Reactions to Wendy Davis’ Abortion Stories and Ray Rice’s Violent Video

On this episode of Reality Cast, I share reactions to Wendy Davis' abortion stories, and Rewire Senior Political Reporter Andrea Grimes fills us in on what's happening in Texas. In another segment, I cover the Ray Rice domestic violence video and its fallout.

Related Links

Reopened abortion clinic

Wendy Davis abortion revelation

Wendy Davis explains her abortion

Rachel Maddow interviews Wendy Davis

New video on Ray Rice incident

Ryan Van Bibber’s argument

Fox and Friends is not funny

CNN goes after Fox News for this

Tamron Hall interviews Joe Biden

Rush Limbaugh reaches a new low

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Andrea Grimes will be on to fill us in on what’s happening in Texas. Wendy Davis comes out about her abortion, and a segment on the Ray Rice domestic violence video and its fallout.

So there’s a small bit of good news coming out of Texas.

  • mcallen *

The McAllen clinic will be basically the only one in the entire Rio Grande Valley offering abortion. This is good news, but I do worry, as we’ll get to later in the show, that this victory will be short-lived.

***************

Despite the fact that abortion is a very personal topic, for most politicians who talk about it, the personal tends to be avoided. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. Abortion should be regarded as the sort of thing you shouldn’t have to talk about in public if you don’t want, which is why Roe v. Wade was all about privacy rights. But it also means that Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis’ revelation that she had not one, but two abortions for medical reasons is a big deal. Doubly so because one of her abortions would have been banned under the new law in Texas that bans all abortions after 20 weeks, even in the case of fetal abnormality.

  • davis 1 *

Davis became a major figure in pro-choice circles last year, when she used her position as a state senator to successfully filibuster [what became] HB 2, a massive bill intended to regulate most abortion clinics in the state out of business. It was a big victory at the time, but then the Gov. Rick Perry just called another session of the state legislature and pushed it through, anyway. Since then, the law has been tied up in courts but also have been used successfully to shut down a whole wave of clinics, making access in the state much harder to get.

Davis has been running for governor, putting women’s rights at the center of her campaign. It seems she’s banking on the idea that the issue will get out the vote and turn enough female voters away from her opponent Greg Abbott that she will have a chance to win in what is traditionally a very red state.

Under the circumstances, talking about her own abortions makes a lot of sense. She had already been out about one, an ectopic pregnancy that was terminated. That wasn’t really controversial, in part because most people don’t realize that the anti-choice movement wants to ban aborting even ectopic pregnancies, even though they are never really viable. Indeed, many Catholic hospitals refuse to abort the embryo, instead saying you have to have your entire ovary removed rather than to give you a drug that just kills it and saves you from surgery and from losing some of your reproductive capacity. But this new abortion that Davis is out about is the sort that is controversial even outside of rabid anti-choice circles.

Davis went onto ABC News and explained what happened with this second abortion.

  • davis 2 *

There’s a debate to be had about the problem of focusing on medically necessary abortions at the expense of talking about abortions that are necessary because the woman simply does not want or cannot be pregnant right now. However, this is someone specific’s actual life and she certainly had no control over what happened to her, so I think I’ll leave that discussion for another time. This is a reality that women who want their pregnancies nonetheless have to abort them. And the anti-choice reaction to her story has given lie to their claims to be motivated by Christian charity.

Rachel Maddow had Davis on and asked her about one response.

  • davis 3 *

Part of the issue here is that a story like this shows exactly what the stakes are with these 20-week abortion bans. Anti-choicers prefer to tell a story about lazy women who blow off the abortion until they start to show, or selfish women who balk at the first sign of a sick baby. Setting aside the idea that lazy or selfish people are, in the anti-choice mind, the ideal candidates for forced parenting, the larger issue here is that once you actually hear people’s reasons for termination, it becomes a lot harder to judge. So instead, they make accusations of dishonesty, which is really, really rich coming from any anti-choicer, since the entire movement is constructed out of a series of lies.

Next segment, I’ll have on Andrea Grimes to talk some more about the on-the-ground reaction to Davis and her announcement.

***************

Interview

***************

We’ve known for months and months that Ray Rice, a running back for the Baltimore Ravens, badly hurt his girlfriend Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City casino back in February. Security video from the hotel hallway showed them fighting as they entered an elevator and then, a few moments later, showed him dragging her unconscious body out of the elevator in a manner that was shockingly callous. However, everything that’s happened since then has served to shore up Rice’s claim, backed up by the NFL and the Ravens, that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. The Ravens got Janay to repeatedly state that she shared the blame and the NFL suggested that this is a dual-blame situation and therefore they shouldn’t have had to punish too badly. Ray also married Janay, and she’s changed her name to Janay Rice. For people who understand the issue of domestic violence, that wedding screamed “red flag,” because it’s really common for abusers to reach for big gestures like proposing marriage in order to get their victims back on their side. But for the Ravens, who put pictures of the wedding on their website, it was touted as just further evidence that since she forgave him, the rest of us should not want him to be held accountable for his actions.

Then the gossip blog TMZ released a video from inside the elevator that showed that the story about how the Rices share the blame is complete hooey.

  • rice 1 *

There’s legitimate and important debate about whether or not it’s ethical to release this video, knowing that it is contributing to Janay Rice’s pain and embarrassment. With that in mind, I have linked coverage that edits out the worst parts of the video. I will say, however, that it does single-handedly destroy the entire narrative about how there is shared blame in this because it’s clear in the video that he is pushing her and badgering her and her behavior is both reactive to his. And it’s utterly laughable to suggest that the knock-out punch he delivers has any resemblance to self-defense. Because of this, the Ravens terminated Rice’s contract and the NFL put him on indefinite suspension. However, a lot of people, including myself, are frustrated that the management needed the public to see this awful video before they were willing to let go of their insinuation that it wasn’t that bad. Ryan Van Bibber of SB Nation made some points about how serious this problem is.

  • rice 2 *

He goes on to say that it shouldn’t take graphic footage of domestic violence being released to embarrass the NFL before they take measures to hold batterers accountable. This should be common sense. This shared-blame narrative was always hooey, because even if you were open to the idea that Janay Rice might have been as aggressive as Ray Rice, it’s ridiculous to suggest that it’s even close to a fair fight between an ordinary sized woman and a big old football player. But, to the surprise of literally no one who understands this issue, it turns out that nope, she was not as aggressive as Ray Rice’s defenders claim.

Sadly, even in the face of such a terrifying glimpse of what domestic violence actually looks like, there were some responses that were deeply inhumane. On Fox News, the focus was on blaming the victims and making crass jokes.

  • rice 3*

CNN host Carol Costello brought Jan Langbein, an expert in domestic violence, to explain how wrong-headed all this is.

  • rice 4 *

I know I’m playing a lot of clips, but I also want to highlight Tamron Hall’s interview with Joe Biden. Hall lost her sister to domestic violence, after her sister’s abuser killed her. Biden has been instrumental in pushing the Violence Against Women Act into law and advocating for strengthening it. These are the people who actually have something of value to say about this issue.

  • rice 5 *

Maybe now that we’ve faced, yet again, how wrong-headed the victim-blaming approach really is, there will be some change on this issue. Hopefully the NFL, at least, will recognize that trying to minimize instead of correct is not the way to go with this.

***************

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Rush Limbaugh’s priorities edition. Rush Limbaugh has had enough of all this talk about the evils of domestic violence, since it’s ruining his precious football watching experience.

  • Limbaugh *

Jesus, it’s “feminized” and “politically correct” now to simply say that men shouldn’t hit women? What next, arguing that your balls fall off if women are permitted to look you in the eye? Just when I thought he can’t get any lower, he does. Unbelievable.