The GOP's [Not So] Great War On Women: The Party's Ongoing Attempt To Kill Planned Parenthood

There's no doubt about it: if you're an American citizen of the female persuasion, you do not want to live your life in the dystopian version of American society the Republicans are building.

And Republicans themselves, especially the ones who wrongly self-classify as "conservative" (they're actually radical as hell), feel freer every day to speak their misogyny right out in public. Any lie about women that serves their petty political purposes, they say it, often in front of a session of Congress. Any "document" that reflects their partisan position on a women's issue, however antiscientific that doc's content, they dredge it up in front of a House committee, post it all over the Web and talk endlessly about it on Fox, ABC, CNN, etc., who sometimes seem almost to be unofficial branch offices of the GOP.

It's really ugly out there these days, and I don't see Republican behavior improving until after the GOPers succeed in stealing the 2016 presidential election. If they don't succeed in stealing the White House, count on the anti-women rhetoric continuing until they steal an election, or go to ground trying (yeah, I know; wishful thinking on my part).

Planned Parenthood, as you know if you're reading this blog, is American women's essential health care resource: without its existence, its funding, its efforts, many American poor women, or even women of ordinary means, or adolescent or senescent women, or women deep in underserved rural areas, or college students, would never receive even the most basic of reproductive health care, and could and do die of the lack.

GOP leadership (what's left of it) is laying about itself with a broadsword, and it is women who get the worst of it. At its most malevolent, the GOP aims the blade at Planned Parenthood. For the record, and contrary to what you may have heard from Repub's like that chronic liar Carly Fiorina, about 1½ to 2 percent of Planned Parenthood's services are abortion-related. (UPDATE: NPR, which I've heard stands for "Nice Polite Republicans," uses the figure 3 percent. I'm not going to dispute over a 1 percent difference: by law, none of it is federal tax money anyway. But don't believe for one nanosecond those hostile women-hating antiabortion fanatics who would tell you it's 15 percent; that's a figure they made up out of thin air.)

---

Four women reporters at TPM... TPM regulars Sara Jerde, Caitlin Cruz and Caitlin MacNeal, along with the brilliant and seemingly omnipresent Amanda Marcotte... sample recent GOP output from what many of us appropriately label the GOP War on Women. You may want to read their articles listed below, some of which include videos... I thought I understood how bad GOP hatred of women is, how withering is the blatant public Republican assault pointed at American women, but these reporters' research has convinced me: whatever I imagined, the reality is even worse:

• Sara Jerde: GOP Chair Repeatedly Interrupts Planned Parenthood Head At Hearing
• Sara Jerde: WATCH: Did A GOP Rep Just Wink At Planned Parenthood's President?
• Sara Jerde: Planned Parenthood Head Shuts Down GOP Chair Over Abortion Chart
• Amanda Marcotte: The GOP's Great Mammogram Farce Of 2015
• Caitlin Cruz: Wilmore Debunks Bogus Chart At Planned Parenthood Hearings
• Caitlin MacNeal: GOP Chair Defends Using Chart From Anti-Abortion Group At Hearing

The "GOP chair" referred to is Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) (rut?), and I've often wanted to ask him: "Chaffetz, does your mother know what you do to women, not at night, but right out in broad... television lighting?" Then again, I'm sure I'd be a happier person if I never met that asshole...

Separate And Emphatically Unequal: Court Rulings Using An ‘Undue Burden’ Test, With Clinics In An Adjacent State, To Restrict Access To Abortion

Please read author/activist Robin Marty's article at TPM, "Is One Key Anti-Abortion Attack Beginning To Fall To Pieces?" (There's no need for me to repeat its extensive content, and it's too complex to summarize effectively.) You'll learn about the latest attempts to legislate de jure obstructions to abortions, access to which women are constitutionally guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, and possible changes in federal court responses to various "no undue burden" assertions used in recent decades by courts seeking grounds on which to vindicate various new state anti-abortion laws.

This is surely a risky business... but so is the whole process since Roe more than 40 years ago. Women's constitutional rights absolutely should not depend upon the votes of one or two federal district courts determined by a woman's state of residence, or (more recently) upon the religious affiliation of two-thirds (6 of 9) of the Justices of the US Supreme Court. But they do. The more such state laws are passed... the more federal district court rulings that validate those laws... the more women of reproductive age have a very real chance if living into a second era in which their constitutional right to control their own reproductive status is willfully destroyed by one or more of five aged men on SCOTUS. Ladies, keep your eyes open... and be prepared to take your arguments to the streets if nothing else works. In a just world, America should be faced with a simple choice: an uncompromising protection of the rights of ALL its citizens irrespective of gender, or a coordinated response to restrictions which brings America's male-dominant society to its knees. A baldfaced compromise of the civil liberties of half the American public is wholly unacceptable.

I will restate my fundamental principle on the matter: Every child a wanted child; every birth a healthy birth; every decision regarding a woman's reproductive status and health a decision affirming wholeheartedly the woman's own position. No exceptions!

Six Catholic Supreme Court Justices Walk Into Sit Above A Bar...

... and assure that cases involving women's reproductive health issues virtually never receive a fair hearing. In this case, Harris v. Quinn, the Court struck down a Massachusetts law that placed an invisible boundary 35 feet from the entrance to any abortion clinic, a boundary within which anti-abortion protesters may not go in pursuit of talking women out of obtaining a legal abortion. The Court claimed that the protesters' First Amendment free speech rights were violated by this boundary.

I have traversed the grounds of a Planned Parenthood location many times while working on an IT contract for them, and I can tell you from direct observation that what those protesters do is by no means confined to gentle logical persuasion. They physically obstruct the woman's path to the clinic with their bodies. They shove bloody fetus pictures in her face. They shout at the top of their lungs at her. If the clinic has escorts (most do these days), they actually assault the escorts by falling on them to create a breach in the line protecting the clinic.

There is no way on earth that what they do is limited to "speech." The claim that it is, is a baldfaced lie... a lie now endorsed by the overwhelmingly Catholic-heavy Supreme Court.

Sooner or later, a woman seeking an abortion will carry a firearm to the clinic for self-protection. Sooner or later, a living, breathing adult human being, one whose humanity is not in dispute by any parties to this debate, will get hurt. And if they are hurt while waving a bloody-fetus poster in a woman's face, I will not feel any sympathy for them. Abortion is an established legal... nay, constitutional... right in America: no woman should be required to tolerate threats to her person to exercise that right.