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.
Hell, this year’s earlier ruling has already all but made women second class citizens.
If a women is pregnant in 2007, the right to her own body is not only secondary to the unborn child, but is secondary to what the government says is best for that unborn child.
There are millions of Americans out there who seem to think that the last 100+ years of the advancement of rights in this country, civil rights, reproductive rights, classic liberalism in general, has been a failure.
The only solution these people can see is to roll them all back. It’s not just women’s rights, but everyone’s rights. We’re at the crossroads here folks. Down one path is freedom and justice for all, the real American way. Down the other…well, down the other is darkness. Decades, if not generations of it.
The choice is ours.
or nurse practioner affiliated with Planned Parenthood who also teaches sunday morning Sex Ed in a religious education program in a denomination like the Unitarian-Universalists, United Church of Christ, United Methodist and Episcopal Chuch could be banned from teaching?
I also thought that the Republicans believed in faith-based approaches to sex ed and social services?
What about the OB-Gyn at a medical school who writes sex ed curriculum or advises school boards, but who also is involved in complicated pregnancies and emergency abortions? Some of those services are now lost too?
Short answer: who knows. Longer answer: I’m sure the right wing of the GOP would prefer to see it interpreted as broadly as possible.
And the democrats (and I’m on our state central committee) move merrily along and vote for the likes of Alito and Roberts….
And that’s what’s so insidious about this movement too. You almost have to vote democratic in 2008 if you care even a shred about human rights for women. No not voting, no protest votes.
So if it’s Hillary, you have to help enact a 32-36 year dynasty wherein one member of two families is in the White House, or else you’ve sold women down the river.
And if it’s Edwards or Obama, you have to vote for them despite their inability to unequivocally reject the neocon (and AIPAC) agenda when it comes to Iran.
We’re between a rock and a hard place and the path out keeps getting narrower and narrower.
Even though that report came out proving what any sane person already knows without millions spent on study we can thank the democrats in the House for going ahead and approving not only More abstinence only education but heck they threw in another 28 million or so…bringing this allotment up to about 150 million…WTF is wrong with them? My understanding from reading that article was the dems didn’t want to fight against it..you know the old ‘hold their powder’ for a better day. Sorry ass spineless bastards…so where’s the difference between them and the rethugs on this anyway?
The closest historical parallel to what is happening now is Prohibition. The campaign to abolish alcohol took several decades, but was finally “successful”.
Since this was a case of a vocal minority forcing their will on the majority it didn’t work. Not only did the illegal liquor industry emerge, but it led to a general disdain for government (since lots of people were now law breakers). In addition the amount of money sloshing around led to corruption of cops and judges as well as creating a permanent organized crime sector, which is still with us.
Once the temperance movement had achieved its aims it fell apart and after Prohibition was repealed never reorganized.
If abortion becomes illegal or effectively illegal we can expect a similar dynamic. Abortions will continue with the usual unpleasant side effects (botched jobs, unwanted pregnancies, sucides and/or infanticides). But the key organizing theme of the right wing movement will fall apart. This also means their supply of money to support the movement will dry up as well.
After some period of time abortion restrictions will be removed and the right will have been defeated. One has to wonder if they realize this and thus only make enough “progress” to appease their core while never go far enough that they achieve their stated goals.
An article in the Kansas City Star had even worse than the ones you cited.
This means that a private physician may continue to provide medical (non-surgical) abortion free of any oversight — as long as that physician does so fewer than five times per month — but that a licensed provider of abortion care cannot hand a woman a Mifeprex pill unless the clinic is remodeled and relicensed as an ambulatory surgical center, to make sure the hallways are at at least eight feet wide.
OK, comprehensive sex ed from PP might have meant that some female students ultimately became patients in their clinics — but for contraception instead of abortion. And this is supposed to be a bad thing?
Yesterday was a typical Saturday in our clinic, and we had four abortion patients under age 18. Sometimes it’s five or six, some as young as 13. Then again, this is Texas, a pioneer state in abstinence-only education.