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Jemima Kirke of Girls tells her abortion story

Kansas bans the D and E procedure

Oklahoma bans the D and E procedure

Wayne LaPierre reacts to Clinton candidacy

Bill O’Reilly reacts to the Clinton campaign

Gender-baiting

Dallas female CEO says women can’t be president because they’re not suited for leadership

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll speak with a reporter who attended a huge annual crisis pregnancy center conference. Two states ban a very common abortion procedure, and the sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton started as soon as she announced her candidacy.

Jemima Kirke’s character on Girls didn’t get an abortion because she had one of those well-timed TV miscarriages instead, but the actress did have an abortion in real life and sat down to record a video about it for the Center for Reproductive Rights’ Draw the Line campaign.

• Kirke *

It’s a very typical abortion story, but I think that’s what gives stories like this power. It shows that the woman in question is not some weird, sex-crazed monster, but just like the rest of us: Most of us date people we don’t end up married to. Most of us have sex even if we’re not interested in having a baby. Abortion is a mundane, everyday part of the female experience and it’s good to talk about it as such.

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So there’s yet another assault on abortion rights that could dramatically impact a lot of women’s ability to get health care, but it’s barely getting any mainstream media coverage. I have a piece up at Rewire [here: http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/04/16/anti-choicers-going-take-away-second-trimester-abortion-without-much-notice/] talking about some of the reasons why, but this is really just going to be a more newsy piece to try to make up, as much as I can, for the deafening silence around this enormous issue. Anti-choicers are quietly taking away the ability to get a safe abortion in the second trimester.

• D and E 1 *

There’s a lot of hand-wringing and boo-hooing amongst anti-choicers about how supposedly barbaric it is to “dismember” a fetus. But it’s worth pointing out that, in many cases, they forced this situation. It used to be legal to perform something called a dilation and extraction, or D and X for short, which allowed the abortion doctor to pull the fetus out in one piece. Now, that’s not doable for a lot of abortions, but for some abortions, particularly later ones that were primarily done for medically necessary reasons, it was both safer and helped families who were grieving a wanted pregnancy that had to be terminated for medical reasons have an intact body to grieve. But anti-choicers banned that abortion, basically claiming that it’s somehow more gruesome to remove a fetus in one piece rather than bit by bit. Now they’re singing a different tune, claiming that it’s actually the D and E that offends them.

Anti-choice activists: not an honest group of people. It’s a recurring theme on this show.

• D and E 2 *

These exceptions are there to make it sound like they are pro-life, but rest assured, the exception is meaningless. It’s not just because there’s no exception for either health or rape or incest. Nor is it because there’s no exception for mental health, an exception that always tees off anti-choicers because they don’t like acknowledging that women have brains. Mostly it’s because an exception this narrow becomes nearly impossible to prove and, because it’s pretty rare, most doctors who feel confident with the terminate-or-die diagnosis may not have experience doing D and E abortions and so will have to resort to more invasive or painful procedures.

But the hatefulness of this bill doesn’t stop it from spreading.

• D and E 3 *

The lurid language is meant to be provocative and moralistic, of course, but it’s also meant to make it sound like they’re just singling out a specific procedure and like it’s nothing more than that. That’s simply false, however. Because the D and E is basically how they do second-trimester abortions, this is functionally a ban on abortions after 14 weeks. And a whole lot of those are done because of fetal abnormality or because of rape, and both those reasons for abortion are now not considered good enough in Kansas or Oklahoma.

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Interview

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Perhaps you have heard that a pro-choice feminist lady with strong name recognition has formally announced she is running for president. That’s right, Hillary Clinton has made her announcement in a video that feels deliberately low-key, about ordinary Americans doing ordinary things with Clinton wedged in at the end. I’m not surprised Clinton is trying to be as low-key as possible, because the fact that she’s a woman makes the already predictable conservative freak-out even uglier than it would be for someone with a similar resume but an M instead of an F on the driver’s license. And sure enough, NRA head Wayne LaPierre went all in with the misogynist reaction.

• Hillary 1 *

I mean, how do you even parody that? The actual argument, not even the implied argument, is that the White House belongs to white men and any other person who occupies it is an interloper whose presence can only be tolerated just long enough to make a point before returning the office to its rightful white male owner.

Bill O’Reilly engaged in the same logic where things like the presidency are assumed to belong to white men by rights and any attempts to allow more people in are taken as attacks on the rights of the white man to be the only legitimate candidates for things like high office.

• Hillary 2 *

It was only a couple days and already you had major conservative leaders working this idea that being a woman gives you all these inherent and unfair advantages over poor, beleaguered white men. Ridiculous on its surface, sure, but if you think about the implications, it gets even uglier. Because no woman has ever won the presidency. No woman has even been a major party nominee for the presidency. If you believe that women automatically have a leg up, then the only way to explain this discrepancy is to assume that women are inferior to men and that no woman throughout all of history has been even remotely as qualified as even the worst male president. Oh, I know the excuse is to say this is a new development and that this supposedly advantage women have over men just started happening. To which I say, I will believe women have an advantage over men when women start getting jobs and promotions and winning elections over men who are clearly better at the job than they are. You know, how sexism has always worked against women since forever? And Hillary Clinton ain’t your test case, as she has better name recognition and a resume that is much more impressive than every male candidate who has thrown in so far in this election. And even if the Republicans can muster up someone who has that going for him, you’d still have to prove the loss was due to gender and not policy disagreements with the public. Sounds like a lot, I know, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

When not claiming that men are victimized because they let the broads run for office now, Clinton critics were engaging in just plain old gender-baiting. Such as Republican strategist Ana Navarro on CNN.

• Hillary 3 *

As always, it’s wise to consider that “advice” coming from your opposition may just be concern trolling. I doubt Navarro is upset about male candidates drowning her in testosterone by always talking about their wives or their golfing. Instead, I would argue that this so-called advice is an attempt to make her womanhood an obstacle instead of an asset by implying that there’s something silly and weak about being female or even feminine. It is true, I think, that Clinton is embracing her gender more this time around than last. That’s because American women are increasingly rejecting the idea that our gender does make us weak or insipid. Instead, the idea of strong but feminine womanhood has really taken hold in our culture, whether you agree with it or not. The idea of the steel magnolia has always persisted in American culture, of course, but it’s really on the rise lately with the ascendency of stars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift and TV shows like the Good Wife and Scandal. Clinton’s gender is an asset in a way it wasn’t 8 years ago, and so it’s no surprise to see that Republicans are trying to hit hard on that front, trying to turn a strength into a weakness.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the really far out sexist anti-Hillary edition. While the conservative press is trying a sexist narrative against Clinton that carefully avoids saying directly that women are inherently unqualified to be president, some of the every day conservatives out there aren’t so subtle. Go Ape Marketing CEO Cheryl Rios got herself on TV in Dallas recently by blabbing about how a woman can’t be president.

• Rios *

The cognitive dissonance of anti-feminist women is always hilarious. It used to be the women who have full-time jobs as writers and pundits in order to tell other women they belong in the home. And now you have a CEO explaining how women aren’t fit for leadership.