If there is one thing Republicans can be counted on to shout about regardless the issue is individual freedom and how the federal government encroaches on personal liberty. In fact, Republicans in Congress have all but brought governance to a screeching halt because the idea of acting on issues important to the American people such as creating jobs, gun safety, immigration reform, education, and infrastructure spending is in some way imposing on Republican supporters’ personal freedom. However, Republicans in Congress have demonstrated over the past two-and-a-half years that they will govern with extreme prejudice to deny personal freedom and liberty of over half the population, especially if their impetus is enforcing the religious right’s agenda targeting America’s women. At the start of the 113th Congress, Speaker of the House John Boehner promised he will make it a national priority to “make abortion a relic of the past,” and that it was “one of our most fundamental goals this year” ignoring the economy, jobs, and every other issue important to the people Republicans were elected to serve.
On Tuesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee voted to advance a bill that encroaches on a woman’s right to choose their own reproductive health and ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy in the United States. The bill violates the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that protects a woman’s ability to have an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, which medical professionals concur, is at best after the 24th week of pregnancy. All four Democrats on the committee voted against the measure and one astute Democrat noted that every Republican lawmaker in favor of the abortion bill was a man and that none are medical professionals. Representative John Conyers, (D-Mich) lamented “It is totally out of order for us to determine a medical question like this under the guise of acting as members of the very vital House Judiciary Committee,” and that “no good has ever come from an all-male committee deciding the law about a woman’s body. This is not appropriate.” Another Democrat, Ted Deutch (Fla) said that watching “a group of men” make medical decisions on behalf of women is “hard for people to take,” and that “inserting politics in something that affects a married couple in the depths of despair at learning they have found themselves in a situation they have to make that painful decision, is just not what we should be doing.” Of course, Republicans disagree.
To make matters worse for women, as Democrats attempted to include exemptions from a national ban on abortion in cases of rape and incest, the bill’s sponsor, Trent Franks (R-AZ), harkened back to failed senatorial candidate Todd Akin’s professional medical opinion that “the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low” because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.” Apparently, Republicans abandoned their own post-election pledge to avoid estranging women voters by minimizing rape, defying science, and making absolutist medical pronouncements borne of ignorance and lunacy, and taken up where Republican men left off last year and renewed their war on women’s rights under cover of false-medical and religious authority.
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
The all-male panel deciding that a fetus is viable at 20 weeks contradicts medical professionals who assert that even at 23 weeks, a premature fetus is barely past the halfway point in a normal pregnancy and may survive to live a life of mental retardation, blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy, and if they are fortunate, severe learning disability for life. A fetus at 25 weeks is hardly considered viable either, and the medical costs alone can reach into millions of dollars and the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Heart Association do not suggest that doctors attempt to resuscitate a fetus under the age of 22 weeks making the Republican 20 week viability claim patently false. However, real medical professional’s standards aside, it is the all-male panel’s rejection of exemption for rape and incest that is part and parcel of the rape culture Republicans are promoting with their despicable “honest” or “legitimate” rape claims that are affecting thousands of American women and girls who are victims of sexual assault.
In a typical case of a rape victim forced to carry her assailants child to term, a 14-year old Indiana girl who is eight months pregnant has faced harassment, vandalism, and alienation because she was violently raped by a 17-year old who is due to be sentenced for three counts of child molestation. Although the child was raped, she, like many rape victims, is being portrayed as being promiscuous and it does not help her case when Republicans with no more medical knowledge than their Old Testament proclaim if she was “legitimately raped, the female body has ways of shutting the whole thing down” or that the “incidents of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” These all-male panels are the same types who, besides attempting to ban abortion, oppose contraception, the Plan B emergency contraception pill, as well as comprehensive sexual reproductive education and sexual health resource providers such as Planned Parenthood Republicans are frantic to defund and destroy to satisfy personhood and pro-life advocates.
It is unclear what it is going to take for Americans to comprehend that Republicans have no interest in doing any governing that is not taking from the people, but especially from women. Despite promising to focus on jobs after winning control of the House in 2010, Republicans immediately attacked women’s right to choose at the start of the 112th session of Congress, and regardless their extremist anti-women position contributed to their losses in the 2012 general election, they began the 113th session introducing national personhood bills and now an unconstitutional ban on abortions while a fetus is still medically unviable outside the mother’s womb. Their war on women is the ultimate expression of government assault on individual liberty and freedom, as well as imposition of religion by congressional legislation and further implies women’s second-class citizen status unworthy of making their own reproductive health decisions. The all-male, non-healthcare professional panel devising these truly Draconian laws perpetuate the patriarchal mindset among many, many conservatives that women are incapable of making their own healthcare decisions, and forcing women to carry a child to term against their will piles economic injury on top of loss of freedom to decide when they give birth.
What American women have to understand is that these vile men, these vile Republican men will risk electoral defeat to condemn them to a life of second-class status as birth machines and to keep them banished at home barefoot and pregnant. Women are under vicious assault and nothing is going to stop the war on women until Republicans and their American Taliban religious supporters relegate them to little more than breeding stock, and whether it means “slut shaming” rape victims, defining “honest rape,” or passing forced-birth laws, Republicans will use any means to restrict women’s personal liberty. At a time when the public demands Congress works to improve the economy, create jobs, repair the infrastructure, pass gun safety laws, and reform immigration, Republicans have shown their idea of governance is punishing women at their electoral peril and it is proof positive they are seriously in a holy war against women.
Audio engineer and instructor for SAE. Writes op/ed commentary supporting Secular Humanist causes, and exposing suppression of women, the poor, and minorities. An advocate for freedom of religion and particularly, freedom of NO religion.
Born in the South, raised in the Mid-West and California for a well-rounded view of America; it doesn’t look good.
Former minister, lifelong musician, Mahayana Zen-Buddhist.
