Rachel Maddow had a response for the Republican-led government in Missouri after they criticized her reporting on the state’s attack on women: Get lost.
“The state government in Missouri has let us know they are upset about our coverage,” the MSNBC host said. “But our reporting on this matter is correct and the state has not substantively rebutted any of it.”
Maddow said the only thing the GOP-run government in Missouri made clear in their press release is that they don’t want the rest of the country to know about their escalating war on women.
“As far as we can tell, they just don’t like that this is becoming national news,” she said.
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Rachel Maddow responds to the GOP-led government in Missouri after they attack her for covering the state’s anti-abortion measures. #ctl #p2 #maddow pic.twitter.com/QGrrHtmcRr
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) June 11, 2019
Maddow said:
I should tell you that as of today, the state government in Missouri has let us know that they are upset about our coverage. They have put out a press release about it, denouncing our coverage of this, but our reporting on this matter is correct and the state has not substantively rebutted any of it. As far as we can tell, they just don’t like that this is becoming national news. So that’s worth watching, too, to see if Missouri keeps up this new policy of forced vaginal exams for women as a cost of asking to get an abortion. That is worth watching to see if they keep doing this now that everybody in the country knows they’re doing it and they don’t appear to like that.
The Missouri GOP is taking a page from the Trump playbook
On Monday, a state judge ruled that Missouri’s last remaining abortion clinic must remain open, preventing the state – for now – from becoming the only in the country without such a clinic since abortion became legal.
But as Rachel Maddow reported last week, the GOP-led government in the state has been putting pressure on the clinic to close down by forcing every woman who wants to have an abortion in the state to undergo a medically unnecessary vaginal exam.
It’s a procedure that, as Maddow reported, the patient doesn’t want to undergo and the doctors don’t want to administer.
Instead of recognizing that their new attack on women in Missouri is reprehensible and changing course, the state is taking a page from the Donald Trump playbook and attacking the media for covering it.
Rachel Maddow showed no signs of backing down.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
