Clinton and Sanders Tweet Criticisms of Anti-Choice Legislation

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) took to Twitter this week to speak out against anti-choice legislation and to urge Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) to veto legislation targeting reproductive rights. 

In a series of tweets signed “-H,” indicating that they come from the candidate herself, Clinton wrote that “States like Ohio, Utah, and Florida that attack Planned Parenthood are attacking women’s health, and they’re part of a dangerous trend.” The Democratic presidential candidate noted that if “efforts to roll back women’s rights seem relentless, you’re right: States have enacted 282 abortion restrictions since 2010.”

Clinton called on Scott to “do the right thing and protect a woman’s right to make her own health decisions,” referring to an opportunity to veto anti-choice legislation passed Wednesday by the Florida’s GOP-majority state senate. The measure would force doctors who offer abortion care to have admitting privileges at local hospitals and ban abortion clinics from receiving state funding for cancer screenings, HIV testing, and other forms of preventative care.

The medical community has called admitting privileges laws medically unnecessary. Anti-choice legislators and activists characterize these laws as safety measures for pregnant people, though an anti-choice leader outside the Supreme Court this month said that admitting privilege laws are designed to destroy abortion care access.

Meanwhile, Sanders’ campaign in a Wednesday tweet flatly called on Scott to “veto this bill. Don’t play politics with abortion.”

“This is not about abortion services,” Barbara Zdravecky, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, said of the bill, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “This is about contraception, STD diagnosis and treatment, cancer screening, pap smears. They’re taking that all away.”

Trump: ‘”I Think Islam Hates Us”

Donald Trump doubled down on the comments he made about Islam earlier this week during Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate, charging that Americans should be wary of Muslim “hatred” of the United States.

“I think Islam hates us. There’s something there—it’s a tremendous hatred,” Trump said Wednesday, speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. When pressed by Cooper to clarify whether that hatred was “in Islam itself,” Trump replied that, “you’re gonna have to figure that out, OK?”

CNN debate moderator Jake Tapper again pressed the issue with the leading Republican candidate, asking if his comments referred to “all 1.6 billion Muslims.”

“I mean a lot of them,” Trump replied.“There’s something going on that maybe you don’t know about, maybe a lot of other people don’t know about, but there’s tremendous hatred. And I will stick with exactly what I said to Anderson Cooper.”

Trump returned to the topic after Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) criticized his comments, asserting once again that “there is a tremendous hate” in Islam.

“There is tremendous hate. Where large portions of a group of people, Islam, large portions want to use very, very harsh means,” Trump said.  “Let me go a step further. Women are treated horribly. You know that. You do know that. Women are treated horribly, and other things are happening that are very, very bad. … The question was asked, what do you think? I said, there is hatred. Now it would be very easy for me to say something differently. And everybody would say, oh, isn’t that wonderful.”

Trump’s assertion comes months after he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” in the aftermath of attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California. Trump justified his stance by similarly claiming that there is a “great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population.”

What Else We’re Reading

Mother Jones analyzes the Democratic presidential candidates’ positions on abortion rights later in pregnancy, finding that although Sanders is against restrictions on abortion access, Clinton’s position isn’t as clear.

Meet Lucia Quiej: The Guatemalan immigrant mother who questioned Democrats about family reunification during Wednesday night’s debate.

The Washington Post profiles Donald Trump’s sister, the “tough, respected federal judge Ted Cruz called a ‘radical pro-abortion extremist.’”

Bernie Sanders lent his support to destigmatizing breastfeeding this week. After a photo showing a Sanders supporter breastfeeding at a campaign rally gained attention, the Sanders campaign tweeted that “As a society, we should never stigmatize women for breastfeeding in public.” The woman in the photo wrote on Facebook that after the rally, “Bernie and Jane O’Meara Sanders both thanked me for doing what mothers do and taking care of my daughter when she needed her mom, even if that meant nursing in public!”