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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Guttmacher’s Adam Sonfield will be on to explain why we need Obamacare to cover men’s contraception. I mix things up with a segment of good news, and for some reason, a lot of conservatives are saying really weird things about abortion lately.

Rewire’s Andrea Grimes was on HuffPost Live to talk about the Texas HB 2 law and how it was upheld, to the ruination of women’s abortion access in the state.

• Andrea *

You can watch the whole thing, which is about 20 minutes long, at Rewire. The link is in show notes.

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I don’t get many opportunities to share good news on this show, but the legislative session is winding down and a few court decisions are starting to come in that are rolling back some of the more aggressive attacks on reproductive rights. In particular, abortion doctors regained some free speech rights they had been losing in state legislatures. It’s popular on the right these days to pass laws forcing doctors to lie to patients or guilt trip them, even though it should be obvious that mandatory lying or emotional abuse is not only a violation of free speech rights, but of basic medical ethics. Doctors are often forced to say that abortion causes mental distress or breast cancer, even though neither is true. But Arizona took it to another level earlier this year.

• States 1 *

Oh yes, they claim there are “both sides” to this story, which means that it’s a victory for anti-choicers no matter what happens, because now they’ve got the idea out there that there’s some confusion over whether an abortion can be, uh, reversed. The answer to that question is a big fat you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me no, followed by a reminder that women do not, in fact, have abortions and then suddenly start freaking out and asking doctors to put it back in. Which is the other lie that anti-choicers want to get out there, to lay the groundwork for the idea that abortion needs to be banned to stop that kind of regret from happening. In the real world, women who decide after an abortion that they do want a baby tend to just get pregnant again. Nearly all women who have abortions are either mothers already or will be mothers one day.

But while they’ve hijacked the legislature to push two giant myths that have no foundation in truth, at least, for now, anti-choicers can’t actually make doctors lie to their patients about this. The state has agreed to put a hold on the law until it can be heard in federal court. Hopefully, the court will have the common sense to see that forcing doctors to tell such a ridiculous lie is a grievous assault on free speech and medical ethics.

While most of the attention to mandatory ultrasound laws focuses on the actual wanding itself, and how terrible it is to drag it out longer than necessary for diagnostic purposes, there’s also free speech issues involved. The North Carolina mandatory ultrasound law came with a script where a doctor was supposed to lecture a woman about holding the father responsible and about adoption and all sorts of issues roughly 99.9 percent of women getting abortions have already considered. And because of this, it was struck down as a violation of free speech by the Fourth Circuit Court. Now that decision is sticking.

• States 2 *

The downside is that this means that other ultrasound laws won’t be dealt with. The Supreme Court is being really cowardly on the issue of abortion, basically, which makes me worried about what’s going to happen with Texas. But this is a good news segment, and I have even more!

• States 3 *

The state is asking a federal appeals court to remove the injunction, but the fact that it got put there in the first place is good. It’s obvious what antis are doing now. They get a few 20-week bans in and, having established the idea that 20 weeks is more than enough time to get an abortion, they try to shorten the window. If they can get 12 weeks to be the new standard, they’re going to start arguing that if you can’t get it done in eight weeks, you don’t deserve an abortion. And then it’s going to be six weeks. Then four weeks. And they’ll be running around implying that everyone who needs four whole weeks to get an abortion is a lazy, no-good slut, without ever acknowledging that you really can’t get an abortion before four weeks, because a lot of doctors worry it’s too early to get it done safely. Or admitting that most women don’t even know they’re pregnant at four weeks, since you may not even have noticed a missed period yet.

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Interview
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For a while, it felt like right-wingnuts were so busy blaming gay people for everything that they forgot to blame abortion for everything. But abortion is back on the docket, probably because of all the political attention being paid to the issue, and we are all the poorer for it. The Fox News reaction to the horrible shooting in Charleston, South Carolina has been a shameful endeavor: mostly a bunch of attempts to downplay the obviously racist motives of the shooter and try to spin it as some kind of attack on Christianity. But they also found time to blame abortion, courtesy of Alveda King, an anti-choicer who exploits her familial connection to Martin Luther King Jr. to get on TV. King performed her duty, downplaying the racism of this attack and trying to make it about abortion.

• Abortion 1 *
• Abortion 2 *

The entire display is baffling as well as insulting. This man, Dylann Roof, murdered nine innocent people. He is a murderer. We all agree on that. But apparently at Fox News, calling him a racist is just a bridge too far, because they’re that committed to propping up the illusion that racism is not a thing that happens. And the abortion thing. I thought I’d become inured to right-wingers equating the choice to end a pregnancy with the loss of actual people, people with lives and families and memories and feelings. But once again, I just can’t even deal with this. It minimizes the realities of violence to suggest that the life of a person is worth no more than the life of an embryo. It’s outrageous to me that people who can’t see that think they should be treated as moral arbiters. Just, no.

Much less awful but just as nutty: California Assembly member Shannon Grove is under fire for blaming California’s drought problems on legal abortion and suggesting that taking away a woman’s right to choose brings the rains. No, I’m not kidding. A news station quoted Rewire’s own Zoe Greenberg on this story.

• Abortion 3 *

Grove is denying that she blamed the drought on abortion, but she’s denying it in a cagey way. I mean, she didn’t say exactly that abortion restrictions bring the rains. She just held it out as a remarkable coincidence that probably had a causal relationship. Like it’s only like 99 percent likely.

On the Faith and Freedom radio program, hosts Mat Staver and Matt Barber were just beside themselves with glee over the news that Texas is cutting breast and cervical cancer screenings through Planned Parenthood. They falsely claimed that doing this would somehow defund abortion, though it only defunds cancer screenings. To justify their desire to see funding for cancer screenings cut, they, well, just listen.

• Abortion 4 *

Yes, that’s the reason one in three American women will get an abortion, as a sacred rite of a widespread American death cult. That must be it. There could not be any other reason, such as finishing your education, waiting for a better relationship, or wanting to care for the children you already have. Death cults. It must be death cults. The irony here, of course, is that the only people who are pushing death are the people who would rather see women go without cancer screenings than accept Planned Parenthood’s sex-positive, pro-choice philosophy.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, period-splaining edition. Rabbi Daniel Lapin is this nutty right-winger that is deeply beloved by Glenn Beck because of his anti-woman opinions. And he came onto Beck’s show to explain that we women are so desperate to be pregnant all the time that our periods cause mourning. I’m not exaggerating.

• Periods *

That’s because it is not. Because that might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, and that’s saying a lot when you consider the history of this show. May I remind you that, in the real world, women deliberately take pills to suppress ovulation? The notion that we’re all sitting around just praying to get pregnant every month for the entire span between menarche and menstruation, which is like 35 to 40 years, mind you, is just, yeah. No. This might be the greatest mansplaining of all time, between its pseudo-intellectual wankery, putting men’s B.S. over women’s lived experience, and just utter and hilarious falseness.