The continuing Republican war on gynecology (but there is NO war on women!!)
The continuing Republican war on gynecology
If you’ve been following the defunding efforts aimed at Planned Parenthood, it becomes quickly and abundantly clear that despite all the handwaving about “fetal body parts”, the real goal is to cut women off, especially poor women, from health care that makes it possible to have a healthy sex life. But of course, Republicans are trying to hide that. The ideology behind this drive, which holds that no one should have sex before marriage and only for procreation after, is wildly unpopular. But man, the efforts at pretending that this is about anything but destroying access to sexual health care are paper thin.
Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post shares one example, out of Louisiana, where Planned Parenthood is suing to keep Gov. Bobby Jindal from forbidding Medicaid patients from using their clinics.
Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast and three anonymous patients sued to block Jindal’s decision. The plaintiffs also argued the decision would inflict “irreparable harm” to its 5,200 Medicaid patients, who have nowhere else to go for care.
In response, the state submitted a list of 2,010 other providers these patients could patronize. Except this was not actually a list of family-planning practitioners; it was a list of all Medicaid-enrolled providers — including audiologists, ophthalmologists, radiologists, nursing homes and, yes, dentists. (As a cheeky Mother Jones writer observed: “They know ‘vagina dentata’ is a myth, right?”)
Indeed, out of the 2,010 clinics that Louisiana falsely claimed could offer family planning services, only 29 actually do. But in reality, even that 29 number is too big, as Rampell explains:
But there’s no evidence these 29 can absorb the thousands of patients who would be displaced, given that Planned Parenthood serves an estimated 30 percent of the female contraceptive clients who use publicly funded clinics in New Orleans, and 60 percent of those in Baton Rouge.
. . . . .
Indeed, some versions of this theory actually suggest that promoting safe sex actually causes sexual desire where none existed before. That’s the theory promoted by the American Life League, which has put out a video claiming that by educating kids on safe sex, Planned Parenthood is creating a desire to have sex—or, in their parlance, “hooking” people on sex. The theory is rooted in this notion that people don’t have much natural desire to have sex and, if left to their devices, sticking penises in vaginas would never occur to most people at all. And so, the theory goes, Planned Parenthood actually teaches people to want sex, so that they will get pregnant on accident and they can make all that sweet, sweet abortion money. So that’s what Jindal is stabbing at, a claim that by cutting off sexual health care services, people will simply stop having sex—maybe even stop wanting sex—and voila! STI and unintended pregnancy problems disappear. This isn’t limited to Jindal, either. As I chronicle at RH Reality Check, SBA List has been busy trying to implant the idea that the only legitimate sexual health care is “pregnancy-related”, i.e. if you’re not getting prenatal care, then they don’t see why you need a doctor at all.
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http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/the-continuing-republican-war-on-gynecology/
= new reply since forum marked as read
made me a horny assed teenager. Yeah, evolution had nothing to do with it. 
K&R
