression in our country.

UPDATE: it seems that Greg Fultz has a history of violent rhetoric against women on Twitter (screenshot and examples here). Why am I not surprised?

And now we return you to our regularly scheduled programming of Republican misogyny

After two days of listening to Republicans insist that George W. Bush alone deserves the credit for the successful Bin Laden mission and wingnuts everywhere dissing Navy Seals because God forbid Obama should get credit for ANYTHING, it's almost a relief to get back to life in normal America, where the most important priority is not the economy, or even national defense, but rather punishing all those slutty American women.

First, let's go back to redefining rape. Because while the tender feelings of people like me, who have spent 40 years having MY tax dollars pay for wars and tax cuts for the wealthy and other things I don't agree with, don't matter one whit, the tender feelings of those who love the fetus but hate the baby once it's here, are paramount:

In a 251 to 175 vote this evening, 16 anti-choice Democrats joined every House Republican present in passing H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act. A chief weapon in the House GOP’s “comprehensive assault” on women this bill proposes some of the most radical and draconian restrictions on women’s rights. They include:

– Redefinition Of Rape: The bill sponsor Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) faced serious backlash after he tried to narrow the definition rape to “forcible rape.” By narrowing the rape and incest exception in the Hyde Amendment, Smith sought to prevent the following situations from consideration: Women who say no but do not physically fight off the perpetrator, women who are drugged or verbally threatened and raped, and minors impregnated by adults.

Smith promised to remove the language and while it is not technically in the bill, Mother Jones reports that House Republicans used “a sly legislative maneuver” to insert a “backdoor reintroduction” of redefinition language. Essentially, if the bill is challenged in court, judges will look at the congressional committee report to determine intent. The committee report for H.R. 3 says the bill will “not allow the Federal Government to subsidize abortions in cases of statutory rape” — thus excluding statutory rape-related abortions from Medicaid coverage.

In America now, it's Republican Congressmen, not your physician, who gets to decide what constitutes health care. And so under this bill, you would no longer be able to deduct the cost of abortion as a medical expense, nor would you be able to use pre-tax dollars to pay for your insurance if that insurance even offers to cover abortions:

The bill would prevent people from deducting the cost of an abortion from their taxable income, except when the procedure is performed in cases of rape, incest or when a physician certifies that a woman's life would be in danger if she continues the pregnancy.

Current law, known as the Hyde Amendment, bars federal money for abortions, with the same exceptions as those in the bill. But the bill would make the Hyde Amendment federal law, rather than a provision added to other bills that must be voted every year.

Abortion opponents have charged that the health care overhaul contains a loophole for insurance policies. Obama's health care overhaul, passed last year, creates state marketplaces for insurance known as "exchanges." It allows participating plans to cover abortions, provided they collect a separate premium from policyholders and that money is kept apart from federal subsidies.

The bill, written by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., disallows the tax credit for the expenses of a small employer health insurance plan that includes coverage for an abortion. Democrats said that amounts to a tax increase.

"I thought my Republican friends hated taxes, but apparently they hate reproductive freedom and women's rights even more," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif.

Supporters of the bill passed Wednesday say the health overhaul doesn't go far enough to make sure that no tax money is used to subsidize abortions. Congressional estimates say the bill would raise only a negligible amount of tax revenue.

Opponents say the bill would make it difficult if not impossible for many women to obtain medical insurance that covers abortions — even if they pay for it themselves. They say the legislation could put the Internal Revenue Service in the position of determining whether women who get abortions were sexually assaulted, so the agency can decide whether the procedure is tax deductible.

Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., said the bill is really an effort to prevent insurance companies from covering abortions.

Because in these troubled days, the most important thing to Republicans is to codify into law that women who are raped are really just sluts who are asking for it and should be forced to bear the children of their rapists. After all, they'll need cannon fodder for the wars THEIR future leaders are going to start.

EEEWWWW!!! LADYPARTS!!!

Katha Pollitt, on the Republican War on Women, a fight from which they Will Not Rest Until All Women Are Beaten Into Submission:

Remember “shared sacrifice”? Like the rain, the budget cuts were supposed to fall on all alike. But somehow men seem to be ending up with more than their share of umbrellas, and women are getting soaked. Attacks on reproductive healthcare are openly aimed at women and have gotten a lot of attention—like the House vote to defund Planned Parenthood and eliminate the Title X family planning program, which has fortunately been blocked in the Senate. Less visible are the ways federal, state and local government cutbacks, touted as neutral and necessary belt-tightening, will fall disproportionately on women.

The cuts will affect women in three ways. Partly as a legacy of private sector discrimination, a huge proportion of working women are employed by government or government contractors, and they tend to work in the very areas slated for the most drastic slashes—education, healthcare, social services, libraries, legal aid, secretarial and other office work. Moreover, because they are more likely to be poor, old and caring for children or relatives, women are the major recipients of social services. Thus, when a senior center is closed down, not only is the elderly person deprived of care likely to be female, the staffer who prepared her lunch or organized her group activities is probably a woman too—and so is the relative who now must take up the slack. When Head Start and childcare slots are eliminated—the Continuing Resolution for fiscal year 2011 proposed by the House axes 368,000 of them—tens of thousands of teachers and aides, almost all female, lose their jobs, and so do many mothers who rely on them. Add massive proposed cuts in the Women, Infants and Children feeding program and the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant, and the abolition of the Women’s Educational Equity program (which monitors schools’ compliance with Title IX), and it’s almost as if there was some kind of concerted plan to undo forty years of progress for women—and, especially, to make sure poor women stay poor.

First they came for the black people, and I said nothing because I was not black.

Then they came for the immigrants, and I didn't speak out because I was not an immigrant.

Then they came for the old and the sick, and I didn't speak out because I was not old and sick.

Now they're coming for the women. Who will speak out? Who will stop them?

Scott Walker joins the Republican war on women

In case you had any doubts that the GOP is now the Punish the Dirty Whores Who Won't Keep Their Legs Closed party, now Scott Walker has joined the Punish the Unchaste Sluts brigade:

Walker's proposed biennial budget, released Tuesday, would eliminate $1.9 million in state grants for birth control and health screenings, which go to Planned Parenthood and other providers. With federal matching funds, the grants amount to about $4 million a year, said Amanda Harrington, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood.

The budget also would repeal a law that went into effect last year requiring commercial health plans to cover prescription birth control. The law affects about a third of the state population, as the other two-thirds are uninsured or covered by self-insured plans or government insurance.

Lindsay Beyerstein notes that this is right in character for Scott Walker, who used to be an activist in the fetophile movement:

You may not know that Walker is also a longtime anti-abortion crusader. Andy Kroll of Mother Jones reports that Walker, a former president of his college’s chapter of Students for Life, has a long history of campaigning against abortion, contraception, and sex ed. As a gubernatorial candidate, Walker won the endorsement of the hardline Pro-Life Wisconsin, which even opposes abortion to save the life of the woman.

As I reported in RH Reality Check, Walker’s anti-union “budget repair” bill also contains an all-out attack on a popular and successful Medicaid program to provide birth control to Wisconsinites whose incomes would qualify them for Medicaid if they became pregnant. The program saves Wisconsin an estimated $45 million a year in maternal and infant health costs alone and brings in 9 federal dollars for every on dollar spent by the state.

So what else are we to conclude other than that Republicans think women who have sex ought to be punished for their sin with the burden of motherhood. Kind of an odd sentiment for a party that's been running on "family values" for the last thirty years, isn't it?

And while we're on the subject, go read Sharon Lerner, here.