From Rick Santorum's claim to "take the bullets" as proof of his pro-life credentials to Michele Bachmann's, Newt Gingrich's, Ron Paul's, Tim Pawlenty's and Santorum's signing Marilyn Musgrave's Susan B. Anthony List pledge to systemically strip away a woman's ability to access safe, legal abortion if elected president, the GOP's anti-abortion, anti-birth control contingent is all too willing to sell out America's women and their families in their quest to out-pro-life each other.
To wit: Four of Colorado's Congressional Delegation -- Mike Coffman (R, CD-6), Cory Gardner (R, CD-4), Doug Lamborn (R, CD-5), and Scott Tipton (R, CD-3) -- all voted for provisions in federal legislation to spur the IRS to audit rape and incest survivors who choose abortion care and to raise taxes on small businesses that provide private insurance plans that cover abortion services. But politicians' insistence on interfering in reproductive health care doesn't stop with abortion: while June marks the 46th year that birth control has been legal in the U.S., attacks on contraception have reached nearly unprecedented levels in 2011. Anti-abortion, anti-birth control members of the U.S. House of Representatives supported budget provisions earlier this year to completely eliminate federal funding for Title X, a program established under President Nixon to ensure, in Nixon's words, "no American woman [would] be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition."
Federal law prohibits the use of Title X dollars for abortion, restricting use to reproductive health exams; pregnancy testing; screenings for infertility, cancer, and sexually transmitted infections; and referrals for treatments of cancer, STIs, or infertility. Colorado has more than 60 Title X locations in county health departments and safety-net clinics. The program is credited with preventing 9,600 unintended pregnancies in 2008 alone that would have resulted in 4,300 births and 4,000 abortions -- saving Colorado taxpayers nearly $27 million in costs related to births resulting from unintended pregnancies.
In their myopic zeal to eliminate women's ability to access abortion, state legislators in Wisconsin, Indiana, Kansas and North Carolina enacted laws prohibiting their states from contracting with facilities that provide abortions. While the provisions ostensibly target abortion, their practical effect is to end payments to doctors and nurses who provide birth control, prenatal, and other obstetric and gynecological care to Medicaid recipients if the clinic where those professionals work also provides abortions. In Indiana, Planned Parenthood has stopped serving its 9,300 Medicaid clients because of the law. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has pronounced the laws illegal, but that hasn't stopped anti-abortion, anti-birth control extremists from pressing forward. In fact, 12 state senators here in Colorado tried unsuccessfully to tack on a similar provision to the state's annual budget bill.
While states haven't (yet) passed laws re-banning contraceptives, anti-abortion extremists are doing their best to accomplish that through dangerous, deceptively worded "personhood" measures that have been introduced in state capitols throughout the country to grant constitutional rights to fertilized eggs. Despite being resoundingly rejected by Colorado voters in 2008 and 2010, "backers of the proposals are pushing forward in each of the 50 states either with legislation or citizen-initiated ballot measures. And earlier this month, the national anti-abortion, anti-birth control group American Life League hosted its annual "The Pill Kills" conference in Dallas, with seminars revolving around the meme that the pill kills marriage, a follow-up to its 2009 "pill kills women" and 2010 "pill kills the environment" themes.
Policymakers who support these attacks on birth control are tone-deaf to the needs of mainstream Americans, and certainly the majority of Coloradans: research from the New York-based Guttmacher Institute shows that 99% of U.S. women aged 15-44 have ever used contraception, with an estimated 38.4 million women using birth control at any given time use of birth control crossing all economic, ethnic, and religious sectors. Moreover, recently released data from the Guttmacher Institute and the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution estimate that U.S. taxpayers spend $11 billion per year on unintended pregnancies -- roughly the same amount budgeted for U.S. operations in Iraq for 2012. In Colorado, that translates to an estimated $80 million in taxpayer dollars on births resulting from unintended pregnancy.
When it comes to demonstrating their willingness to deny mothers, wives, daughters and neighbors their constitutionally protected right to make personal, private decisions, it's clear that many of the candidates lining up for the 2012 election are in lock-step with the elected officials who reneged on their campaign promises to prioritize "jobs, jobs, jobs" by voting to restrict access to abortion and birth control. It's time to start recognizing the true costs of the anti-abortion, anti-birth control policies pursued by these politicians.
Follow Toni Panetta on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NARALcolorado
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Content: Republicans suck
What about the blue dogs that waste time, all the time...
What's with attacking Ron Paul? He's pro-life but has stated repeatedly that he does not believe it's a legislative issue and should not be under the control of the government.
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Conclusion: Republicans and Democrats suck and the Huffington Post is a "through the looking glass" Fox News slander machine.
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Journalism's dead.
That's the people voting, not reps who may have been voted for because they promised to leave social issues alone and focus on jobs ( but were lying ). That's the actual people of Colorado telling you where they stand.
And then telling you again.
So how about YOU follow your own advice and listen to the people?
2010:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive/ldn/2010/nov/10110304
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Amendment 62, a ballot initiative that would have given personhood status in the state constitution to all human beings “from the beginning of biological development,” was rejected by a 3 – 1 margin by voters.
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2008
http://www.seculargovernment.us/a48.shtml
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Amendment 48 was a 2008 ballot measure in Colorado that sought to define a fertilized egg as a person with full legal rights in the state constitution. The Coalition for Secular Government vigorously opposed this "personhood" measure. Happily, Colorado voters rejected it resoundingly: 73% against and 27% in favor.
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And nobody is forcing you to get an abortion. You are the only one trying to shove rules down people's throats. And you are going to have a devil of a time getting past my teeth.
abortions or birth control. Why don't we educate people in school, so we don't have unwanted
births. This country is drowning in debt. Welfare and social services , are busting at the seams. It
should be cut in half. The same goes for the defense budget. Cuts in medicare, medicaid, should also be done. I also want the Democrats to push for tax increases. You don't want to end up like
Greece do you. We are so under water, we might just go out of business .
Beyond that, there are various barriers to universal condom use to prevent unintended pregnancy. For brevity's stake, I'll stick to just a few; because there's a character limit for comments, I'll break this into multiple posts.
1. sexually coercive relationships: sexual assault is what comes to most people's mind for this category, but there are also instances when a woman's partner refuses to wear a condom, or for that matter, objects to her use of birth control. In the latter case, there are documented instances where a woman's partner has sabotaged her use of contraception by throwing out her pills*, refusing to wear a condom, not telling her if the condom breaks or falls off during intercourse, or using psychological or emotional manipulation to pressure her into foregoing contraception.
*In the case of having your pills thrown out, barriers to replacing the pills include time-sensitivity (missing more than a day of pills can lower overall effectiveness rates), being able to pay out-of-pocket for the "early" re-fill of the prescription because insurance companies only cover costs on a monthly, or in some instances, three-month basis; and for those facing distance or transportation barriers, getting to a pharmacy or clinic that carries the brand of contraception you use to refill the prescription.
It's so simple even a child could think of it.
And my grandpa sat me down and talked about authority. One thing a commanding officer must do in order to have real authority is ****not give orders that he knows a majority of the men won't obey.****
Were he to give such an order, most of his men would disobey it. And they would do so in a premeditated fashion after having thought about it and decided to ignore the order. This would be devastating for discipline in general and his authority in particular as it would erode the reflex of obedience that the military requires to operate.
So it isn't as simple as giving an order.
This basic principle is why alcohol prohibition was such a spectacular failure. When you criminalize common human behavior you make everyone a criminal and this breaks down respect for the rule of law. And it is also why abortion prohibition doesn't work. The only states doing it that aren't corrupt cesspools are little tiny places like Ireland with neighbors that don't prohibit. So even poor people can just pop over the border to get it done and the prohibition doesn't actually accomplish anything.
Their recent gutting of the Infants Feeding Program and the cuts to social services funds make it clear, it isn't about "saving babies", the goal is to BAN ALL SEX, and punish those who refuse to give it up with unhappy marriages and a dozen children. The conservatives have said all along they want to take us back to 'Biblical traditional values' -- nobody understood what they had in mind was stoning women.
As such, taking away life violates the creator's law, and the real cost is sickness and death and eternal perdition for the offender.
It is not a coincident that the Obama appoints Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chairman od DEM party.
God is telling us that Debbie who promotes "reproductive WRONGs" and is judged with cancer (breasts and uterus) had to be removed.
Women's choice is between life (GOP) and death (DEM).
Women's choice is between the GOP, which considers women to be a 'fetal container' available for 'nutrition' and is willing to kill women to preserve the 'principle' that a fertilized egg is equivalent to a person, and the Democrats who see women as grownups capable of making their own decisions.
Because imagining that the words "medical exemption" means that forced gestation won't murder women is pure fantasy.
If we actually knew for sure which pregnancies were deadly and which weren't then nobody would ever die of pregnancy.
I know several loving mothers who had an abortion when they were unprepared teens. Not a one of them regrets it now. Two regretted it for a time. But then they had their first planned child. A child they were ready, able, and willing to do right by. A child they brought into the world while holding the father's hand.
And as they looked into the sleepy eyes of their firstborns they realized that this child would not exist if they'd become single teenage moms because they'd never have met their current husbands. Their choice was not the choice of life or death. It was the choice of *this* life or *that* life.
And all their regret melted away because they understood the true nature of the choice they had made and they knew they'd chosen well. It wasn't simply a matter of finances - though that is part of it. By building their own fortunes first they now had enough to give a better life to their children. It was also a matter of maturity. They had been girls then. They hadn't finished growing up. They didn't know who they were yet. Now they were women grown. And as such were emotionally capable of doing a much better job of mothering.
And if you believe mothering is important - that it matters to the outcomes for the child - then it is worth waiting for.