One of the ironies of this election is the argument that, no matter how much Obama may disappoint us, we still have to vote for him in order to preserve Roe v. Wade. We must have a President Obama to appoint liberal judges to the Supreme Court! cry the possums. The problem is that Obama is the wrong Democrat for that argument.
The truth is that if Obama himself were being floated as a possible Supreme Court appointment, progressives would be opposing him as too conservative.
We’ve known all along that Obama is rather iffy on women’s rights (despite some propaganda to the contrary), and he even had to be dissuaded from voting for the Roberts confirmation. But with his recent statements on late-term abortions, it’s become clear just how conservative he really is.
First he came out with a stance that is so far to the right of existing abortion law, it’s been espoused on the Supreme Court only by arch-conservatives Scalia and Thomas. The next day he tried to “clarify” — though I’m choking on calling it a “clarification” when he’s reversing what he said the day before and even denying that he said what he said — but the so-called clarification isn’t much better. The new phrase he’s using, “serious clinical mental health disease,” introduces a burden that is significantly more stringent than what the law has demanded for the past 35 years. He’s still in Scalia and Thomas territory.
Obama also tells us that he’s in favor of “a woman’s right to choose with her doctor, her pastor and her family.” But that’s not the existing legal standard. Obama’s language sounds like the husband notification provision that was struck down in Casey. As Zuzu at Shakesville points out, that puts him in company with Samuel Alito.
As for the “pastor” reference, we can only hope that’s just pure godbag pandering.
And what’s with this talk about “partial birth abortion”? What is that? Doesn’t exist. No such thing. It’s a construct of right-wing forced-pregnancy propagandists. Obama says,
“My only point is that in an area like partial birth abortion having a mental, having a health exception can be defined rigorously. It can be defined through physical health, It can be defined by serious clinical mental-health diseases. It is not just a matter of feeling blue.”
Is he conflating the mythical “partial birth” abortion with all late-term abortions? Does he think “feeling blue” is an accurate representation of what a woman might experience when she learns that she’s carrying a fetus whose brain is growing outside its skull? Does he have any fucking clue what he’s talking about? Is he just making shit up?
I’m sorry, I thought I could get through this whole post without swearing. I was wrong.
So. Scalia, Thomas, Alito. These are Obama’s ideological confreres on the Court. (And don’t forget Obama’s man-crush on Roberts, with whom he apparently shares more “ideology” than we realized.)
I’ll say it again: if Obama were being floated as a possible Supreme Court appointment, progressives would be opposing him as too conservative..
And yet this is the guy we’re supposed to back for President, so he can appoint….liberal justices? Huh?
One word. LEVERAGE.
Posted by Violet under Reproductive Rights, Election 2008 on July 7, 2008, 1:27 am EST
13 Comments »
First he alienates everybody who’s blue-collar, religious, pro-gun, and/or anti-NAFTA:
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
There goes Pennsylvania!
What’s even more damaging about this comment is that it was delivered in a speech to California billionaires, and by a Democrat who publicly opposes NAFTA but has been reported as conveying private assurances to Canada that nothing would change if he were elected. Extra points for dissing the Clinton Administration, which most working-class people remember as their most positive experience with Democrats.
Then he alienates every pro-choice woman in America:
Barack Obama said anti-abortion Democrats are backing him because they feel he respects their opinion on the issue despite disagreement on it. ….”It may be that those who have opposed abortion get a sense that I’m listening to them and respect their position even though where we finally come down may be different,” he told reporters at a news conference.
“The mistake that pro-choice forces have sometimes made in the past, and this is a generalization so it has not always been the case, has been to not acknowledge the wrenching moral issues involved in it,” he said.
No. Just: no. That is a typical anti-choice line and it’s worse than false; it’s hugely offensive. It’s the kind of thinking that brings idiot men to my blog every time I post on abortion, trying to explain to me that it’s about bay-bees. “Don’t you unnerstan, it’s a bay-bee growing in there?” they plead. As if women thought abortion was like deciding whether to get mushrooms or extra cheese.
But hey, it’s good to know Barry respects the position of people who don’t think women should be entrusted with decisions over their own life and health. It reminds me of his man-crush on John Roberts, and how it pained him to think that a little thing like “ideology” might stand in the way of confirmation to the Supreme Court. “Ideology,” in this instance, referring to Roberts’ belief that women have no right to abortion and don’t even deserve equal pay for equal work. Hey, what’s a little ideology between ex-Harvard Law Review guys?
If Barry does become the nominee, I’m wondering who’ll still be around in November to vote for him. How many electoral votes does DailyKos have?
Posted by Violet under Politics, Reproductive Rights, Election 2008 on April 11, 2008, 11:25 pm EST
9 Comments »
This article was published last fall, and the information in it was probably available before then, but I’ve just now discovered it:
Sen. Barack Obama had hired Pete Rouse for just such a moment.
It was the fall of 2005, and the celebrated young senator — still new to Capitol Hill but aware of his prospects for higher office — was thinking about voting to confirm John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice. Talking with his aides, the Illinois Democrat expressed admiration for Roberts’s intellect. Besides, Obama said, if he were president he wouldn’t want his judicial nominees opposed simply on ideological grounds.
And then Rouse, his chief of staff, spoke up. This was no Harvard moot-court exercise, he said. If Obama voted for Roberts, Rouse told him, people would remind him of that every time the Supreme Court issued another conservative ruling, something that could cripple a future presidential run. Obama took it in. And when the roll was called, he voted no.
Here’s what that tells me about Obama:
- At the age of 44 this man had no clue why voting to confirm a young, anti-abortion, anti-women’s rights ultra-conservative to the Supreme Court was a bad idea for the women of America. Or he simply didn’t care.
- This article is reproduced on Obama’s own website, so apparently he still hasn’t figured out #1. Or he still doesn’t care.
- When he did change his mind it was only to preserve his presidential chances. Defending the rights of female American citizens wasn’t enough.
In the fall of 2005 the feminist sphere was aflame with calls to block Roberts’s confirmation. And while we were doing that, this chump was sitting in his Senate office making absurd noises about Roberts’s “intellect”.*
And you trust this clown?
*Allow me to remind you that Roberts’s vaunted intellect has led him to oppose abortion rights, equal pay for women, and to question “whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good.”
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Politics, Reproductive Rights, Election 2008 on March 14, 2008, 8:29 pm EST
16 Comments »
Matt Abbott in Catholic Online:
That said, I do believe, in some cases, the abortion-seeking woman is indeed the perpetrator. She knows very well what she’s doing. She’s not coerced by anyone. Perhaps she’s even going against the wishes of her loved ones. This is the woman who should be treated as a criminal – if not a murderer, then an accessory to murder.
What would be an appropriate prison sentence for such a woman?
Fifteen years-to-life sounds reasonable, no? Of course, one would have to take into account all the circumstances in a particular situation, and it wouldn’t be an easy task. But it could be done.
If Matt ever decides to leave the Church, he could do some fine work at Landover Baptist.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Godbags, Reproductive Rights on September 6, 2007, 2:46 pm EST
9 Comments »
Speide Bahl is an anti-choicer and an anti-feminist, it’s true, but unlike so many of his tribe, he’s also an original thinker. Time after time Bahl has brought a new perspective to the problems that divide Americans, and his most recent contribution to the abortion debate is no exception.
As Bahl writes with admirable candor, “One of the biggest problems facing us Pro-lifers is how ugly fetuses are.”
Yes! Finally, someone on the anti-choice side has the intellectual honesty to tackle this issue head-on. And what’s even better is that rather than insisting, as so many anti-choicers do, that women be forced to continue their pregnancies, Bahl proposes a couple of non-restrictive measures designed to make fetuses more appealing:
Saturday morning fetus cartoons depicting the fetus as a fun, adorable plaything, or even as an action hero. Or both.
A MySpace or Facebook account for each fetus to create a social network that will make Mom think twice before aborting. “After all,” as Bahl writes, “it’s one thing to make a quick trip to a clinic…it’s something else to have to answer 100 angry e-mails and delete an account.”
Of course I’m not actually endorsing these ideas; the problem with abortion in this country isn’t that it’s happening too much, but that it is increasingly unavailable. I’m just appreciative of Speide Bahl’s novel approach to the issue. If more anti-choicers were like him, this thing would have been settled a long time ago.
Posted by Violet under Reproductive Rights, Various and Sundry on August 18, 2007, 4:24 pm EST
5 Comments »
“The ‘partial-birth’ abortion ban is a political scam but a public relations gold mine.”
The Supreme Court has just voted to uphold a ban on something that doesn’t exist: so-called “partial-birth” abortions. There is no such medical procedure by that name. The whole thing is a boondoggle dreamed up by forced-pregnancy advocates who will stop at nothing to keep women from exercising control over their own bodies. It sounds awful — “partial-birth? yikes!” — and the fake diagrams published by forced-pregnancy advocates to illustrate it look even worse. That’s the whole point, to get people to react emotionally. That way they don’t notice that the actual purpose of the law is something entirely different.
So what is it that’s being banned here? Forced-pregnancy advocates have known all along that if they were honest about what the law actually does, they would run into all kinds of guff. That’s because most Americans don’t share their peculiar obsession with controlling the nation’s uteruses. So they’ve had to lie. They’ve had to pretend that the law bans only one type of rare, late-term abortion. The problem is that the law doesn’t actually do that. The wording of the ban is so half-assed, so broad, so confusing, that it could very well apply to almost all procedures performed as early as the 12th week of pregnancy.
Which, of course, is the point.
The law contains no exception for the sake of a woman’s health — though this shouldn’t surprise you once you understand that the whole purpose here is just to keep females from having any control over their own bodies. From a medical standpoint the language of the ban is such gobbledygook that many doctors, perhaps most, will simply stop performing second-trimester abortions altogether rather than risk finding themselves on the wrong side of the law. It is no accident that the ban has been opposed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which represents more than 90% of ob-gyns, as well as by more than a dozen other major medical groups.
Legally, the decision is indefensible. Three lower courts found the ban unconstitutional based on 30 years of precedent. The Supreme Court itself found a similar law unconstitutional in 2000. What’s changed between then and now is that Shrub has packed the Court with right-wing ideologues. Back when Alito was confirmed (the occasion of my original Shaka, when the walls fell post), optimists were saying that the Dark Side still only had four votes on the Court since Kennedy wouldn’t vote to overturn Roe. It’s a moot point now. This Court has made it clear that even if Roe isn’t technically overturned, there are other ways to outlaw abortion.
More information and background:
Posted by Violet under Reproductive Rights, Various and Sundry on April 18, 2007, 7:09 pm EST
27 Comments »
Today is Blog for Choice day, and the good folks sponsoring the event have asked us bloggers to write about why we’re pro-choice. It’s a terrific idea, and I expect the intertubes will be flooded today with excellent posts listing all the reasons to support women’s reproductive freedom.
I, however, am going to be a contrarian asshole.
I’m tired of giving the reasons why I’m pro-choice. I’ve been giving the reasons why I’m pro-choice for 30 goddamn years, and the thing is, reasons don’t matter. Not to the people on the other side, the weepy irrational twit-headed godbags who want to extend full citizenship rights to 8-celled clumps and herd women into forced-incubation camps. They don’t even understand reasons.
Listen: 30 years ago I took the pro-choice side in a high school debate on abortion. I gave a good solid presentation, listing all the reasons why it was right and necessary for women to have the right to an abortion: because it’s a matter of fundamental bodily integrity, because the decision to bear a child belongs solely to the person doing the bearing, because women will seek abortions no matter what and if they’re illegal then thousands of women will suffer or die from back-alley hack jobs, etc., etc. When I sat down, I was genuinely curious to see how my debate opponent would answer my arguments.
She didn’t even try. She didn’t address a single point, didn’t discuss a single question of law or rights or statistics. Instead, she pulled out a piece of paper and started reading: “Mommy, I’m 8 inches long and I have all my organs! I love the sound of your voice…” It was the Talking Fetus pamphlet! Yes, that thing. It was making the rounds 30 years ago and it’s still out there today. It’s like the Christmas fruitcake that won’t die.
Anyway, my debate opponent read this thing with a trembling voice, her eyes welling with tears as the wee diary-keeping embryo drew ever closer to its destiny with Jesus. By the end she and the whole class were sobbing — snot dripping out, the whole bit. I leaned my head against the wall and wished our teacher would schedule a lesson on propaganda.
I don’t remember if, when I got up to respond, I actually said, “You do realize that this wasn’t really written by a baby, right?”, but I was certainly thinking it. It wouldn’t have mattered though. At that point my classmates would have sooner voted for roasting live kittens than for abortion, and in fact in their minds it was pretty much the same thing.
And that’s still how the anti-choice people think, which is to say, they don’t really think. They just fantasize about talking fetuses and cry. So, instead of trying to fight them with reasons, maybe we should just circulate some really, really sappy pamphlets. I know: we could do one written from the point of view of a woman bleeding to death on the floor of a motel bathroom as the illegal abortionist hightails it out of there
with the cash and the coathanger in his pocket. It could end with the dead woman in Jesus’s arms, asking “Whatever happened to Roe v. Wade?”
Posted by Violet under Blogging for Choice, Reproductive Rights, Recommended on January 22, 2007, 6:09 am EST
23 Comments »
Reading up on the Imaginary-Procedure Abortion Ban case before the Supreme Court, this headline caught my jaundiced eye:
Abortion Foes Face Pair of Big Tests
I keep thinking there’s a letter missing.
P.S. I apologize for this unaccustomed descent into juvenalia. I blame it on my choking-sensation malady which is clearly depriving my brain of sufficient oxygen.
Posted by Violet under Reproductive Rights on November 10, 2006, 1:56 am EST
29 Comments »
From Super Babymama:
When she got here I could tell she had been crying for hours. Her eyes were puffy and her skin was blotchy, and as soon as I gave her a sympathetic, “what’s wrong?” she burst into tears again. She literally fell to her knees and crawled across the floor to me, laying her head in my lap and sobbing, while I stroked her hair and let her cry. Finally she sat up and buried her face in my neck while I hugged her.
She’d been pregnant.
Now she wasn’t.
And she was having nightmares about being a murderer.
This post knocked me over.
No trolls, no jokes. I mean it.
Posted by Violet under Reproductive Rights on May 1, 2006, 12:56 am EST
62 Comments »
Terri Herring is the president of Pro-Life Mississippi, and she’s just heart-broken that the state’s new abortion ban will allow exceptions in the case of rape and incest:
“I think it’s our responsibility to have a pure pro-life message that has to be you don’t kill a child for the crime of his father,” Herring said.
Ah yes, the miracle of life: a father and his child.
P.S. I posted this the first time with the wrong picture, because I’m blind. Sorry.
Technorati Tags: Abortion, Mississippi
Posted by Violet under Reproductive Rights on March 18, 2006, 7:48 pm EST
16 Comments »
I think it’s time for the women of South Dakota to form an international sorority with the women of Saudi Arabia. Riyadh and Sioux Falls could be sister cities. I mean, shit, there’s no telling when the South Dakota legislature will decide that women shouldn’t drive — isn’t road travel kind of hazardous to those precious embryos they might be carrying?
And since the new abortion law makes no exception for rape, it’s just a matter of time before the legislature compassionately fills that breach by outlawing all those wicked things women do that force men to rape them. Things like going outside the house without a male escort, walking on the street after dusk, wearing something other than a voluminous head-to-toe black bag, breathing.
Yes, I’m sure that Saudi women can offer our South Dakota gals lots of tips on how to manage their new status as dedicated blastocyst incubators. I don’t think we can really quite call them citizens anymore, do you?
Technorati Tags: Abortion, South Dakota, blog against sexism
Posted by Violet under Reproductive Rights on March 8, 2006, 12:12 pm EST
10 Comments »
Teenage girls pray for the patriarchy
Colorado is a state full of majestic mountains, glorious vistas, and raving lunatics. Godbag lunatics, to be specific.
Rep. Betty Boyd, Democrat, is on her fourth try to get emergency contraception readily available to the women of her state. Unlike certain female Democrats who have recently been excoriated on this blog, Rep. Boyd is actually working on behalf of women instead of their oppressors. What a concept!
It’s an uphill battle, seeing as how Colorado is the kind of place where godbag teenage girls attend hearings on emergency contraception in order to pray for the patriarchy (as if it needed any help) and to testify against women having actual control over their reproductive health. It’s the kind of place where a male godbag legislator can sneer, “Call me Nostradamus, but I don’t see this bill becoming law.” It’s the kind of place where similar legislation has already been defeated 3 times, partly on the advice of godbag-owned hospitals.
So, if you’re in Colorado — or even if you’re not — send Rep. Betty Boyd some love. Go to her website and find out what you can do to help.
Thanks to Jeff for the alert.
Posted by Violet under Reproductive Rights on February 27, 2006, 2:58 pm EST
20 Comments »
In the coverage of South Dakota’s bold new law to reduce women to the legal standing of cuttlefish, not much attention is being paid to the fact that the main sponsor of this legislation is a female Democrat. Senator Julie Bartling is her name, and that’s her mug shot. I’ve included it so you can gaze upon her oddly cheerful visage and contemplate what it must be like to live with your head permanently implanted inside the large intestine of the patriarchy.
Now, it’s standard operating procedure for feminists to acknowledge that our bitterest female opponents are themselves victims of the big P, and to extend compassion to them as the deluded tools that they are. So Julie, I’m officially extending compassion to you. And having gotten that out of the way, let me say again: fuck you, you goddamn misogynist bitch.
Posted by Violet under Reproductive Rights on February 24, 2006, 7:38 pm EST
44 Comments »
Reader Will sent me the following about the dwindling numbers of abortion providers. Look over these statistics: 87% of U.S. counties have no abortion provider, the number of abortion providers has dropped by more than a third in the past 20 years, the number of hospitals performing abortions has dropped by more than half…
An abortion provider is simply a facility where abortions are performed. The important term is abortion clinics because “abortion provider” includes hospitals. Hospitals are not much of an option for an abortion. In other words, you do not walk in and schedule an elective abortion in a hospital.
So in Virginia, in 2000, there were 46 abortion providers (counting hospitals). Now, go look in your local phone books and see how few abortion clinics exist.
Ask yourself how many abortion clinics exist in your state.
Ask yourself whether only one doctor is serving more than one of those clinics.
Ask yourself how old that doctor is and how many more years he will continue.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Violet under Reproductive Rights on February 21, 2006, 1:35 pm EST
17 Comments »
