Religion-based hate crimes against women...

This happened.

The leader of a dissident Amish sect was sentenced on Friday to 15 years in prison for a series of bizarre beard- and hair-cutting attacks on other Ohio Amish that drew national attention.

Samuel Mullet Sr., 67, the leader, was sentenced in Federal District Court in Cleveland for coordinating assaults that prosecutors argued were motivated by religious intolerance. Fifteen of his followers, including six women, were given lesser sentences, ranging from one year and one day to seven years.

The breakaway Amish were convicted of multiple counts of conspiracy and hate crimes, which carry harsher punishment than simple assault.

Prosecutors had asked for a life sentence for Mr. Mullet. Defense lawyers claimed the government was blowing out of proportion personal vendettas that Mr. Mullet harbored against former followers and other critics, and thus did not deserve a long sentence.

[...]Judge Dan Aaron Polster told Mr. Mullet and his co-defendants that they were being punished for depriving victims of a constitutional right, religious freedom, whose fruits they enjoyed themselves as Amish through exemptions from jury service and other laws.

The trial of the 16 defendants, including three of Mr. Mullet’s sons, unveiled a tiny sect in thrall to its leader, who in the name of purity abolished Sunday church services and punished men for ogling non-Amish women by confining them to chicken coops. Testimony also detailed how Mr. Mullet pressured married female followers to have sex with him, including a daughter-in-law.

[...]In handing Mr. Mullet 15 years, Judge Polster said he oversaw his flock with “an iron hand” and that he was “a danger to the community.”

Could abortion criminalizers who justify their violent actions with their own twisted interpretations of religious text, be prosecuted for their hate crimes against women who choose to terminate a pregnancy, and their health care professionals who provide medical support?

Some of the more extreme antiChoice terrorists have been brought to justice, but those who incite them to such actions, remain at large.

What if the sustained campaign of threats and legal intimidation carried on by fundamentalist christian politicians as well as failed ones like Randall Terry were scrutinized under the laws that brought Mullet to trial?

I wonder if there's a district attorney anywhere in the US brave enough to go down that road?

If you repeat a lie often enough ...

Why do zygote zealots and fetus fetishists lie and lie and lie and lie?

Self-righteous pricks like Con MPs Woodworth, Vellacott and Warawa claim they want to *open the debate*.  The sixth estate exposes their lies; these rightwing religious fundamentalists want to pass laws that criminalize abortion.

With the help of paid propagandists like Jonathan Kay, who can't be bothered to present accurate and correct facts in his odious piece of obfuscating glurge.

My first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.

It required a medical intervention to prevent an infection that could have killed me, which happened to Savita Halappanavar in similar circumstances, and to facilitate healing so I might become pregnant in the future, as was my desire.

Now imagine what that would be like if abortion were criminalized at 19 weeks? 

Documentation and evidence would have to be gathered - just like a rape kit - to prove that I hadn't "provoked" my own miscarriage, and then hauled myself to emergency while something bigger and more intense than four menstruations' worth of blood gushed forth. 

At the hospital, I (and my husband) would be subjected to an interrogation from the cop on duty, just to satisfy prurient, sanctimonious crotch-sniffers like Babs Kay, Woodworth, Vellacott, SUZANNE and Maggie Somerville - that it was "really and truly" a miscarriage. 

Health care professionals providing the necessary emergency dilation and curettage would have to complete numerous forms as proof that this health crisis wasn't a "homicide", and that none of us deserved to be jailed, as the fetus lobby would like to see happen.

As fern hill said, there is no LAW regulating abortion but there are medical protocols, procedures and RESTRICTIONS that our public health care system has established with regard to the termination of gestation.

Disgusting tactics that vilify and demonize women and their physicians only serve to provoke acts of violence from mentally unstable people who believe such lies.

Do Canadian doctors, or perhaps a surgical team providing a life-saving procedure to a pregnant woman need to become the target of an abortion vigilante before people like Jonathan Kay take responsibility for publishing LIES?

Illustration above from here.

And remember, Mike likes 'em nubile!

[...] Michael Coren managed to, within three-and-a-half minutes, feign passion for women’s rights and follow it up with vicious and slanderous lies against women’s health providers. See for yourself in the September 7 “The Real War on Women.” Coren called Planned Parenthood “a group—remember this—dedicated to making sure that as many babies are aborted as possible.”

For a group so committed to this goal, they sure allocate their funds strangely. Abortions account for only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s total services. Cancer and HIV screenings, contraception, counseling and other services account for the remaining 97 percent.

So according to Sun News, Planned Parenthood, the largest reproductive health services provider in the US, is actually just a bunch of baby abortion fanatics; just look how much of their activity is abortion!

It doesn’t take more than a little research to find out the truth. Doesn’t Sun News have fact checkers? Or is Sun News just lying to its audience, believing they are too stupid to look up the facts for themselves?

Even though Coren apparently has no qualms about malevolently lying about an organization devoted to women’s health, he makes sure to assure us he’s on the side of women’s rights. “I also find it repulsive that after decades of struggle for female equality, there are still many people on the left who speak of women in the plural, and in the collective, as though they have no individual identities or ideas… it’s almost like a slave-master mentality from the 19th century isn’t it?”

From here.

This isn't the first time that religious fundamentalist and christian-Sharia zealot Michael Coren has attacked US Planned Parenthood as well as the international organization. He also parrots the talking points that supporters of M312 have been regurgitating for months.

That particular line of attack on Planned Parenthood in the US is not original to Coren, though it's been debunked.

Instead of posting a clip from StunTV showing Coren's glib prevarications, here's one that deconstructs the willful harm that deliberate lies carried by schlock media inflicts upon its audience.

As for the title of this post, it's a reference to the StunTV Limbaugh wannabe's alleged interest in p0rn0graphy that features *adult* women disguised to resemble pubescent girls.

Get over it.

The boy-os like this one who are eager to let CONs like Wankworth criminalize women and health care professionals when some pregnancies end before the full gestation term is complete have a MASSIVE Mommy problem.

It seems they can't objectively handle the reality that the women who chose to give them life could have chosen differently: their birth mothers had the power to end their pregnancies.

This possibility appears to make them completely irrational, mentally deranged and incapable of thinking straight.

Added: And since they can't lash out at their mothers for having possessed this power, they now want to deprive women of the basic human right to their own bodily integrity and autonomy.

^NOT the sharpest knife in the drawer.

As fern hill demonstrated in the previous blogpost, the dumbassitude bar has been set low, when CPC MPs claim they're the smartest guy in the room.

MP Woodworth has been working on this Motion 312 - his anti-science project for awhile now.

Choice Joyce at Abortions Rights of Canada has exhibit XY:

Attention supporters! We need to help out Stephen Woodworth because the poor guy lacks imagination. He couldn't even think of a title for his motion! Let's help him out by naming his motion for him. Please email your clever, funny, or subversive titles to info@arcc-cdac.ca. We'll pick the best one and go public with it!

Joyce ArthurExecutive DirectorAbortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC) joycearthur@shaw.cawww.arcc-cdac.ca

This contest has spilled onto Twitter, of course. Check out some of these #M312 gems:

"Women Aren't Persons Unless Childbearing Act"

"Motion to Regress and Oppress"

"Kanada's Kinder, Küche, Kirche Act"

"Hidden Abortion Agenda Motion" or HAAM

"The Handmaid's Tale' Motion."

"The *Catholic Sharia* Pregnancy Control Act"

"The Coathanger of White Male Prominence act"

The "Everything I Know About Being Pregnant I Learned From Watching TLC" Motion

So far, the usual zygote zealots and womb zombies have been unusually quiet. They probably learned their lesson from the last or perhaps before-last time they counted their preborns before they were hatched.

Bill C484 will be forever known as "Kicking Abortion's Ass" because John "Sperm Holocaust" Pacheco unfortunately crowed about it passing 1st reading in the House.

Ladies: Send your menstrual detritus to MP Woodworth!

To quote the fightin' words of JJ at unrepentant old hippie, that would be: CPC MP Stephen Woodworth, Pride of Kitchener’s K of C and another crotch-nosing fetus fetishizing Womb Cop who believes government should be juuuuust small enough to crawl up your vagina and police your uterus.

Woodworth, who is a fundamentalist Catholic who believes "life" starts at the moment of conception, wants to police Canadian women's sexual and reproductive autonomy by criminalizing abortion. This is what we should all do, so he can determine through forensic analysis how many zygotes & embryos we are sluttishly allowing to slip out of our bodies every month.

Depending on the "strength" of your menstrual flow, you should be able to cram all your pads and strained uterine detritus - such as suspicious clots - into one 9 x 12 bubble-wrap-lined enveloppe.

Mail it to Stephen Woodworth, c/o the House of Commons, Ottawa K1A 0A6. You don't have to pay postage to send MPs or the PM (hint, hint) mail.

It sounds gross, but if we don't ACT UP and speak out against Woodworth's project, this is what may soon happen in Canada.

Workers at the Stamford wastewater treatment facility on Harbor View Avenue discovered a dead human fetus while sifting through sewage Saturday morning.

Police do not know exactly how old the fetus is or its sex.

The fetus has been taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where an autopsy will be conducted, Lupinacci said. Police plan to investigate further after they have received a report from the medical examiner.

"We're hoping on some DNA and we're going to have to somehow check pregnancies and whatnot," Lupinacci said. "It could even possibly be a miscarriage. We don't even know if it's a legal fetus at this point."

A fetus is considered viable if the pregnancy lasts beyond 24 to 25 weeks, said Dr. John Morris, a gynecologist who practices in Stamford. A fetus that is about 4 inches in length is probably pre-viable, meaning it most likely could not survive outside the mother's body, he said.

"Viability is kind of a gray area," Morris said. "Most people will give you between 24 and 25 weeks as an age limit. Before that, the lungs won't be developed enough and you have all other sorts of issues."

Nobody in their right correct mind would want this investigated, you say? You would be wrong.

We cannot allow the CONtempt Party to criminalize women, health care providers and abortion.

Creekside: #TellAntiChoiceMPsEverything

Oh, Alison at Creekside: #TellAntiChoiceMPsEverything is toying magnificently with CON MP Stephen Woodworth.

Think of a sleek, muscled BC mountain lioness tossing a grubby bug around the landscape.

SUZANNE - do you really want to go there?

Local fetus-lobbying, abortion-criminalizing Catholic zygote zealot @Roseblue aka Blob Blogging Wingnut SUZANNE FORTIN recently suggested her own project, based on this US initiative of a "hit-list" of abortion services providers.

Our blogging & tweeting colleagues Dr Dawg and Canadian Cynic responded.

Although the Vatican Taliban and Pope Maledict haven't honestly said so, most Church Fathers clearly believe all this nastiness about holding Rome and its powerful clergy accountable for their priests' abuse of children is inappropriate.

How will the Church be able to recruit and keep priests if not for the pedophile bait it once dangled in front of the right men?

Thus Catholics have been ordered to breed more and more, to satisfy dogmatic need to mold children, body & mind, and break their will so that they'll be blindly devout Catholic foot soldiers.

The organizations representing women and men who were physically and sexually violated as children by church clergy should start, as SUZANNE suggests, a registry of names and known addresses for pedophiles and abusers, as well as the names of the bishops, cardinals and other Church Fathers who facilitated their crimes and protected them from judicial prosecution.

That should end well, no?

Meanwhile, back in Ontario ...

We could use some actual information about abortions instead of the truthiness, prevarications and outright lies the fetus lobby propagates.

Campaign Criminalize Abortion pamphleted 20,000 homes in 24 provincial ridings, claiming it costs $30-50 million every year to provide abortions to Ontario women "for the killing of children in the womb".

Campaign Criminalize Abortion Youth has also been gathering signatures for a defund abortion petition that is to be presented to the Ontario Legislature in the near future and urging people to contact their MPP to tell them that abortion is a financial drain on our health care system and should be delisted from OHIP.

Based on figures available here, Campaign Criminalize Abortion has doubled and possibly tripled the costs of providing health care to women who choose to terminate a pregnancy.

Here's recent information about what happens when medically safe and legal abortions as well as reliable contraception are not accessible to women.

Abortion rates are higher in countries where the procedure is illegal and nearly half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe, with the vast majority in developing countries, a new study concludes.

Experts couldn’t say whether more liberal laws led to fewer procedures, but said good access to birth control in those countries resulted in fewer unwanted pregnancies.

The global abortion rate remained virtually unchanged from 2003 to 2008, at about 28 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, a total of about 43.8 million abortions, according to the study. The rate had previously been dropping since 1995.

About 47,000 women died from unsafe abortions in 2008, and another 8.5 million women had serious medical complications. Almost all unsafe abortions were in developing countries, where family planning and contraceptive programs have mostly levelled off.

“An abortion is actually a very simple and safe procedure,” said Gilda Sedgh, a senior researcher at the U.S.-based Guttmacher Institute, designated by the World Health Organization as an official Collaborating Center for Reproductive Health. “All of these deaths and complications are easily avoidable,” said Sedgh, the study’s lead author.

Unfortunately, abortion criminalizing organizations prefer to spin their propaganda.

Merci to AntoniaZ who provided links to the news realease from the January 16 anti-abortion campaign.

MP Woodworth's final smackdown.

At least, we hope this well-informed, knowledgeable exposé of the purportedly naïve MP's foray into lobbying for the fetus will be effective.

Woodworth claims that CC 223 is a 400-year-old Canadian law that is unsupported by 21st century medical science. But, as Woodworth no doubt knows, the Criminal Code of Canada was enacted in 1892, and was based on an 1879 draft. There simply is no such thing as a 400-year-old Canadian law.

Moreover, Woodworth gives no indication of precisely which 21st century medical science he regards as relevant to CC 223. Medical science is irrelevant to the question of when a fetus becomes a human being — that matter is a legal and philosophical one, not a medical one. Perhaps, though, Woodworth has in mind some of the pseudo-science that lurks behind, for instance, Indiana’s notorious 2011 law that patients seeking abortions must be informed of a fetus’s ability to feel pain. If so, then Woodworth should be advised that the current medical consensus is that fetuses cannot feel any pain before 20 weeks gestation, and that they are not capable of a conscious experience of pain — so-called “true pain” — before 26 weeks (if they are capable of it at all).

Since, as Woodworth is surely aware, fewer than one per cent of Canadian abortions are performed past 20 gestational weeks, and none are performed on an elective basis after 24 weeks, medical science’s findings about fetal pain do not in fact militate in favour of any change to CC 223.

If not, there are many prochoice men and women ready to speak up against the insidious Contempt Party campaign to re-criminalize abortion.

Previous posts at DJ! about Woodworth's little project.

And also: jj's take on Woodworth.

Grand merci to CC's tweet.

I Come Not To Praise Tiller But To Bury Him

I'm definitely not sure what the slander/libel laws are in the US, but I can hope someone gets out a legal brickbat and wings it in the direction of Troy Newman of Operation Rescue in the US.

This upstanding defender of the pre-born has apparently boldly gone where many forced pregnancy cultists have gone before, down the 'free speech' route of Lyinggggg forrrrr Jesusssssusssussssss in his visit to an uncritical media platform. He appears to be attempting pre-emptive damage control before an HBO series airs on Dr. George Tiller, the physician brutally murdered by a Christian fundamentalist terrorist for medical dedication to providing women safe, legal, pregnancy termination services.

I also love this nerfball question from the 'interviewer'.

"Mefferd: When you talk about these clinics, and we’ve seen this so many times before, that these abortion clinics are just gross, they’re dirty, they’re poorly maintained, why do you think that is? I mean, they seem to have enough money coming in from abortions to be able to get some Clorox, why are they so gross?"

The rest of the piece is here, tagged by the iron-stomached site, Rightwing Watch.

These fetus exploiters are blase in their moral turpidity, false-witnessing their faces off and then fantasizing even more as their faces flop about on the floor. This is the 'free speech' their Canadian fellow travellers long to have, the ability to completely and deliberately misrepresent reality to the public forum, smug in their certainty they have power and influence enough to avoid repercussion.

And Brutroyus is an honorable man, here to defend the pre-Caesarean against the ravages of ambitious selfish women preternaturally lusting for the Imperial feminist purple.

Shocking New Poll: Canadians Fine with Status Quo on Abortion!

So, LifeShite is SHRIEEKING about its latest poll under this headline: Canada: Poll Shows 72% Want Pro-Life Protections for Unborn.

(One wonders, in passing, what 'pro-life' protections are. As opposed to what other kinds of protections? Helmets? Identity theft?)

As usual, there is some flummery in how they get that number. Basically they throw out the protection 'at birth' and the 'don't give a shit' numbers, add the rest together and get 72%!!!!!11!!!

Here's how the numbers break down.

Human life should be protected:
at conception: 28%
from 2 months on: 17%
from 3 months on: 17%
from 6 months on: 10%
at birth: 20%
don't give a shit: 9%

Of course, the wording of the question is always interesting. There's a link at LifeShite to the PDF where I found this.

Q.5 This question concerns the development of human life before birth. According to medical research, a fetal heart begins to beat about three weeks after conception. Brain waves can be detected within two months after conception. By two months all organs and body parts are in place. In your opinion, at what point should the law protect human life?

Throw some misleading 'medical research' at people and ask them to pick a point in time. Say nothing about fetal viability, which is the stage that some sane people think is worth considering. But it's tricky.

There is no sharp limit of development, age, or weight at which a fetus automatically becomes viable. According to data years 2003-2005, 20 to 35 percent of babies born at 23 weeks of gestation survive, while 50 to 70 percent of babies born at 24 to 25 weeks, and more than 90 percent born at 26 to 27 weeks, survive. It is rare for a baby weighing less than 500g (17.6 ounces) to survive.

I wonder how the answers would have gone if the question had been something like this: 'Medical research shows that very premature babies cost the medical system boatloads of money, and even then, premies have poor survival rates and high risk of lifelong health problems. In your opinion, at what point should the healthcare system be on the hook for bazillions of dollars?'

Who came up with that bullshit question? Oh. Look. From Environics' PDF:

QUESTION DESIGN
The questions were designed by senior Environics researchers in conjunction with representatives from LifeCanada. The questions were pre-tested as part of the overall survey, prior to being finalized.

Translation: We put our top people on this 'fleecing the fetus fetishists' gambit.

Fetus fetishists were probably less happy with the legality question. A whopping 68% think abortion is fine in the first three months, which, not surprisingly, is within the timeframe of over 90% of abortions.

In other words, a solid majority of Canadians are A-OK with the status quo.

As we said back in April 2010, despite the Manning Centre's and abortion criminalizers' wishful thinking, Canada remains pro-choice and socially liberal. A fact that has remained virtually unchanged for the past decade.

You Knew This Was Coming

The US has rather mild warnings on its cigarette packs. That's about to change. They're going to get the graphic warnings we've had in Canada for years.

(Joke: 'I smoke. I used to have a brand. Now I just say, 'Anything but the teeth'.)

Never a gang to miss a stupid stunt PR opportunity, fetish fetishists want such graphic warnings on abortions.

“As much as I support the decision by the FDA to hold smokers accountable for the health risks they’re accepting, I can’t help but wonder where the warning labels on abortion are,” writes SFLA [Students for Life of America] Executive Director Kristan Hawkins in a June 23 blog post. “Abortion is the single worst scar on the social justice movement in America. No one is debating that smoking has terrible consequences, but the extermination of innocent children is a crime of much more concern, and one I refuse to stand for.”

They're a tad uncertain though, where a doo-hickey like this might be displayed.

As to where such a graphic warning label would be placed, Hawkins suggests abortion facilities, abortion-causing drugs.

And, of course, it raises the burning question of 'what does abortion when not pregnant do?'

Because, as fetish fetishists never tire of saying: Women are too fucking stoopid to understand what they're doing.

As JJ once famously said at her place (too lazy to look for link): 'Who knew? I thought I was going in for a Brazilian wax.'

Dear Mayor Watson,

About that *Respect for Life But Only If You're Pre-Born* proclamation ...

@Momforchoice tweeted. She linked to a kick-ass letter from Joyce Arthur, the executive Director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. It reads in part:

We are writing now to request that you please refrain from issuing any “Respect for Life” proclamation in the future, on the basis that they fail to meet the criteria in your Policy. The proclamation contradicts your policy in two fundamental ways: 1. It endorses discrimination against women via the removal of their constitutional rights (and arguably promotes hatred against women), and 2. It is religiously motivated because it promotes a sectarian religious doctrine on abortion.

We note that your policy “emanates from the desire to uphold the intent and spirit of the Ontario Human Rights Code” – under which “sex” is a protected ground against discrimination. The “respect for life” that is promoted by this proclamation is disingenuous because it actually promotes discrimination against women. Its context refers to respect for fetal life at the expense of women’s lives, health, and rights. The goal of the anti-abortion movement is to restrict or re-criminalize abortion and force women to complete any and all pregnancies. But in Canada, women have constitutional rights under the Charter, while fetuses do not. Several Supreme Court of Canada rulings have said that fetuses cannot be persons, that a pregnant woman and her fetus are “physically one” person, and that all rights must accrue to the pregnant woman because she already has established constitutional and equality rights. (See for example: Dobson v. Dobson 1999 2 SCR 753; Tremblay v. Daigle 1989 2 SCR 530; and Winnipeg Child and Family Services v. D.F.G. 1997 3 SCR 925.) Therefore, it is not possible to give rights to fetuses without severely compromising the rights of pregnant women. This also means that laws that restrict abortion discriminate against women, and that calls to pass such laws promote discrimination.

Read the whole thing, it is a splendid tonic against the ShrieeeeeK!!!

March of the Feti Roundup (updated)

Prevented by Blogger's malfunction, I wasn't able to do my annual post-fetus-fetishist-bunfest snark yesterday.

So. As always, inquiring minds want to know. How many teenagers got bussed in for an edumacational day on the Hill?

Police estimate 5,000.

Here, we have the phrase 'estimated at over 10,000' but no word by whom.

The ever-reliable LifeShite claims 15,000 attendees.

When I posted a link to the nifty Hill Cam on Twitter, David Akin, a major star at Fox News North, pointed out that by then the gathering had perhaps started to dwindle as the march had started.

I asked when he reckoned the peak occurred. He said, 12:45 to 1:00. (I loooove Twitter.)

Moseyed around the toobz for a while and found this screen-shot at Trashy's World.



I asked when it was taken. By chance, the window was still open and read 12:51, smack dab in Akin's peak period.

Tweeted a link to Trashy's and asked if that look 'peakish' to Akin.

Answer:

Yup. That's what I saw RT @fernhilldammit: Screen shot at 1251 http://bit.ly/kA0VUR @davidakin said that's within peak attendance time.

And as Antonia Z pointed out, that crowd includes cops, media, bystanders, and pro-choice demonstrators.

So, what do you think? Here's another shot from a little while ago for comparison.



And just to round out March of the Feti (JJ's phrase, which I'd reference if bloody Twitter would stop pulling a Blogger), here's what the oft-disappointed-but-sure-they're-on-track-with-a-Con-majority think is in store for us.

Pat O'Brien, a former Liberal MP who sat as an Independent after falling out with his party over abortion, said "the debate is on" and politicians will have to catch up with the public.

And Georges Buscemi, president of Campagne Québec-Vie, said abortion services can be scaled back without a new law making the procedure illegal.

For instance, federal funding to family-planning organizations "can be diverted to other groups that are more open to life."

"There could be some behind-the-scenes work done," Buscemi said at news conference.

"Different things, subsidies to different organizations, policies on health, policies on education. There are a lot of things that can be done behind the scenes to prepare for the future."

March organizer Matthew Wojciechowski claimed there are now between 60 and 65 MPs out of 308 elected to Parliament who are in favour of new abortion laws.

Behind the scenes, eh? Nope. No hidden agenda atall atall.

UPDATE: Buckets does some sciency-facty stuff and comes up with 8,000.

Going too far.

That's not a notion addressed in The Fetus©™ fetishists' book on ways to harass women and deprive them of the right to choose - everything is fair game, from their abortion-criminalizing perspective.

Fortunately this adolescent, wise beyond her years, was not intimidated by the aggressive tricks used by a no-choicer.

Most people would say praying to end abortion is harmless. But, Palmquist has other tactics as well. This week, she confronted a 14-year-old girl entering the clinic about her decision to abort her fetus. [...] while the young girl was sitting in the clinic, Palmquist sent her a text message [which] said "if you go through with this, we've named your baby Britney."

People like Terry Palmquist would forcibly prevent women from exercising their right to choose. Since zygote zealots can't forcibly confine women in prison until they give birth, they are currently attacking Planned Parenthood through political means.

It's why we call them Right Wing Nut Jobs.

And why aren't pregnant Fetus©™ fetishists who insist on numerous and medically unnecessary sonograms viewed as endangering gestational development?

We Won't Go Back

Great new PSA, featuring Lisa Edelstein.

Can't blink.

In the hilarious stand-up comedy monologue below Janeane Garafolo - about whom it is claimed that she bears a slight ressemblance to fern hill in the same way that Patsy Stone looks like deBeauxOs - refers to US rightwing religious fundamentalists Con zombies using the expression "Can't blink". Garafolo riffs about that, and Stevie Spiteful.



I suspect the expression "Can't blink" was borrowed from military jargon, and it's exploited in the RepubliCon discourse just as terms such as pre-emptive strike and collateral damage are deployed.

Nonetheless, it reveals a political reality in the US - and elsewhere, as events in Northern Africa and the Middle East demonstrate - that one should remain vigilant with regards to the actions of ideological opponents.

fern hill's post about the US RepubliCons' MASSIVE push to re-criminalize abortion with legislature that limits women's access to abortion exposes the depth of their hypocrisy. As this NYTimes op-ed says:

House Republicans are preparing to push through restrictions on federal financing of abortions far more extreme than previously proposed at the federal level. Lawmakers who otherwise rail against big government have made it one of their highest priorities to take the decision about a legal medical procedure out of the hands of individuals and turn it over to the government. [...]

A separate Republican bill would deny federal funds for family planning services to any organization that provides abortions. It is aimed primarily at Planned Parenthood’s hundreds of health centers, which also provide many other valuable services. No federal money is used for the abortions. This is a reckless effort to cripple an irreplaceable organization out of pure politics.

Remember how ReformaTory HarperCon backbenchers' Preacher Vellacott and Rod Bruinooge kept introducing private members' bills to impose legislated restrictions on a legal medical procedure and re-criminalize abortion in past parliamentary sessions?
From another NYTimes op-ed:

The objective is to provide the Supreme Court’s conservative majority with a new vehicle for further tampering with Roe v. Wade’s insight that the decision about whether to terminate a pregnancy is best left to women and their doctors pre-viability.

Americans who support women’s reproductive rights and oppose this kind of outrageous government intrusion need to respond with rising force and clarity to this real and immediate danger.

This incremental erosion of women's right to choose when and if to procreate in Canada is a toxic spillover from US rightwing zealotry - and bigotry. Don't blink, because the HarperCons are following the lead of their ideological brethren in the US.

"Mass Bloodshed" threat by US fetus fetishists

Media Matters speculates that CNN's infotainment personality *Dick Dickson* is responsible for this thinly disguised threat issued by rightwing blog Red State:

We will not endorse any candidate who will not reject the judicial usurpation of Roe v. Wade and affirm that the unborn are no less entitled to a right to live simply because of their size or their physical location. Those who wish to write on the front page of RedState must make the same pledge. The reason for this is simple: once before, our nation was forced to repudiate the Supreme Court with mass bloodshed. We remain steadfast in our belief that this will not be necessary again [...]

One can safely presume the use of the term 'mass bloodshed' does not refer to the phenom of synchronized menstrual periods that occur with women living in college dorms and residences.

The abortion criminalizers are huffing and puffing these days, using false equivalencies and behaving like the gynophobic bullies they are. Emboldened no doubt by Palin's appropriation of the term 'blood libel', US senator *Roger Pricker* labeled women's legal access to abortion

"a three-and-a-half decades-long holocaust."

Fetus fetishists, instead of dealing with the harsh consequences of re-criminalizing abortion, prefer to spin and dissemble. Last year a bible-thumping blogger used twisty and illogical train-wreck-of-thought to attack this powerful statement by Jane Fonda, on the subject of choice.

"Every dictator—Stalin, Ceaucescu, Hilter—has made anti-choice a central component of their agenda. The anti-choice movement has used different strategies over the decades, growing more strategic and virulent in reaction to the modern U.S. women’s movement."

It may be religious fundamentalist zealots who shrieeek the loudest about re-criminalizing a woman's right to determine if and when she procreates, but underneath the rhetoric lies an imperative to control women's breeding potential just as political leaders and party bureaucrats do in China, the UAE, Kenya and other countries living under autocratic rule.

Abortion criminalizers plan assault.

The New York Times provides a good overview of the attack plan US fetus fetishists are developing to take down a woman's right to a safe and accessible medical intervention to end a life-threatening pregnancy.

The politics of abortion have changed profoundly in some larger states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“We’re facing the biggest threat to reproductive rights we’ve ever faced in this state,” said Lisa Subeck, executive director for Naral Pro-Choice Wisconsin.

In Michigan, because of the switch to an anti-abortion governor, “the dominos are lined up well for us this time,” said Ed Rivet, legislative director for Right to Life of Michigan. For starters, advocates hope to pass a state ban on the procedure opponents call partial-birth abortion that had been vetoed twice. After that, he said, “We have quite a list.”

Many defenders of abortion rights argue that because the election hinged largely on the economy and the role of government, officials did not receive a mandate for sweeping new social measures. “This last election was not about these issues at all,” said Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “We now are concerned about a real overreaching by some state legislators and governors that will make it very difficult for women to access reproductive health care.” [...]

The abortion rate in the United States, which had declined steadily since a 1981 peak of more than 29 abortions per 1,000 women, stalled between 2005 and 2008, at slightly under 20 abortions per 1,000 women, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute.

So, expect abortion criminalizers to regurgitate their usual lies about abortion as they crank up their war against women's right to control their reproductive capacity - in effect, to overturn Roe v. Wade not at the Supreme Court level but incrementally in women's lives, where it will cause them the most harm.