Lawrence Finer from the Guttmacher explains the growing class gap with unintended pregnancy. Michele Bachmann ups the ante on anti-choice rhetoric, and a victory for choice in Texas.

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Idaho woman sues after being prosecuted for abortion

Michele Bachmann making extremist statements during primary

Bachmann’s Great Gas Light Adventure 

Melissa Harris-Perry on the Texas ultrasound law

All this getting to have sex for pleasure somehow makes it unpleasurable, through wingnut magic

On this, the 200^th episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing Larry Finer from the Guttmacher Institute about growing inequalities in the unintended pregnancy rate.  Also, Michele Bachmann ups the ante on extremist rhetoric, and an ultrasound law is blocked in Texas.

The first lawsuit over fetal pain laws has been filed.

• fetal pain *

I’m worried that the woman isn’t the most sympathetic person, but she really is in a horrible situation.  She’s a mother of three who lives on $200 a month, and she was basically forced into this situation because she really had no other option.

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Republican presidential primary candidates got together for yet another forum, this time hosted in South Carolina, and once again, it gave some of the candidates an opportunity to compete in a contest of who’s the furtherest to the right.   On the issue of abortion, Michele Bachmann turned in a solid performance as a fanatic, though she did stop short of saying that she supported putting women who test positive for pregnancy in captivity to make sure that they have their babies no matter what.  But she didn’t stop much short of that.  Her response to the question of abortion was, frankly, chilling.

• Bachmann 1 *

There’s a couple of versions of the Human Life Amendment I’ve seen floating around, but they’re all basically the same as those personhood amendments that anti-choice activists are pushing in various states.  The wording defines fertilized eggs as human beings, with the hope that a woman who has one inside her—or may have one inside  her, since they can’t be detected with modern scientific tools—loses her basic human rights.  This is beyond just abortion, though obviously driving women who want abortion, which is currently at over a million a year, into looking at illegal or unsafe options is bad enough as it is.  But defining a fertilized egg as a person has even more widespread consequences.  It would mean a ban on stem cell research and using IVF to get pregnant, for one thing.  Anti-choicers also hope it would mean a ban on female-controlled contraception such as birth control pills and IUDs, which they falsely claim cause fertilized eggs to die.  

That may not hold up, but absolutely is a danger is that very ordinary behavior from women will get criminalized.  Already the government is using the birth of stillborns to prosecute women for child abuse if they were found to use drugs, even if there’s not a scrap of evidence linking the drug use to the stillbirth. A solid percentage, around 50%, of fertilized eggs slough off on their own without attaching. Drink a beer and have a period?  How do we know there isn’t a corpse you created lingering on that tampon? It’s a situation that’s ripe for selective enforcement, which again is already going on with stillbirths, which are common but only a handful of women are prosecuted over because the government had something against them. Additionally, a law like this can and probably would be used to justify restricting women’s ability to eat certain foods, go certain places, and hold certain jobs, on the grounds that these things could affect  fertilized eggs that may be inside them but are undetectable.

But she kept going.

• Bachmann 2 *

As I argued on XX Factor, she’s saying up is down and black is white.  She’s arguing that by giving women the right to abortion, the Supreme Court imposed their morality on the nation.  To which I say, how?  Roe v. Wade didn’t require a single woman who doesn’t want an abortion to have one.  What it did allow was women who want them to have them.  In other words, it disallowed the government to foist personal morality on women.  It did the opposite of what she’s saying.  Bachmann is saying that your neighbor’s choice to have an abortion is somehow an imposition on your freedom.  That may make emotional sense to people who believe all women everywhere are their personal property to be controlled by them, but it makes exactly no legal sense.  Since when does Michele Bachmann own my uterus, and since when is my choice to do what I want with it a violation of her rights?

But wait, it gets even worse.

• bachmman 3 *

A “confrontation” with the court if they continued to rule that women are self-owned human beings with rights instead of reversing course and ruling that women should be forced to bear children against their will?  What on earth would that mean?  Does she mean something mild, like when Obama criticized the Supreme Court for the Citizens United ruling?  I doubt it, since this is a discussion about confrontation, not just criticism.  Is she implying that a power grab or a coup is an acceptable response to the court ruling that women are full human beings with full human rights?  Hard to say, but certainly I imagine the authors of the Constitution that Bachmann is always on about would probably not like her blithe dismissal of the powers they themselves gave the Supreme Court.

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insert interview

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While most of the news lately about abortion rights has been grim, I do have one good news item to report, this time out of Texas.  Earlier this year, Gov. Rick Perry rushed through the one of the most restrictive mandatory ultrasound laws in the nation, claiming that it was an emergency provision. He did this in a state that’s experiencing record drought and high unemployment, but the idea that women might be getting legal abortions without going through medically unnecessary, uncomfortable and humiliating vaginal sonograms accompanied by ridiculous state-scripted anti-choice lectures that make no sense?  That’s an emergency.  Melissa Harris-Perry reacted appropriately to the legislation.

• texas 1 *

The excuse for mandatory ultrasound laws is that they are about “informed consent”, i.e. anti-choicers argue that women are literally too stupid to know that an abortion will remove an embryo from their bodies, and they believe if you show them a fuzzy picture of a miniscule batch of cells, they’ll suddenly go, “oooooh, you mean if I have an abortion, I won’t have a baby!” and run screaming from the office.  That’s what antis claim, anyway, but empirical evidence shows that women who look at ultrasounds don’t actually decide against abortions.  Because women can’t be that stupid.  It’s really impossible. 

Harris-Perry had a clip of some of the bill authors explaining their logic.  Warning: put in your mouth guard if you’re a teeth grinder, since these men appear to literally believe your average woman’s intelligence falls somewhere between that of a 3-year-old and a kitchen sponge.

• texas 2 *

 Yeah, it’s truly painful listening to two very, very stupid men go on about how stupid women are, isn’t it?  Anyway, the reality of this bill is that it has nothing to do with informed consent, which again, is already being provided as women actually seek out abortions to terminate pregnancies, and aren’t really going to be like, “What do you mean if I do this I don’t get a baby?”  The specifications on the heartbeat and the image actually clue you into what’s going on.  In order to get that sort of thing at the stage in their pregnancies when they’re aborting—that is, very early—they have to do a vaginal ultrasound.  Which is incredibly uncomfortable and invasive.  And while they’re doing this, they have to be delivering a state-scripted lecture instead of doing what doctors usually do through miserable procedures, which is offering information and comfort.  It’s about punishing women who have abortions with physical and psychological abuse.  You get the impression that the legislators would probably like to shove giant, uncomfortable objects inside women themselves if they could get away with it. 

Luckily, the let’s-punish-women-with-unnecessary-vaginal-penetration-and-humiliation law has been stalled for now.

• texas 3 *

So Texas anti-choicers have been temporarily prevented from punishing women whose sexual choices they disapprove of by shoving unwanted, unnecessary probes into their bodies.  But I imagine their desire to punish sexually active women with vaginal penetration won’t  be thwarted forever.  Many laws allowing the physical abuse of women who have abortions under the guise of “informed consent” have been allowed to stand, in part because many people don’t get that this has nothing to do with informed consent and everything to do with hurting women for going against the sexual rules of fundamentalist Christians.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the damned if you do, damned if you don’t edition.  This conversation on Fox is possibly the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard.

• feminists *

Okay, you have the bizarre argument that feminists somehow are running over men by wanting equality, which assumes that this is a zero-sum game and if men aren’t dominating women, women must be dominating men.  Actually, feminists are saying no one dominate anyone else!  But also, this whole “feminists aren’t getting laid, and they’re angry” crap?  I spend hours each week cataloguing the way conservatives are angry because they believe feminism means women are getting laid, which they really hate.  They want to punish us with vaginal probes, by stripping our rights, by slut-shaming us.  Even in this clip, this Fox News lady is screeching that we want to have sex “like men”, by which she means having sex for pleasure.  And so the argument is that we’re unsatisfied because we have actually can have sex for pleasure?  Ugh, that’s really confusing, like arguing that the only way to enjoy food is to live on energy bars eaten only for survival. All this conservative arguing that up is down is just exhausting.