Morning Roundup: Wyoming House Defeats Ultrasound Bill

Jan 26, 2011, 9:47am

Beth Saunders

The Wyoming House defeats an ultrasound bill, making abortion all about men, children in Texas are facing a real emergency, and reclaim the vagina!

The Wyoming House of Representatives voted to defeat a bill that would require ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Bob Brechtel, said he wanted women to know the “torture and pain that can be inflicted” during abortion.
Abortion – let’s make it about men, says an anti-choice speaker in Colorado whose partners had four abortions. He also says that there is no one to blame but himself – as if he should have supreme control over the women who decided to terminate their pregnancies.
As a follow-up from yesterday’s item on Texas Governor Rick Perry declaring mandatory ultrasounds to be an emergency issue in the state, a new study by Texans Care for Children says that the state ranks dead last

in providing health care coverage and mental health services to children. It comes in last in preventing childhood homelessness, childhood food insecurity and obesity among adolescent girls. The state has the most fatalities from child abuse and neglect and ranks last in per capita spending on child-abuse prevention.

Now that sounds like an emergency to me.
Reclaim the vagina! So says a writer and activist at Oklahoma State University, who reminds us that the very word is still seen as inappropriate to some. So, let’s take her advice and reclaim the power of the vagina– say it aloud sometime today.