Abortion

Roundup: DC Mayor Arrested Protesting Budget Riders

Beth Saunders

DC mayor arrested protesting abortion rider; birth control also too controversial for Florida legislature; Pennsylvania moves towards TRAP laws in response to Gosnell; UK gay men can donate blood but only if they're celibate; and how forced pregnancy solves our budget woes.

Washington, DC, mayor Vincent Gray was arrested protesting Monday. Image from Washington Post.

DC mayor arrested protesting abortion rider; birth control also too controversial for Florida legislature; Pennsylvania moves towards TRAP laws in response to Gosnell; UK gay men can donate blood but only if they’re celibate; and how forced pregnancy solves our budget woes.

  • Washington, DC, mayor Vincent Gray and 40 others, including members of the DC City Council, were arrested yesterday in protest of the federal budget’s effect on the city, including the abortion rider preventing DC from spending locally raised tax dollars on abortion for needy women. Congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton had her own message for Congress, “It’s time that the District of Columbia told the Congress to go straight to hell.”
  • We all know that the uterus is too racy to mention in the Florida legislature. Now, the chair of the state House Rules Committee says that birth control is too unsavory to say aloud as well. Gary Aubuchon  rejected a resolution that would recognize April 12 as “Birth Control Matters Day” because it’s controversial. (Please note, 99% of American women have used contraception at some point in their reproductive lives.)
  • A Pennsylvania House committee has passed a bill that would regulate abortion clinics as surgical centers, which could force the closure of many clinics in the state. The bill is considered an answer to Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s illegal abortion center that operated under appalling conditions.
  • The headline looks positive, “U.K. to Allow Homosexual Men to Donate Blood,” but further reading reveals that the men are only allowed to donate if they’ve not had sex in ten years.
  • There are many great op-eds on the Republican war on women, but I have to highlight this one by Mary Ann Sorrentino, who writes for the New Hampshire Sentinel Source. She says, “ It makes perfect sense that if the nation simply adopts a policy of forced pregnancy and then weans all the newborns off their mothers’ breasts and into an atmosphere of poisonous air and tainted water all our fiscal woes will just disappear.”

Apr 12

Apr 11