What's happened to the whole Republican "the economy and jobs are our first priority" mantra from the 2010 elections? Eric Cantor can say it all he wants, but that isn't making it true. Instead of jobs, conservatives are once again focused on our lady parts. While I am sort of getting used to the new TSA pat downs, I have to draw the line when it comes to the government getting its hands on my privates.
The GOP is focusing on the budget, but not for creating jobs -- they are trying to impact substantive issues through bills that control spending, as they recently did in their (thankfully) failed attempt to redefine rape in the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act." It initially called for limiting the availability of Medicaid funds for abortion only to women who had been "forcibly" raped.
Since the original passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976, no federal taxpayer funds have been available to cover the cost of abortions through Medicaid except in instances of rape, incest or if the life of the mother is in danger. The forcible rape exception, introduced by Representative Chris Smith (R-N.J.), didn't explicitly spell out in the bill what that meant, but a variety of organizations, including NOW and EMILY's List, believed it would exclude victims of statutory rape, date rape, rape victims who initially said "no" but weren't able to fend off their attackers, and women who feared for their lives unless they acquiesced to a rapist's demands.
Often, Democrats are scarily silent in these debates. Thankfully Democratic Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut led the charge that ended in having that exception pulled from the bill. That's good news as far as it goes. Fortunately, they're also spearheading a full court press to make voters aware of the mostly-Republican efforts to further chip away at women's reproductive health rights.
Their full-court press includes a petition effort encouraging voters to contact their representatives if they disagree with the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act. And now several other senators have joined with a fiery Gillibrand to protest not only this specific bill, but the GOP's bait-and-switch agenda:
But why go to such lengths when the bill has little chance to ever become law? Gillibrand explained it to me this way:
"This legislation is an unprecedented effort to restrict access to women's reproductive health care and it is critical that my colleagues and everyone who cares about women's rights have the facts about the damage this bill would cause. "
The GOP's mantra has long been that there is too much government involvement in our lives. Right now, one commercial airing daily calls on the government not to tax soda and soft drinks because that's just too much intrusion into our private lives. So if conservatives are upset that Uncle Sam is too involved in what we put in the shopping cart, how do they square that with telling a woman who has been raped that maybe her rape just wasn't violent enough to warrant an abortion?
I'll make a deal with the Republicans -- I'll keep my hands of their soft drinks if they stay away from my uterus.
Joanne Bamberger is the author of the forthcoming book, Mothers of Intention: How Women and Social Media are Revolutionizing Politics in America (Bright Sky Press). She is the founder of the political website, PunditMom, and a regular contributor to AOL's Politics Daily.
Follow Joanne Bamberger on Twitter: www.twitter.com/PunditMom
Bob Burnett: Republicans Renew War on Women
I disagree with the NOW and Emily's List interpretation, but why debate it? Clarify the language
and move on.
I think the intent here was to keep every teenager who gets pregnant from getting a free abortion by claiming statutory rape. I don't think a 15 year old girl, who lives in a state where the legal age of consent is 16, deserves a taxpayer funded abortion just because her boyfriend, possibly even still in high school himself, is 18.
It also might be an attempt to stop a woman from going into a clinic and saying she passed out at a party from drinking too much and found out she was pregnant within x number of days or weeks.
I love the way the word "rights" gets thrown around so much by liberals. "Women's reproductive health rights" for example is misnomer when refering to abortion "Women's non-reproductive health rights" somehow seems more appropriate.
And please read carefully: federal funding of abortion is ALREADY PROHIBITED, except in cases in which the majority of Americans do agree it should be covered. It requires a pathological lack of compassion to force a viction of rape or incest to have the baby if she gets pregnant (with no consequences, of course, to the man involved), or to say a woman should die for her pregnancy. But apparently such people do exist.
Young women better wake up and pay attention. For now these creeps have been stopped - and there is no better word than "creepy" to describe a bunch of old men defining whether what has happened to a given woman is "forcible" sex - but ignorance can prevail if no one prevents it. Yes, these representatives are playing to their constituents - except that even many of those will realize they are being "played." The composition of Congress was not changed by "Values Voters" this time. It was changed by people scared and frustrated by the state of the economy, and they can probably figure out these efforts do nothing to address those concerns. THAT, after all, would take hard thinking, and might upset somebody other than "those women."