If you’re a woman reading this, I hope you don’t live in Missouri, where the right to choose an abortion if you are pregnant just became much more difficult:
Missouri abortion providers will face new regulations for their clinics and new restrictions on teaching sex education classes.
Gov. Matt Blunt signed legislation today placing more abortion clinics under government oversight by classifying them as ambulatory surgical centers. Planned Parenthood claims the law could force it to spend more than $1 million to remodel some of its buildings.
The new law, which will take effect Aug. 28, also bars people affiliated with abortion providers from teaching or supplying materials for sex education courses, and it allows schools to offer abstinence-only programs. […]
The legislation also puts into law the Missouri Alternatives to Abortion Services Program, which lawmakers have funded through the budget for several years. It provides grants for pregnancy centers that encourage women to give birth instead of have abortions. The law authorizes a public awareness campaign to promote the centers.
Isn’t it odd? I always thought Republicans opposed increased government regulation as a burden on society and taxpayers. Seems some government regulation is good for you after all, at least if it helps make it more difficult for you to exercise your right to obtain an abortion.
And yes, in Missouri, God (and the state) now forbids people who know what they are talking about from teaching sex education classes. Nor can they provide materials to sex ed classes which inform kids of the benefits of contraception in avoiding pregnancy, and, in the case of condoms, lowering the risk of catching a sexually transmitted disease, like AIDS. Instead, children there will be taught to “just say no” to sex. And we all know how accurate and effective such abstinence only programs can be:
In December 2004, Rep. Henry A. Waxman released a report showing that many federally funded abstinence-only education programs use curricula that distort information about the effectiveness of contraceptives, misrepresent the risks of abortion, blur religion and science, treat stereotypes about girls and boys as scientific fact, and contain basic scientific errors. […]
State evaluations of the abstinence-only federal initiative are just now becoming available. Advocates for Youth’s analysis, Five Years of Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Education: Assessing the Impact, covers evaluations from Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. The review found that abstinence-only programs show little evidence of sustained, long-term impact on adolescents’ attitudes favoring abstinence or on teens’ intentions to abstain. Importantly, in only one of the ten states did any program demonstrate short-term success in delaying the initiation of sex, and none showed long-term success in impacting teen sexual behavior.
Of course, this matters little to Republican politicians and their rabid anti-sex supporters. Truth is irrelevant as far as they are concerned. The only thing that matter is that they continue to turn back the clock to some mythical age of absolute purity, where no one ever had sex before marriage or outside of marriage, where each child’s birth was a precious, sacred event, and where everyone went to church on Sunday to imbibe the the “good word” and be scared straight (literally) by their preacher’s hell fire and damnation sermon. That such a biblically correct paradise has never existed in the United States at any time in our history matters little to them. They take it as an article of faith that they are carrying out God’s plan here on earth, and against those delusions what power can mere facts possess to change their thinking.
In short, they are heading us down the road to back alley abortionists, increased teen pregnancy, increased transmission of sexual diseases and the treatment of women’s bodies as chattel, belonging to their fathers or their husbands, as the case may be. Their fantasies of a Great Christian Revival in America would result in a new Dark Ages where religion is the dominant power in society, people are subservient to God and a patriarchal order which grants husbands and fathers ownership rights over female bodies, and where science is limited to areas where it won’t cast doubt on the teachings of faith. And laws like the one just passed in Missouri are part of their plan to chip away and chip away at the very idea of women’s rights until the day comes when five justices on the Supreme Court agree to overturn Roe v. Wade and set in motion the reversal of 100 years of progress for women in our country.
Count on it.
