Eideard

This post is a year old. Republicans haven’t gotten better. Their goals have retreated further into darkness and hatred.

Here is a list of misogynist bills introduced by Republicans in the past two weeks showing what they want for women.

1) Rape: Republicans are actually trying to redefine rape to exclude drugging a women and raping her, or getting her drunk and raping her. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven’t the language is still out there.

2) More Rape. A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to “accuser.” But victims of other crimes, like robbery, would remain “victims.” Apparently in Georgia if a women is raped, she isn’t really – is just an annoying accuser. Which means the rapist is not really a criminal.

3) Murder. In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder anyone who injures or threatens a fetus, including a doctor who provides abortion care and the mother. He denies it has anything to do with abortion so I guess it is aimed at makingit OK for a husband or boyfriend to kill his partner if he thinks she might injure the fetus- like in a car accident, or he just doesn’t like her anymore.

4) Starvation. Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids. But payments to corporations to not grow food to keep prices up is still in the budget.

5) Death. In Congress, Republicans have proposed a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life (so she and fetus die.)

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Hundreds of thousands of young people descending on Madrid this week for the Catholic church’s World Youth Day – which features processions, group prayers and a mass with Pope Benedict XVI – are to get a “special” concession.

Church leaders have ordered that anyone confessing, during this event, to having had an abortion – a sin punishable by excommunication – will be welcomed back into the church.

“Normally, only certain priests have the power to lift such an excommunication, but the local diocese has decided to give all the priests taking confession at the event this power,” said the pope’s spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi.

Two hundred white wooden confession booths have been set up in Madrid’s Buen Retiro park for the event, which started on Tuesday and runs until Sunday…

The driving force behind the deal is the archbishop of Madrid, Antonio María Rouco Varela, who persuaded the Vatican to offer women who had had abortions access to “the fruits of divine grace that will open the doors to a new life”…

Young Catholics making the trip to the Spanish capital will also gain a plenary indulgence – effectively a reduction in the time believers spend in purgatory after confessing and being absolved of their sins. These concessions were once sold by priests, but now the indulgences are granted on special occasions.

And for only an additional $99 anyone who admits to voting for a candidate who called for the church to pay taxes – and begs forgiveness – will be guaranteed passage through the eye of a needle.

As seen on TV. All credit cards accepted.

A new analysis published by the UK journal Reproductive Health Matters shows that the criminalisation of abortion in Poland has led to the development of a vast illegal private sector with no controls on price, quality of care or accountability. Since abortion became illegal in the late 1980s the number of abortions carried out in hospitals has fallen by 99%. The private trade in abortions is, however, flourishing, with abortion providers advertising openly in newspapers.

Women have been the biggest losers during this push of abortion provision into the clandestine private sector. The least privileged have been hardest hit: in 2009 the cost of a surgical abortion in Poland was greater than the average monthly income of a Polish citizen. Low-income groups are less able to protest against discrimination due to lack of political influence. Better-off women can pay for abortions generating millions in unregistered, tax-free income for doctors. Some women seek safe, legal abortions abroad in countries such as the UK and Germany.

“In the private sector, illegal abortion must be cautiously arranged and paid for out of pocket,” says Agata Chełstowska, the author of the research and a PhD student at the University of Warsaw. “When a woman enters that sphere, her sin turns into gold. Her private worries become somebody else’s private gain.” The Catholic Church, highly influential in predominantly Catholic Poland, leads the opposition to legal abortion.

Since illegality has monetised abortion, doctors have incentives to keep it clandestine, “Doctors do not want to perform abortions in public hospitals,” says Wanda Nowicka, Executive Director of the Federation for Women and Family Planning. “They are ready, however, to take that risk when a woman comes to their private practice. We are talking about a vast, untaxed source of income. That is why the medical profession is not interested in changing the abortion law.”

The kind of “morality” enforced by religious fools, stuck into the Dark Ages. Just in case anyone wonders what might follow the Kool Aid Party and the rest of the Republican Crusaders.

In Florida, “uterus” is a dirty word. A member of the state house of representatives drew a reprimand when he complained that while Republicans want to repeal rules and regulations on corporations, they are all hot to impose rules and regulations on individuals. Women, for example. The rightwingers who control both the house and the senate in Florida have introduced 18 bills to restrict abortion.

Representative Scott Randolph, a Democrat from Orlando, said that his wife had decided the only way to protect her rights was to, as he put it, “incorporate her uterus”. Maybe then the business sycophants of the Republican party would stop trying to micromanage it with laws circumscribing reproductive freedom. Speaker Dean Cannon said he was shocked – shocked! – at such language on the house floor, deeming it a breach of “decorum”. Stephanie Kunkel, Planned Parenthood’s Florida director, rolled her eyes: “If the speaker can’t bear to hear or say the word ‘uterus’, he shouldn’t be legislating it.” Newspaper columnists amused themselves concocting acceptable euphemisms: Frank Cerabino of the Palm Beach Post suggests “baby garage”.

And that’s pretty much how Republicans see women – as a place to park a kid till he’s ready to pop out and go to Sunday School and learn that sex is filthy. Republican-controlled legislatures across the US are hell-bent on stopping women from exercising control over their own bodies. Florida is one of 13 states that would require women to have an ultrasound – which they would have to pay for – before terminating a pregnancy. In Indiana, Texas, Kentucky and four other states, a woman would be forced to look at the foetus. Doctors would have to describe to her, in great detail, the foetus and its physical functions. After all this, she would still have to cool her heels for several days before being permitted to actually have the abortion…

In Texas, where they’re trying to restrict RU-486, the “morning after pill”, the legislature also threatened to cut funding for low-income contraception programmes on the logic that birth control among the poor leads to increased abortion rates. That’s bad and stupid, but not as bad and stupid as what’s going on in Louisiana where Representative John LaBruzzo has introduced a bill to outlaw all abortions – no exceptions, even where the life of the mother is at risk – and charge doctors who perform abortions with “foeticide”. On 26 April, Mother Jones reported that LaBruzzo would also like to make criminals of women who have abortions, but that he may remove that provision in his bill, making it easier to pass.

As Gloria Steinem said, so many years ago: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

I’ve been following the serious attack on freedom of choice by Republikans – about right for self-titled Libertarians. Plus the absurd assault on language by Florida Republicans. You should RTFA in the Guardian for the best precis of what’s going on. Both the criminal and laughable elements of the tale.

As is customary, most of the news-as-media-and-entertainment crowd who own American journalism have paid little attention to the political struggle and fear possible retaliation by Republicans and their Kool Aid Party brown shirts. So, there has been little coverage of the uterati event. Though it would fit nicely in with their dedication to column inches about stupidity like birthers and other racist camouflage.

Three potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates expressed hostility toward the public school system at a home schooling rally on Wednesday in the early presidential caucus state of Iowa.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul told the crowd government wants “absolute control” of the “indoctrination” of children. Paul spoke along with Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Georgia businessman Herman Cain.

“The public school system now is a propaganda machine,” Paul said, prompting applause from the crowd of hundreds of home schooling families. “They start with our kids even in kindergarten, teaching them about family values, sexual education, gun rights, environmentalism – and they condition them to believe in so much which is totally un-American.”

Bachmann said home schooling is the “essence” of freedom and liberty. “It’s about knowing our children better than the state knows our children,” she said.

“It is not up to a bureaucrat to decide what is best for your children,” Bachmann said, drawing cheers from the crowd. “I am so tired of the establishment telling us that they know best. We know best…”

Cain, former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza and another prospective Republican candidate, denounced government involvement in education at all levels.

“That’s all we want is for government to get out of the way so we can educate ourselves and our children the old-fashioned way,” Cain said.

Justin LaVan of the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators said it was encouraging to see potential presidential candidates talking about the home-schooling movement.

“More importantly, talking about our Creator – our rights that came from our Creator, acknowledging that and giving him the glory, folks,” said LaVan, who served as master of ceremonies at the rally.

Hallelujah – have a snake!

These people calling themselves Republicans, today, are less Republican than George Wallace, David Duke, Father Coughlin and all the bigots who tried previously to take over that once-principled party.

He also says gold is the only legal tender

A Georgia state lawmaker with a history of operating on the political fringe has filed a bill stripping the term “victim” from rape, stalking and domestic violence cases…It would eliminate the word “victim” from statutes dealing with stalking, rape, obscene telephone contact with a child and family violence…

The proposed change angered some who felt that Bobby Franklin meant the legislation as an attack on rape victims and on women, who comprise the overwhelming majority of victims of sexual assault…

Carolyn Fiddler, the communications director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, wrote on the organization’s website that the legislation diminishes rape victims by questioning whether what happened to them is even a crime.

“Burglary victims are still victims. Assault victims are still victims. Fraud victims are still victims,” she wrote. “But if you have the misfortune to suffer a rape, or if you are beaten by a domestic partner, or if you are stalked, Rep. Franklin doesn’t think you have been victimized…”

This is the second controversy this month over Republican legislation mentioning rape. Last week, U.S. House Republicans changed the language in a bill limiting taxpayer funding for abortions after Democrats and others argued it narrowed a longstanding allowance for government funding of abortion in the case of rape by using the term “forcible rape.”

Critics said that the language would exclude abortion funding for the rape of unconscious or mentally incapacitated women, for instance.

Franklin, who also has filed legislation that would outlaw abortion in Georgia…recently attracted attention for filing legislation that would eliminate the need for Georgia residents to get driver’s licenses, saying the government cannot abridge an individual’s right to travel.

He has also filed a bill that would abolish all zoning laws in the state.

Unlike most of his KoolAid Party contemporaries who would take American law and justice back to the 19th Century – and the Confederacy, Franklin apparently is aiming for the 18th Century or earlier.

No doubt he’d love the Inquisition.

The abortion rate in the United States, which has declined steadily since a 1981 peak of more than 29 abortions per 1,000 women, stalled between 2005 and 2008, at slightly less than 20 abortions per 1,000 women, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute.

While the new report is a statistical survey and does not provide any explanation for why the numbers hit a plateau, Rachel Jones, the lead author, said the economy might have played a role.

“Unintended pregnancy is increasingly concentrated among poor and low-income women, and for the 2008 survey, we were collecting data in the midst of a recession,” Ms. Jones said. “So there are more poor women in the survey, women who in better economic times might have decided to carry to term, but since they or their partner lost their job, decided they couldn’t…”

The report found that more women were turning away from surgical abortion in favor of medication, usually mifepristone, the drug formerly known as RU-486, to end their pregnancies. The report estimates that about 17 percent of all 2008 abortions, and more than a quarter of those performed before nine weeks of gestation, were medication abortions.

Randall K. O’Bannon, director of education and research at the National Right to Life Committee, said the trend toward medication abortions had helped keep the abortion numbers steady…

Mifepristone was introduced in the United Sates in 2000, and according to the report, there were 187,000 medication abortions in 2008, compared with 158,000 the previous year. Many clinics that do not specialize in abortions offer only medication abortions.

Ms. Jones sees the increase in medication abortions as good news, because such abortions occur early in pregnancy, when abortion is safest…

The Guttmacher report found an increase in harassment of abortion providers, with clinics in the Midwest and the South the most likely to experience harassment and those in the Northeast and the West the least.

Do those statistics signify anything special to you?

Certainly, the geographic spread in harassment of women who feel they have a right to choose fits right into America’s politics and religion. And, frankly, whatever the application – I think most folks would choose pills over surgery when practical.

The head of the Catholic church in Phoenix has stripped Arizona’s largest hospital of its Catholic affiliation after he ruled that a decision to save the life of a mother by terminating her 11-week pregnancy was morally wrong.

Bishop Thomas Olmsted announced yesterday that St Joseph’s hospital can no longer be considered to be Catholic. The ruling breaks a relationship that stretches back to the hospital’s founding by Catholic nuns 115 years ago.

He has also excommunicated the member of the hospital’s ethics committee that permitted the abortion to go ahead.

The schism brings to a head a dispute that has been building for several months over the termination, performed in November 2009, at St Joseph’s hospital and medical centre.

The case concerned an unidentified woman in her 20s, who had a history of abnormally high blood pressure that was under control before she became pregnant. But doctors were concerned on learning of the pregnancy about the extra burden that would be placed on her heart, and they monitored her closely.

Tests showed that in the early stages of pregnancy her condition deteriorated rapidly and that before long her pulmonary hypertension – which can impair the working of the heart and lungs – had begun to seriously threaten her life. Doctors informed her that the risk of death was close to 100% if she continued with the pregnancy.

Consultations were then held with the patient, her family, her doctors and the hospital’s ethics team, and the decision to go ahead with an abortion was taken in order to save the mother’s life. And no need to invite the Bishop and his church in on the decision!

The hospital’s president, Linda Hunt, said following the bishop’s severing of relations that the operation had been “consistent with our values of dignity and justice. If we are presented with a situation in which a pregnancy threatens a woman’s life, our first priority is to save both patients. If that is not possible we will always save the life we can save, and that is what we did in this case.”

But Olmsted did not see it that way. you can RTFA if you really care about crap doctrine, religious ideology, philosophical systems that place superstition as taking precedence over human life.

I’m not wasting any more time on it than I’ve felt necessary for the last 59 years of my life.

A new study has determined that teenagers who have abortions are no more likely to become depressed or have low self-esteem than their peers whose pregnancies do not end in abortion.

The study conducted by researchers from Oregon State University and University of California, San Francisco, is the first to use both depression and low self-esteem as outcomes with a nationally representative sample of adolescents.

The researchers found that young women in the study who had an abortion were no more likely to become depressed or have low self-esteem within the first year of pregnancy – or five years later – than their peers who were pregnant, but did not have an abortion…

Jocelyn Warren said previous research has shown that adolescent girls who get pregnant report more depression and lower self-esteem compared to those who don’t. “What we didn’t know was whether psychological outcomes are worse for girls who choose abortion. This study says, ‘No.’”

“In the interest of women’s health, it’s critical that we conduct the most rigorous studies possible and use evidence-based information to inform public policy,” Marie Harvey, co-author, said. “This is our goal in public health research but it may be even more important in areas such as abortion that are highly politicized.”

As a proper science-based study, the authors make the point that decisions about medical procedures should be evidence-based. Almost an impossible standard to reach given the farce that passes for lawmaking in the United States.

Nutballs trot out their pet ideology, favorite superstition, and ask the whole nation to adhere to whatever spooky crap they believe should be so. Scientific study, measured programmatic analysis over time, has minimal influence on hacks inclined to base political and social decisions upon myth – and possible votes.

The human foetus feels no pain before 24 weeks, according to a major review of scientific evidence…

The connections in the foetal brain are not fully formed in that time, nor is the foetus conscious, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

The findings of two reports commissioned by the Department of Health strike a blow to those seeking to reduce the upper time limit for having an abortion, currently at 24 weeks.

The studies suggest that late abortions, permitted for serious abnormalities or risks to a woman’s health, do not result in foetal suffering because of increasing evidence that the chemical environment in the uterus induces “a continuous sleep-like unconsciousness or sedation”…

Even after 24 weeks, “it is difficult to say that the foetus experiences pain because this, like all other experiences, develops post-natally along with memory and other learned behaviours”…

Anti-abortion campaigners said the work did not challenge other arguments for a lower limit.

Other than the fact that anti-abortion arguments are limited almost exclusively to anti-scientific, religious humbug. And take no account of a woman’s right to choose to order her own life.