BREAKING: House Votes to Defund Planned Parenthood (but there is NO war on women!)

[niyad]

BREAKING: House Votes to Defund Planned Parenthood


In a 241-187 vote, the House of Representatives voted this afternoon, mostly on party lines with Republicans for and Democrats against, to strip federal funding of Planned Parenthood for a full year. The House also voted 248-177 to pass the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which threatens doctors with new criminal penalties, up to five years in jail, for providing legal abortion.

“Once again, the Republican majority demonstrated it is hell-bent to restrict abortion rights for women and to scare doctors out of providing this constitutional, necessary and often life-saving procedure for countless women,” exclaimed Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority.

The Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015, sponsored by Rep. Diane Black (R-TN), is the latest in a series of anti-abortion measures introduced by Republican lawmakers to eliminate funding to the nation’s leading reproductive health care provider following the release of several fraudulent videos by the Center for Medical Progress. Despite no evidence that there is any truth to the videos’ claims that Planned Parenthood is illegally selling fetal tissue, Republicans insisted on eliminating funding that enables millions of women, especially low-income women, to access health care.

Given that Planned Parenthood provides quality, affordable reproductive health care to 2.7 million women, men and teens at approximately 700 health centers nationwide, the stakes could not be higher.

http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2015/09/18/breaking-house-votes-to-defund-planned-parenthood/

[SheilaT]

1. Maybe some of them will change their minds

when a daughter or sister dies from a back-alley abortion. Which is what women will be forced to. I'm old enough to remember before Roe v Wade, and I well recall what women did to abort an unwanted pregnancy.

For these idiots, it will be a return to The Good Old Days.

[niyad]

2. but THEIR women will ALWAYS be able to get abortions, just like before roe. for the rest of us,

they simply don't care if we die.

[SheilaT]

3. For the most part, yes.

But there will be some who are so vociferously anti-choice, that their daughters won't dare go to them when they are "in trouble" and will instead go the illegal route.

There is a very obscure novel called "The Afternoon Women" by Lael Tucker Wertenbaker. It came out in 1970, and is about a doctor who performs abortions. And the reason he does is that some years earlier his daughter died from an illegal botched abortion. A year or so after this a young woman, a friend of his daughter's, pregnant and wanting an abortion, goes to him for the procedure, and when he turns her down, she says something like, "I thought you would do this because of what happened to your daughter."

A while later he starts doing abortions. It's an open secret in the city he lives in, and in fact the title of the book refers to the fact that over time, his mornings are devoted to his regular practice and his afternoons to abortions.

The book is long since out of print, but I see it's available on Amazon. They have no reviews of it there, but depending on your taste in literature, and allowing for the fact that I would have read it more than forty years ago, so I've forgotten a lot but I recall it as being very moving, I recommend it to you.

One thing most people simply don't know anymore, is that one reason the birth rate in this country dropped so precipitously during the Great Depression is that many women aborted unwanted pregnancies. The low birth rate was NOT because of efficient and accessible contraception, but because pregnancies were ended. Of course, some women died, others were rendered sterile, but there you have it.

As you and everyone here clearly understands, abortion will always be with us. Which is exactly why it needs to be safe, legal, and as common as needed.

correction on edit: the book seems to have originally come out in 1966, long before Roe v Wade, and even four years before Hawaii or New York State both legalized abortion in some circumstances. It was a very forbidden topic back then, even though all of us knew women who'd had abortions one way or another.

[niyad]

4. thank you for that book. will have my library order it.

[niyad]

5. obit of this amazing woman:

Lael Wertenbaker, 87, Author Who Wrote of Husband's Death


Lael Tucker Wertenbaker, a journalist and author best known for ''Death of a Man,'' her harrowing book about her husband's death, died on Monday at her home in Keene, N.H. She was 87. The cause was lung cancer, said her son, Dr. Christian Wertenbaker.

She began her career at Time magazine in 1938 and reported from Berlin on Hitler and the Nazi party in 1940 and 1941. She recounted with pride that an official of the German propaganda ministry called her ''a dangerous woman.'' After the United States entered the war, she left Germany on one of the last trains out of Berlin. In London, she reported on the activities of exiled European Governments. In 1942, she married Charles Wertenbaker, Time's foreign editor.

. . . . .


Mrs. Wertenbaker wrote 16 other books, both fiction and nonfiction, among them ''The Eye of the Lion,'' a novel based on the life of Mata Hari, published by Little, Brown in 1964, and ''To Mend the Heart,'' a book about cardiac surgery, published by Viking in 1980. She also edited books, wrote articles for Fortune, Life and U.S. News and World Report, and television scripts for the ''20th Century'' documentary series for Walter Cronkite and CBS.
. . . .

Mrs. Wertenbaker was born in Bradford, Pa., in 1909. She entered the University of Louisville at 16, but never received a formal degree. She was awarded honorary degrees by Keene State College in 1975 and Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, N.H., in 1982.
. . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/29/arts/lael-wertenbaker-87-author-who-wrote-of-husband-s-death.html

[SheilaT]

6. Thank you very much for that link.

I had never known anything about her, and only knew of the one book, The Afternoon Women. I recall that the book created quite a stir when it came out, because abortion was such an incredibly taboo subject at the time.

[niyad]

7. once again, I thank you for it. my library is searching for a copy for me.