The GOP shouldn’t talk about rape. No seriously, I don’t care how much
money Personhood USA is throwing your way. Listen to Susan B. Anthony’s List.
Now, I’d love to have an honest conversation with you fools about abortion and
rape, and how a woman has the right to control her body regardless of whether
she has been violated, but clearly you’re not ready, and that’s not ok, but
I’ll wait. Or continue to talk about rape , but you’ll give yourself away as
misogynists and probably lose every election ever till the end of time.
Actually, let’s go with that one.
Kate Sheppard with Mother Jones had a
piece on the idiocy coming from the right on rape and abortion, and Personhood
USA’s involvement. I won’t rehash the stupid on the right about rape,
pregnancy, and abortion or the general lack of junior high level health class
because we all know the stupidity is spreading and it cost them several seats. The
general consensus even among GOP anti-choice lawmakers is to leave the rape,
incest, and life of the mother exceptions alone.
However, Personhood USA has launched a new campaign called “Save the 1.”
It is about as awful as you imagine. It wants to eliminate the rape and incest
exceptions and eventually make all abortions illegal. Sheppard charges
Personhood USA as contributing to the misinformation the representatives and
candidates are spewing because they encourage the comments.
Sheppard then gives a rundown of the SBA’s intervention with the GOP on
rape. Essentially, SBA told the GOP to stop talking about rape (you know if you
don’t have anything nice or even coherent to say, don’t say anything at all).
But Personhood USA is telling the GOP the opposite. Save the 1 campaign has
slogans such as “Convicted rapists don’t get the death penalty, so why should
the innocent child?” and “Don’t throw the special needs baby or rape-conceived
baby under the bus!” Classy. Rebecca Kiessling, the leader of Personhood USA,
claims to have been conceived in rape, “Rape and abortion are wrong for the
same reason; they are both violent acts of aggression against another person.”
She continued to say in a press release, “If you really care about rape victims,
you should want to protect them from the rapist, and from the abortion, and NOT
the baby. A baby is not the worst thing which can happen to a rape victim—an
abortion is.”
Ok, crazy person. Being forced to carry the child of your rapist is
pretty damn bad, traumatizing actually. Also in 38 states a rapist can sue for
custody and parental rights, you’d be stuck with that bastard forever. Some
states require the father’s signature for adoption as well. Additionally, a
fetus isn’t a person. The woman carrying it is, and there seems to be nothing
about her welfare here. What about her mental and physical health? But then
again these people see women as incubators.
Personhood USA is targeting the Hyde Amendment first, which prevents
federal funds for abortion except in the cases of rape, incest, and life of the
mother. We know this ban has negative consequences for poor women. Personhood
USA says, “Our mission is simple—remove exceptions from the law, beginning with
the Hyde Amendment. In order to achieve this, we must encourage every pro-life
organization to be a standard-bearer, and help them to understand why we must
not accept the exceptions—whether it’s within legislation, or in a candidate’s
position on abortion.”
We’ve seen the idiots’ discussion on rape and abortion and give us such
phrases as “forcible rape” and “legitimate rape.” This excludes a lot of rapes
where the woman in question can’t consent.
Sheppard notes the ways anti-choice politicians could go after the
exemptions including the recently passed exemption for women in the military
who can now use their governmental health care to pay for an abortion; they
could try using the tax code seeking to block women from using tax credits or
deductions to pay for abortions, and finally the Affordable Care Act,
anti-choicers would love to prevent government subsidized health insurance
plans from covering any abortions.
These people are just awful. I go back and forth about what else to write
here. You know without sounding like a crazy person. That’s the anti-choicers
melody. Control of women’s reproductive rights is an attempt to control women.
That is all, dress it up, call it a unicorn, it is still a horse with a stick
strapped to the head. Misogyny is defined as hating women, and anti-choicers
fall in the same vein, and yeah I read Ross
Douthat’s column in the New York Times too. But more importantly, can we
stop all the NYTs the liberal media yet?
Douthat doesn’t agree. He believes the anti-choice movement has got a bad
rap, and that we’re all so much closer together on the spectrum, except the
whole who gets control over women’s bodies thing. Don’t worry Jessica Valenti
was on it:
Irin Carmon
at Salon boiled down Douthat. Douthat claims that “most anti-abortion Americans
are also gender egalitarians” because they are ok with women working outside of
the home. See we’re all feminists because feminists only care about working
outside the home. Yeah, I don’t know any feminists who think that. Abortion
rights aren’t important just because they allow women to work instead of being
preggers all the time; they are important because they are an expression of a
women’s ability to control her own life including her body and time.
Douthat implies
that pro-choice side has wrongfully painted the anti-choicers as misogynists
instead of recognizing their concern for the fetus. And this is where I lose my
damn mind. You know that women are people, right? So the my team points out
that the rights of women and the rights of the unborn are often at the expense
of each other. You can’t honor the rights of a fetus and those of the mother.
The anti-choice team can’t acknowledge that abortion is a women’s issue unless
they are talking up protecting women from it. They also never admit that women
carry the fetus, birth it, and then has to care for it. All of these jobs are
usually done by women according to Carmon.
The anti-choice
side doesn’t know anything about the realities of being female, rape, or
pregnancy, that much was clear by the shit show we had during the election
season, which Douthat admits as well. Carmon then points to the conservative
ambivalence about women’s lives and how they want to talk about women. She
mentions the shit show, but also two Republican politicians who address the
March for Life with language about saving women from their own choices. Because
you know, women can’t make decisions about our own bodies. Carmon mentions
another Republican Rep from Arizona, Trent Franks who wants the GOP to put the
focus on the child, “In terms of the party’s messaging, we should keep our
central focus on the child.”
So where are the
women? Right, they are left out of the discussion because they are seen as
irrelevant and of little consequence. I call that state sponsored misogyny.
