As full disclosure, I do not believe in abortion as birth control. I think it’s a damn lousy choice. In my ideal world, there would be no abortion. However, we do not live in my ideal world. Sometimes through making dysfunctional choices, and sometimes through circumstances beyond their control, women find themselves in situations where an abortion is the best choice among the available choices that are even lousier. A woman pregnant with a rapist’s child is such a situation. But a significant set of the Republican party does not see it that way at all.
The GOP has always pandered to the right-wing base by promising to strip women of the right to control their own bodies. In the interest of not alienating sane people though, many Republican lawmakers make an exception in cases of incest and rape, and when a mother’s life is in danger.
But a group of ultra-conservative Republican Senate candidates — recently propelled to victory in the primaries by Tea Party groups who claim to oppose government intrusion into people’s lives — want the government to force women to carry fetuses to term, even in cases of incest or rape. Rachel Maddow, in her show on Wednesday night, called this group the “Bear Your Rapist’s Baby Caucus.” According to Raw Story, at least 78 GOP candidates for the House would qualify for this extreme voting bloc.
Here are five freedom lovers who think they should get to decide what a rape victim does with her body:
1. Rand Paul (Kentucky)…
2. Christine O’Donnell (Delaware)…
3. Sharron Angle (Nevada)…
4. Ken Buck (Colorado)…
5. Joe Miller (Alaska)…
…In addition to all anti-abortion extremists running for Senate on the GOP ticket, a multitude of House candidates also want abortion outlawed even if the pregnancy is the result of incest or rape. Amanda Terkel reported that the Republican National Coalition for Life has endorsed 63 House candidates who are pro-life “without discrimination.” Dianne Edmondson, executive director of the organization, told Terkel that there are more candidates against abortion with no exceptions in this election cycle… [emphasis added]
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The article includes considerable additional documentation, so I encourage you to click through to it.
I also, believe that my own beliefs make no difference whatsoever, as it is highly unlikely that I will ever be pregnant. Therefore, it is not my choice to make. I have absolutely no right to tell a woman what to do with her own body. Such choices must be preserved for individual women themselves. It must remain a woman’s right to choose.
Isn’t it ironic that the party that claims to believe in small, unobtrusive government, when it comes to protecting Americans through regulation of criminal corporations, wants to be Big Brother in the bedroom and in the doctor’s office?
If Republicans ever gain power again, they will rape women’s rights. Count on it. It’s up to you to stop them. Get out and vote. Treat your voting booth like a car. Put it in D, not R, unless you want to go backwards.
12 Responses to “Protect Women’s Rights from Republican Rape”
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What percentage of abortions are the result of rape? A teeny, tiny percentage — approximately 1%. I feel very bad that abortion has become a political issue, because it has detracted from other methods of birth control in general. I am anti-abortion, not for religious reasons, but because I believe a human being is a human being at the moment of conception. Everything that person ever will be is right there, and no one — not even that person’s parents — have them right to kill them. However, preventing conception is a whole other matter, and because abortion has become too readily available as the tried and true method of birth control, prevention of conception has been put on the back burner. In the United States, almost 4,000 abortions a day are performed. Most of those are on white women who have had previous abortions. It’s disgusting.
In the case of Roe vs. Wade, the woman in question did not get an abortion, but in fact gave birth to her child and gave it up for adoption. She was also not pregnant as the result of rape. In later years she became pro-life.
Legalized abortion of human beings in the womb is the worst thing that has ever happened to the human race. It’s not about women’s right at all. It’s just legalized murder. Preventing the conception of human beings is a whole other matter, and we need to start looking at the issue from that point of view. This is the 21st Century.
As a physician, I absolutely reject your notion that “a human being is a human being at the moment of conception” – just as an acorn most assuredly is not an oak tree.
While I agree with you that the major focus should be on contraception, the great majority of women who had an abortion (and while not particularly germane, the latest figures on abortion rates are barely 3.3k performed daily) were actually practicing contraception in the month prior to conception.
It is my firm belief, which is held by the majority of Americans (as I notice you’re actually Canadian), that restrictions on abortion violate both women’s liberty and their equality. A woman’s procreative liberty is clearly protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. You would certainly agree that the force of any law that would compel women to abort their pregnancies would clearly be unconstitutional – then so too are laws that would prevent her access to abortion. It is simply unconstitutional to conscript women against their will and force them to have children.
If men got pregnant, we would not be having this discussion.
You are so right on that Jerry!
My personal opinion is that abortion is bad (and not for religious reasons) and I tend to fall into the camp that abortion should be permitted in certain circumstances, BUT I lean more towards the pro-choice crowd because determining what and when is abortion acceptable is beyond my place. The picture of the billboard is great because it shows just how America has been attacked by the religious minority…
Ask a woman from the days before Roe v Wade how it felt to have a back alley coat hanger abortion performed and then tell me that a human being does not have the right to decide for herself whether a safe, medical procedure in a sterile environment is better or not. Everyone can say that life begins at conception but truth of the matter a every single sperm cell has life and if you are pro contraception you are just as murderous as a woman who chooses abortion. You can’t have it both ways. And more importantly to me is that NO ONE has the right to dictate to me what my morality has to be. That is one sacrosanct area of my being that is between God and myself.
TWM, a very good point about the back alley coat hanger abortions. And you could certainly open the pro life discussion up to another topic. As every sperm cell also has life, why are the pro life people not fighting against male masturbation?
“If Republicans ever gain power again, they will rape women’s rights. ”
If republicans ever gain power again, they will rape ALL OF OUR rights!
You can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll be voting next month AGAINST the Republicans. Cruel policies like these are unacceptable.
I am vehemently pro-choice, being that I’ve had 2 abortions myself. I can tell you that no woman wants to ever have to make that choice, but in both my situations, I had a birth control failure and my financial situations in both circumstances were precarious. I disagree with women who use it as birth control; but that is a very small minority of women who do that. In both situations, I felt bringing a child into the world at that time would have been both disaster financially and emotionally, especially for the child. Do I think about them and think what they would have been like – all the time. But I don’t dwell on it, since I still feel I made the best decision at the time for my circumstances. Also, 80% of fertilized eggs wind up being ‘aborted’ during a woman’s monthly cycle. I suppose that makes me a mass murderer in Jo’s eyes.
No man or woman is ever going to tell me what I’m going to do with my body; simple as that.
Did this during and after a war. Manu pointed out that when the men were away fighting the women did all the things men did. Whether working in a factory or anything else and they did just as well as men.
http://twitter.com/Nathanhaurit
Republicans suck.