(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Molly Redden
Opponents of reproductive rights had a busy 2013. By the end of June, state lawmakers had passed 43 abortion restrictions into law—as many restrictions as were enacted in all of 2012, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights think tank. By August, when many state legislatures had wrapped up their 2013 session, lawmakers had introduced more than 300 abortion restrictions, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Defending these restrictions inspired a string of public figures to make foot-in-mouth statements about women, their choices, and their bodies. Below, we’ve assembled the worst of these comments.
Pregnancy from rape is too rare too justify rape exceptions to abortion bans.
Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) sponsored the year\’s most high-profile abortion restriction—a House bill to ban all abortions in the United States at 20 weeks after conception. So it’s only appropriate that he uttered the most notorious abortion-related gaffe of the year: “The incidence of pregnancy resulting from rape are very low.”
Franks made that statement in June, by way of explaining to the House Judiciary Committee why it wasn’t necessary to amend the bill to include an exception for women who became pregnant by rape or incest. (In fact, women who are victims of rape frequently become pregnant.) But his comment generated so much backlash that, a few days later, Republicans quietly amended the bill to add an exception for rape and incest victims. Franks’ bill passed the House but was never taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate. A spokesman for Franks told Talking Points Memo later that the congressman meant to say that abortions of pregnancies that resulted from rape were rare.
Rape is like a car accident: It calls for “extra insurance.”
Legislation that banned Obamacare health insurance plans from covering abortion was all the rage this year. Nearly half of all statehouses passed some form of a measure forcing women who wanted abortion coverage to purchase it as a separate abortion-only policy, called a rider.
Some of these state laws, including one the Michigan Legislature passed this month, did not include exceptions allowing insurance to cover abortions in cases of rape or incest. This May, when asked why should women be forced to pay extra to cover their abortions in these cases, Barbara Listing, the president of Michigan Right to Life, explained, “It’s simply, like, nobody plans to have an accident in a car accident, nobody plans to have their homes flooded. You have to buy extra insurance for those.”
Listing’s statement generated a lot of outrage—but it didn’t matter to Michigan legislators, who passed the ban anyway.
Male fetuses masturbate at 15 weeks—proving the need for an abortion ban.
Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) said as much while defending that same 20-week abortion ban that inspired Franks to doubt that rape causes pregnancy. Burgess, who is a pro-life OB-GYN, told a House committee that he was positive fetuses could feel pain at 20 weeks after conception, despite a medical consensus to the contrary: “Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” he said. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. They feel pleasure. Why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?”
Read More The 9 Worst Things Said About Women, Abortion, and Rape in 2013 | Mother Jones.
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A Silent Bulletproof Prayer For Our Nation
Michael Skolnik (Photo credit: Breakthrough Ring the Bell)
by Michael Skolnik
This morning I was awoken by sounds of a nine month baby boy trying to learn how to talk. Before the sun shed her glory upon this great nation and through my bedroom windows, I could hear sounds emulating from the room next door. da da da da da da. ma ma ma ma ma ma. ba ba te ta te ta. Like the many days I’ve heard these odd sounds before, I lie still in our bed and listen, quietly. Hoping to get an extra five minutes of sleep, I let the young boy sing his song loudly. The delicate music that awakes me every morning is sung by my son, Mateo Ali. And when I enter his room to hear his concert, the glorious music puts a big smile on his daddy’s face. An absolute perfect way to start the day.
On December 14, 2012, the day started perfectly for twenty six families in Newtown, Connecticut. At 9:35AM a dark cloud began to hover over a small elementary school at the end of a long road, called Sandy Hook. A rain of bullets came pouring down, smothering the beautiful voices of twenty children and six of their protectors. These children were small. Five years old small and six years old small. Fighting helplessly against a gun that was almost bigger than them. Some took three bullets to die. Some took eleven. But they all eventually went silent.
We promised. We made promises. This was it. This was the breaking point. This was the point of no return. This was as bad as it ever could get. How could we let this happen? To children. To five year old children. To six year old children. To their protectors. We all cried. We all screamed. We all fell to our knees. In prayer. In silence. In devastation. And promised that this would never happen again. Whatever conversation we had avoided for years to have as a nation, we were prepared to have it. And when the conversation began, too many people went silent.
Read More A Silent Bulletproof Prayer For Our Nation by Michael Skolnik | Global Grind.