Tag: abortion

Welcome to Illinois Where Women Are Livestock

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

And here I’ve been kidding myself that I live in a civilized state. Stupid, stupid Clarissa. Mississippi, South Dakota and our friends from across the river have nothing on us in terms of barbarity. Yippee. (Emphasis in the article is mine).

An Illinois House committee that normally deals with farm and wildlife issues passed two controversial anti-abortion measures this afternoon, before a packed room that included opponents wearing t-shirts that stated: “Women are NOT livestock” . . .

The House Agriculture & Conservation Committee overwhelmingly passed both bills, after emotional testimony from both sides.

That particular committee often gets assigned legislation dealing not just with hog farms and irrigation issues, but also gun-owner rights, abortion restrictions and other hot-button conservative causes that have nothing to do with the stated purpose of the committee. Sponsors of those bills often request that committee because it’s made up primarily of lawmakers from rural agricultural regions of the state, which also tend to be among the more socially conservative members of the Legislature.

I think that the message “You, women, are all just brainless cows who are good only for breeding” could not have been delivered any clearer.

Read more:

Republicans Propose “Rape by the Government” Legislation

~ Clarissa ~ 21 Comments

Please, somebody, remind me what do you call the action of penetrating a person against their will?

And on a 63-36 vote, the House passed a bill that requires women to have a “transvaginal ultrasound” before undergoing abortions. . .

The ultrasound legislation would constitute an unprecedented government mandate to insert vaginal ultrasonic probes into women as part of a state-ordered effort to dissuade them from terminating pregnancies, legislative opponents noted.

“We’re talking about inside a woman’s body,” Del. Charnielle Herring, a Democrat, said in an emotional floor speech. “This is the first time, if we pass this bill, that we will be dictating a medical procedure to a physician.”

Once again, penetrating people against their will in return to giving them access to a medical procedure. What is the correct terminology for that?

Think of the most recent medical procedure you have had. How would it make you feel if the doctor had told you, “I’m sorry, the government doesn’t allow me to tend to your medical needs until I insert this device into your vagina / anus. There is absolutely no medical need for this violation but our legislators think it will be cool to stick things into you in response to you daring to request this completely legal medical procedure.”

And the most hilarious thing that this legislation is being introduced by the very people who yell and scream about how intrusive the government has become. Somebody wake me up because this has got to be an especially bad nightmare.

Who Wants to Control Women’s Bodies?

~ Clarissa ~ 28 Comments

Here is a completely shocking story about a horrible vile monster of a woman who refuses her raped daughter a Plan B pill in order to brag about it online to her equally monstrous friends.

Now repeat after me: the anti-choice movement is not about men wanting to control women’s bodies. It’s about a bunch of vile freakazoids wanting to control women’s bodies.

Who Is a Real Abortion-Promoter?

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

Yes!

“In a long-anticipated decision that will affect millions of women’s ability to pay for contraception, the Obama administration announced on Friday that it would not allow religiously affiliated employers such as universities and hospitals to deny full birth control coverage to the women they employ.”

Note how it’s the “abortion-promoting Liberals” who celebrate this decision. A decision that will help reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. And the supposedly anti-abortion Conservatives, where are they? Are they cheering as well?

I guess not.

And For the Especially Clueless: Ron Paul Is NOT a Libertarian

~ Clarissa ~ 39 Comments

He is a fake Libertarian who is supported by Fundamentalist Evangelicals and is interested in nothing but promoting their savage and barbaric beliefs:

When GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul was asked today about Tuesday’s federal court ruling upholding an aggressive new sonogram law in his home state of Texas, the congressman said the requirement that women seeking an abortion first get a sonogram “should always have been a Texas state position.’’

What are the chances that the guy who supports the governmental intrusion into your body will be opposed to the governmental intrusion into your bed, your bank account, your smoking, drinking and reading matter, etc.? Seriously, how clueless do you have to be not to notice that this Ron Paul character supports an extremely powerful state apparatus that will police your body parts like there is no tomorrow?

Yes, he pretends he will legalize pot. And that makes him yet another candidate who lies through his teeth to get elected. Just think about it: how likely are his Fundamentalist backers to allow him to move even an inch in that direction? And if he is in favor of the government controlling what happens inside of your body, how can he possibly be against, say, mandatory drug tests? It isn’t logical, folks. You want to mandate sonograms, you can’t oppose mandating drug tests. Nobody would be able to make an argument supporting the former but opposing the latter.

It is so annoying to see smart, well-read, politically conscious people swallow Ron Paul’s lies and not see that he is in no way different from the fanatical Huckabee, to give just one example.

So whenever you are tempted to take this Evangelical clown seriously, ask yourself the following: Ron Paul wants the government to rummage in women’s vaginas. What does this tell us about his general attitude to an extremely powerful and intrusive government?

Don’t start typing out a response immediately. Just think about it for a moment. And now consider the following question:

Brian Williams should ask him tonight at the debate whether he would agree that a state government has the right to demand pat-downs at its airports. I’d be curious to hear the answer.

If Ron Paul says no, he is a hypocrite of enormous proportions. If he says yes, then he recognizes he favors an all-powerful government whose right to police your body is inviolate.

It makes a lot more sense to support a candidate who is both pro-sonogram and pro-drug tests because such a candidate is at least trying to be consistent.

I just had a grad student offer me a long rant on how Ron Paul is a good candidate because he supports withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. I agree that Ron Paul may attempt to stop waging a war in Afghanistan. (And we all know that he will fail completely in that effort, don’t we?) I also know, however, that he will wage a war against his own people. Women, you know, are people, too. And I consider invading women’s uteri an act of aggression.

Blog for Choice 2012

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

I’ve never had an abortion. I don’t think I would have one, although this kind of a hypothetical is always useless. However, I’m lucid enough to realize that I can say such things because I have the incredible good fortune of having a great support system, a stable income, a wonderful partner, an amazing profession, and access to the best medical services one can imagine. Because of these things I know that an unintended pregnancy will not devastate me emotionally, psychologically, economically, professionally, and health-wise.

I belong to a very tiny minority of women in the world who have the luxury of not needing to consider abortion. It would never occur to me to judge other people from my position of good fortune.

People who want to make abortion illegal or hard to obtain terrify me. I cannot even begin to imagine what kind of hubris, what kind of contempt and deep-seated hatred for actual living, breathing, thinking human beings one needs to have to believe that one has the right to make such a decision for them. If you have principles, beliefs or religious convictions that make you find abortion unacceptable, then don’t have one. But don’t you dare try to impose your religion and your beliefs on others. Trying to inscribe your views on the bodies of other people is one of the most immoral, disgusting, vile things anybody could ever come up with.

Roe vs Wade brought this country into the ranks of civilized places that don’t see women as inanimate objects whose destinies have to be decided and whose bodies need to be managed by politicians who never even saw them. If you do not support Row vs Wade, if you believe that you have the right to invade and manage other people’s uteri, then I have news for you: you are a horrible, disgusting individual. There is no excuse for you. You deserve to be shunned by every normal person with a shred of humanity.

Those of us who respect women enough to let them decide what to do with their own bodies seem to have some unhealthy fear of offending anti-abortionists. They scream “baby killer!” in front of clinics and we try to reason with them and treat them with respect while doing so. In the process, we betray all of those women who will die or be mutilated in back-alley abortions if abortion becomes illegal in this country.

I propose we stop coddling these hateful creeps. I propose we start telling them exactly what we think about them. I propose we stop trying to reason with them because they speak from a place of unbridled, unconstrained loathing for female bodies that they want to invade.

If you are anti-choice, shame on you.

If you support choice, you need to know that we will prevail. There are still many struggles ahead of us but, in the end, reason will overcome barbarity and we will find ourselves in a world where women will be considered by everybody to be valid human beings capable of making their own choices about their own bodies.

Believe in women. Support choice.

The Quote of the Year

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

The most brilliant thing I have read on abortion since Echidne’s “undead corpses”:

Obviously I think [Rick Perry] is horrible for wanting to outlaw abortions, but the rapeandincest “exception” has always been complete gibberish, allowing people who support something monstrous to be seen and to see themselves as somehow being less monstrous.

This is indisputable, people. The “rape and incest exception” is, indeed, supremely offensive. A woman needs to be raped by a relative to deserve a right to decide what happens inside her own body? WTF with that? Let’s not allow vile woman-haters to feel better about themselves through their insulting support of this insane exception.

Canadian Anti-Abortionists Are Funny

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

Canadians are truly special. And Canadian anti-choicers are even more special than that. I don’t know if the goal of this anti-abortion group was to make abortion funny but this billboard made me roar in laughter:

As angry as these woman-haters usually make me, I can’t summon any anger when I look at this billboard. This is just too funny. I’m not even going to analyze all of the implications of the toy that was chosen to transmit the idea. This billboard does not need to be subverted. It achieves that task on its own.

I found this billboard here.

Eve Ensler’s Article on Rape

~ Clarissa ~ 16 Comments

Eve Ensler’s recent anti-rape manifesto puzzled me. I fully support Ensler’s sentiment that rape is a horrible crime that should never be tolerated. However, I find some of her assertions to be very troubling. Take this one, for example:

 I am over women getting raped at Occupy Wall Street and being quiet about it because they were protecting a movement which is fighting to end the pillaging and raping of the economy and the earth, as if the rape of their bodies was something separate.

First, we saw progressive journalists drop hints as to the possibility of sexual harassment occurring at #Occupy rallies. Why such suggestions had never been made about the Tea Party protests is a mystery to me. Is there any evidence that progressively minded people are more likely to rape than conservatives?

Then, these suggestions about sexual harassment among the #Occupiers transformed into hints that women might fear being raped during the protests. Now, Ensler talks about rapes taking place during the protests as if they were an established fact.  Several questions arise, however. If, as Ensler says, women are keeping quiet about the rapes to protect the movement, then how did Ensler find out about these crimes? Did the raped victims share their stories with her? This makes no sense because if the goal of these rape victims is to protect the #OWS, letting Ensler write about it in such a charged format is probably the worst thing to do.

I also have no idea how Ensler arrived at her statistic of 1 billion of women on the planet having been raped. The OCCUPYRAPE term she introduces is very disturbing to me, too. Rape is a horrible crime and I see nothing positive in “occupying” something like this. And what is the “escalation” that Ensler is proposing? If this is a legitimate attempt at political activism, why not be a bit more specific about what the plan here is. This “let’s end rape by February of 2013” reminds me of the promises endlessly made by the Communist Party of the USSR to create a fully communist society by the year 2000.

It would be great if Ensler’s impassioned but hopelessly vague verbiage included references to the fact that the rates of violent crime (including rape) in this country have been on a steady decline in the past 40 years. The legalization of abortion in the US was a significant contributing factor to this phenomenon. Now that we know this, any anti-rape activism needs to include efforts to guarantee that all women have the right to control their procreation when and how they see fit.

This will do a lot more to end rape than passionate manifestos that make wild claims and operate on the basis of unsubstantiated statistics.

There is Hope for Mississippi After All!

~ Clarissa ~ 11 Comments

Some unexpected good news from Mississippi:

A constitutional amendment that would have defined a fertilized egg as a person failed on the ballot in Mississippi on Tuesday, dealing the so-called “personhood” movement another blow. . . The amendment trailed 59 percent to 41 percent with more than half of precincts reporting. The Associated Press has said it will fail.

If even a completely backward place like Mississippi managed to wake up to the utter ridiculousness of calling eggs people, then there is hope for humanity yet.

Fanaticism and the hatred of women are in their death throes. This is why anti-choicers are pushing this desperate, egregiously stupid, hopeless legislation. They realize that this is their very last chance to be taken seriously by the most puritanical, terrified, miserable and angry people in this country. The future generations will think this “personhood movement” was simply one big joke.