In the interest of transparency, I will state upfront that I am a woman. A fifty-something woman.
I believe in rights for woman. Sounds like that should be obvious, right? Apparently in this season of elections, one party seems to think that this is a culture war issue.
No, it's an issue of equality for over 50% of this country's population. 50.9% actually. http://nationalatlas.gov/articles/people/a_gender.html
Here are a few more facts that people seem to want to disregard. Women give birth to 99.9999999% of children and transgendered women give birth to the other .0000001%.
Legislators are overwhelmingly male in this country.
Women hold only 17% of the seats in Congress. (Source)
Only 22% of all statewide elective executive office positions are currently held by women. (Source)
State Legislatures are only 24% women. (Source)
Only 6 out of 50 states have a female governor. (Source)
The United States trails behind much of the world—ranking 90th in the number of women in our national legislature. (*Note: The U.S. is listed as 73rd, but after accounting for tied rankings of other countries, the ranking for the U.S. is 90th. Source)
On average, male cabinet appointees outnumber women cabinet appointees in our states by a ratio of 2 to 1. (Source)
50% less women than men consider of running for office. Of those, 30% less actually run, with only a fraction seeking higher office. (Lawless, Jennifer and Richard L Fox. It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005.)
Women constituted 54% of voters in the 2008 elections, but only 24% of state legislators. (Source)
http://www.wcffoundation.org/pages/research/women-in-politics-statistics.html
Where am I going with this? Simply this--why are women being treated as though they should have no say in their own reproductive health? Oh, I see. It's lack of representation in legislature. Here's how it works:
Texas just voted to not accept any money for Planned Parenthood. This leaves many poor communities without access to basic women's health care, ie. Pap smears, mammograms and checkups. It also leaves them with no access to free or inexpensive contraceptives.
Bill O'Reilly just commented that insurance should pay for Viagra but not for contraception. Apparently in Bill's eyes, the inability to achieve an erection is a medical issue, but problems with menstrual cycles, amount of bleeding, hemorrhaging, anemia and pain in women are not. The last time I checked, an erection was not necessary to urinate. The lack of an erection is also a great way to have male contraception. Ooops! Bet Bill never thought of it that way......he'd have to be opposed then.
Several male dominated legislators have promoted bills requiring women who seek abortions (for WHATEVER reason, even life of the mother reasons....) go through an invasive sonogram-think sticking a rock musicians microphone up your orifice- and listen to a doctor go through a litany of reasons about what is happening in your body. Knock, Knock. Hey, anybody in there??? If your life is in danger, you know what is going on in there-you are under threat of death. The way this country appears to be headed, that will be every woman.
What's next? Relaxing the bigamy laws so that men can marry more than once, cuz, y'know, you need a spare around when one dies giving birth.
One Ohio legislator, a woman, rated a hurrah from me this week when she introduced a bill requiring men to jump through hoops to get Viagra. State Senator Nina Turner, a Democrat from Cleveland, introduced a bill that mimicked the "Heartbeat Bill" (more on personhood, later). In this bill, men who wanted to have a prescription for Viagra would have to meet with a therapist to make sure there was an actual need, demonstrate that need in a doctor's office, listen to a litany of side effects (hey, death is one of them!) and then sign a flurry of papers (which would stay on file for years). Sounds eminently fair to me. And remember, in the interest of best practices, there should be a nurse in the room as well. Lawyers would insist, I would think, because of all the malpractice problems.
Whats the matter, guys? Is this all a little intrusive for you?
And then the so call "Personhood Movement" of which bills like the "Heartbeat Bill" address. In this arena, two cells that have come together to form a zygote are now a person with inalienable rights. If you go to the site for this movement, the front page loosely links together a comment from Dr. Jerome Lejune, the discoverer of the cause of Down Syndrome also known as Trisomy 21, a quote by Justice Blackman that if a "suggestion of personhood can be established" then the Roe v Wade case would collapse, a quote about a slave not being a full human and one last quote from Clinically Oriented Embryology that says this:
"[The zygote], formed by the union of an oocyte and a sperm, is the beginning of a new human being."
Apparently, the beginning is the end with these folks.
(Sidenote: You may have heard of Trisomy21 before. The Santorum family's daughter has this syndrome.)
So what might happen if this legislation were to become law? Let's dust off our crystal ball and take a look.
Lots more babies. This is a good thing, right? Because if contraception is not made inexpensively available and viagra is, then lots of geezers will be procreating with less than optimal sperm. Expect an increase in significant birth defects. http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200708/mans-shelf-life
Lots more poverty, since many of these children will be born to families already in poverty. More than likely, this will occur to an alarming degree in our urban areas, although rural areas will also see an uptick in population.
More maternal deaths. It is estimated that every day 2-3 women die in childbirth or childbirth related situations in this country. The national average is 11 out of every 100,000. That means more motherless children and broken families. http://digitaljournal.com/article/288998
And you thought my previous comment about relaxing bigamy laws was in jest.
Financially? Hospitals will be overrun with the under and uninsured who must use the ER as their primary caregivers. Hospitals will not be able to turn them away, so the cost gets booted onto the taxpayers or insurance premium payers.
Schools will be needed to be built. This is one of the major costs to local taxpayers, because schools need teachers, supplies, buildings and, ever increasingly, support for mental health issues, developmental and emotional issues, not to mention the standard fare of special education services which will need to be increased because more students will be showing up with significant problems (see age of father article).
This doesn't even begin to cover the needs for more transportation, more police, frankly, more of everything.
Interestingly, all of these economic scenarios come from the party who promises smaller government, the Republican Party.
In their haste to regulate a woman's body, they have failed to consider the economic impact. Society will be taken care of by all those surviving mothers who will be staying home keeping their broods in order while their male counterparts are either working extra hours to pay for all of this or are retired geezers with entertainment plans that require Viagra.
Ok, I've gotten long winded and this is running on. I just have one more question.
Why is the Republican Party so interested in what is going on in my body?
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Ok, I was going to stop there, but this just drew me up short. Took my breath away-in rage.
Terry England, a lawmaker from the state of Georgia, referenced women's health care to animal husbandry.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/terry-england-farm-animals_n_1335976.html?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl6%7Csec3_lnk3%26pLid%3D142342
His comments came during a discussion of HB 954 which forbids any abortion past 20 weeks, apparently even if the fetus is dead. This seemed to spur the following comments from the good legislator:
“Life gives us many experiences,” England explained. “I’ve had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive — delivering pigs, dead and alive. … It breaks our hearts to see those animals not make it.”
It's nice to see that legislators think of women to be on the value level of their farm animals.
I'm going to go bang my head off the wall for awhile now.
Santorum is known to be a climate change skeptic but acts more like an outright denier. In any event, in comments made this week, he thundered from the pulpit...er...podium, that, "The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is."
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