FEMINISM! What? Yeah.

keepyourboehneroutofmyuterus:

I was under mistaken impression that the injunction against the ultrasound law stopped the transvaginal part until 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said law had to go into effect in February (even that was wrong - the entire bill was enforceable in January with…

(Source: keepyourbsoutofmyuterus)

rhrealitycheck:

From Robin Marty’s piece at RH Reality Check:

Despite strongly stated aversion to government intrusion and the health care mandage in the Affordable Care Act, the Idaho Senate today voted nearly two to one to pass a bill to require women to pay out-of-pocket for expensive, medically-unnecessary ultrasounds in order to terminate a pregnancy.

The bill seems likely to pass the House, where Republican legislators outnumber Democratic legislators 57 to 13. Without a veto from Republican Governor Butch Otter, women in the state will be provided with a list of “free ultrasounds” at pregnancy centers that will attempt to talk them out of having abortions, then still be forced to undergo expensive ultrasounds performed at an actual clinic before terminating a pregnancy.

Take one minute to contact Governor Butch Otter and tell him to VETO this bill when it reaches his desk. Let him know THE ENTIRE COUNTRY is watching. 

Facebook (his wall, as of this posting, is open and you can comment to it directly)

Twitter: @ButchOtter (hashtag: #NoForcedUltrasounds)

Email

Phone: (208) 334-2100

YOUR voices helped remove the transvaginal part of Virginia’s forced ultrasound bill. It caused the Alabama legislature to kill their bill and Pennsylvania to shelve theirs.

PLEASE USE YOUR VOICE NOW TO HELP WOMEN IN IDAHO.

*this measure will not just impact women in Idaho. 

SIGNAL BOOST!

(via bebinn)

rhrealitycheck:

patchesthegreat:

thecranium:

rhrealitycheck:

Brownback’s Facebook page.

Brownback’s Twitter: @GovSamBrownback. If you take the fight to Twitter, please use hashtag: #mybodyyourchoice so we can see all the responses (use that hashtag no matter which anti-choicer you are tweeting at, in fact).

You can also call Brownback’s office at 877-579-6757 or 785-296-3232. 

Or you can send him an official message through his contact page.

His Wall is full of rebellious ladies! I hope this behavior spreads to other GOPers’ Walls.

Can we please do this to Rick Perry like right now?

YES.

Rick Perry and his administration has recently defunded the Women’s Health Program and then said it was the Obama administration’s fault. Texas also is the only state that currently has, in practice, mandatory forced transvaginal ultrasounds. These are two instances among many of the rollbacks in reproductive health and rights in the state of Texas.

Feel free to leave messages like this for Governor Rick Perry letting him know how you and your body are doing since apparently he fancies himself an expert:

Facebook

Twitter (again, please use #mybodyyourchoice hashtag when leaving these comments - Rick Perry and his administration used this exact Twitter account to shirk responsibility for the defunding of the WHP)

Phone: (800) 252-9600 and (512) 463-1782

Email

SIGNAL BOOST! LETS LET RICK PERRY KNOW JUST HOW MUCH WE APPRECIATE HIS CONCERN! 

(via bebinn)

fuckyeahfeminists:

I never understood laws where they have to describe the fetus to the woman. More evidence these lawmakers have no idea what’s going on - most of the time it’s too small for it to have any real characteristics. Thus the laws only drive up the price of the abortion and don’t change the minds of the people who go in.

Example: from the Raw Story: Ultrasounds don’t Stop Planned Abortions

IF IT WANTS TO BE THE NEXT RICK PERRY, I’VE MADE UP MY MIND. 

(Source: doonesbury.com)

The ultrasound fallacy (via iamdrtiller)

Another excerpt:

In other words, by manufacturing a concern about women’s health and safety, the anti-choice movement defused middle-of-the-road critics and passed the first round of ultrasound laws and similar restrictions with relatively little fanfare, at least compared to what we’ve seen lately. And those health and safety concerns truly involved fabrication: While each woman’s response to an unintended pregnancy and an abortion varies along a broad spectrum, there is no evidence to indicate that in any meaningful, aggregate sense, abortion actually damages women.

As a Guttmacher report puts it, “Likely because the science attesting to the physical safety of the abortion procedure is so clear” — several studies have indicated that abortion is actually safer than carrying a pregnancy to term — “abortion foes have long focused on what they allege are its negative mental health consequences. For decades, they have charged that having an abortion causes mental instability and even may lead to suicide, and despite consistent repudiations from the major professional mental health associations, they remain undeterred.” Neither the American Psychological Association (APA) nor the American Psychiatric Association recognizes so-called post-abortion traumatic stress syndrome as grounded in clinical evidence. Even Ronald Reagan’s antiabortion surgeon general was unable to produce a legitimate case, concluding, “the scientific studies do not provide conclusive data about the health effects of abortion on women.”

Abortion opponents don’t much care. The introduction to the AUL model legislation on ultrasounds, which can make its way verbatim to statehouses nationwide, is introduced with the unfounded, and highly ironic, claim that “in the abortion industry, paternalistic attitudes toward women still prevail and, as a result, women continue to be uninformed of the risks and consequences of abortion.”

Women, in this formulation, aren’t rational creatures who are making a choice for their own lives and bodies; they are fragile, emotional, subject to pressure, an idea that simultaneously seeks to draw on earlier feminist criticisms of the medical profession and on essentialist stereotypes, while denying women any agency and seeking to actually coerce them. The hoped-for takeaway is that abortion opponents aren’t seeking to criminalize women’s behavior (or put them in jail for murder, the natural and consistent conclusion of the anti-choice mentality), they’re just trying to remind them of the maternal instinct that allegedly lies in every woman’s heart.

There’s a reason many of these laws have tried to leave the door open for women — and chillingly, in the case of the Alabama bill, “fathers” and “grandparents” — to sue doctors for allegedly failing to properly inform them. Something has to reconcile the idea of saving women from abortion-greedy doctors with the fact that so many women willingly choose abortion for themselves. Surely it is because the women were lied to by the doctors, not because of their own complex set of feelings; otherwise, how could they have departed so far from a woman’s natural role and “killed” their “baby”?

Emphasis mine. Pregnant people, not just women.

(via prolongedeyecontact)

(Source: stephherold, via bebinn)

Things are (not) looking up. In Washington state, U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton ruled in favor of plaintiffs in a case that called the states laws about access to Plan B an infringement on religious freedom (sound familiar anyone?). The law mandated that Plan B and other such emergency contraceptive drugs be available to women in all pharmacies at all times. This law applied to all drugs, with some exceptions:

Pharmacies can decline to stock a drug, such as certain painkillers, if it’s likely to increase the risk of theft, or if it requires an inordinate amount of paperwork, or if the drug is temporarily unavailable from suppliers, among other reasons.

The plaintiffs argued that this targeted religious pharmacists, because they were not allowed an exception to the rule (though the rule did allow pharmacists to pass the customer on to a coworker if it posed a religious problem). The judge found that this was unfair because it allowed for “secular” exemptions while denying religious ones. 

According to USA Today, this ruling only effects the plaintiff at the current moment. However, in the opinion of this feminist, it is yet another attempt to place religious freedom over the rights of women to access contraception and make their own family planning decisions. 

In Virginia, more bad news. A modified version of the ultrasound bill passed in the state house today. Though this is certainly less invasive than the trans-vaginal ultrasound, it reaffirms anti-choice tenants, such as the inability of women to make their own decisions regarding abortion without the state stepping in to place obstacles in their way. 

However, this afternoon the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that the bill’s sponsor, state Senator Jill Holtzman Vogel, no longer felt “in good conscious that I want to carry the bill in its current form.” Vogel continued:

There are moments when you are legislator when you have to stop and you have to have a moment of real conscience. I sort of had that moment this morning considering the outcome and the fate of this bill.

I can see how this could be viewed as a success for pro-choice activists who came out en masse against the transvaginal ultrasound. However, here is why I think it’s still problematic:

Assuming that women need yet another state mandated intervention to make sure they know what they are doing when they get an abortion just reiterates socially accepted knowledge that says women are incapable of making these decisions without the state stepping in to make sure they really know what they’re doing. This assumes that women are inherently ignorant of what an abortion is or what it does, and that they need (male, white, cis, hetero) men to come in in the form of state-mandated obstacles to access to make sure they actually know what is going on with their bodies. It also reinforces the anti-choice party line: that abortion is a very bad thing that no one should do/would want to do if they really understood what they were doing. 

This is absolutely a blow for women’s health in VA. 

Democratic State Sen. Barbara Favola said she also heard that Republicans lawmakers may be buckling under pressure from women voters. “They’re backing off because they’re now hearing from women about it,” she said. “Yesterday we had hundreds of women line the walkwaybetween General Assembly and the Capitol in silent protest.”