Thursday, March 31st, 2016
Stephan: Here is another Red values state governor and legislature, this time it's Florida, passing laws that take away a woman's control over her own body. I must confess my amazement that we are not seeing mass demonstrations of women, electronically and physically, outraged by this war to subjugate and control them, as a gender. It outrages me, and I am a man. And the cultural and political impact of this is to increase the momentum of the Great Schism Trend.
We are very quickly becoming a country where women in Red value states will have little or no access to pregnancy termination, and will see a significant degradation in female healthcare generally. Meanwhile their Blue Value state sisters will have control over their bodies, and will enjoy superior overall healthcare. Already women in Mississippi live four fewer years than their Blue value state sisters.
My prediction: in those Red Value states they will see a significant rise in self-administered or back alley abortions with a concomitant increase in the sort of abortion crises we used to see in American emergency rooms prior to Roe v. Wade.
Florida Republican Govenor Rick Scott
Credit::AP/Chris O’Meara
For some time now, we’ve been following a long series of red-state reproductive Jim Crow laws incrementally making it more and more difficult for women to retain sovereignty over what happens inside their bodies. Each new law seems to get creepier than the last, especially a recent law signed by Indiana Governor Mike Pence that not only forces women to undergo unnecessary medical procedures but also effectively bans all abortions after 20-weeks, even in the event of pregnancy-related threats to the lives of women — and criminalizes doctors who perform abortions knowing the fetus is suffering from a severe physical deformity or disease.
Of course many of the laws being proposed and passed are direct reactions to the series of deceptively edited YouTube videos alleging that Planned Parenthood has been somehow illegally harvesting and selling fetus body parts. As many of us are aware, countless nonpartisan fact-checkers have debunked the claims made in the videos; around a dozen state investigations have cleared Planned […]