Republican Misogynists Dealt Huge Defeat As 20-Week Abortion Ban Fails
The GOP-controlled House of Representatives was dealt a huge loss on Tuesday as the House-approved bill to ban all abortions after 20 weeks gestation failed to secure the needed 60 votes in the Senate. The extremists in the misogynistic House of Representatives didn’t even want to have exceptions for a mother’s life being in danger. According to the The New York Times, the refusal to allow abortion even if the mother could die may have lost House Republicans the votes needed to push this archaic and repressive legislation forward, as without those exceptions even the GOP’s women, notably Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), would not support it.
This is just the latest in a long line of attempts on the parts of rabidly anti-choice Republicans to limit women’s reproductive healthcare choices. This same House of Representatives just voted to defund Planned Parenthood and are squaring off to shut down the government if the Democrats and President Obama refuse, which they certainly will, to take federal money away from the vital women’s health organization. With the October 1 deadline for a budget agreement to be reached, that is an all-too-real possibility at this point.
Of course, only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s many services are abortion-related, and nothing to do with abortion is funded by taxpayer funds. The trigger for this whole absurd political battle, the videos from the anti-abortion “group,” the “Center for Medical Progress” have been debunked as complete deception, but neither of those facts exist in the minds of the fetus fetishists in the GOP. They will not stop until they have taken away healthcare options for millions of women, and aren’t afraid to shut down the government again, just to score political points.
Senator Mitch McConnell used the “pain capable” junk science to justify the 20-week ban:
“We in this chamber are never going to agree completely on the abortion question. But we should at least be able to agree that if an unborn child has reached the point where he or she can feel pain, that child’s life deserves protection.”
Never mind the fact that the science behind that idea isn’t anywhere near conclusive; their true priorities are put on a pedestal. In the minds of these zealots, the fetus deserves protection, but the mother does not. The living, breathing woman is nothing but an incubator to these people. Never fear, though; any attempts to limit abortion rights or to defund Planned Parenthood will almost certainly suffer the wrath of the President’s veto pen anyway.
It is simply sad that time, resources, and taxpayer money are still, in 2015, being wasted to fight about a social issue that was decided decades ago, and that so many people in positions of power do not believe that a woman has the right to make her own private healthcare choices, and that the government should do that instead- even as the Republican simultaneously cry crocodile tears over the government’s “interference” in healthcare and making insurance affordable for millions of Americans. The delusion and hypocrisy is so convoluted it’s hard to know where it all begins.
H/T: New York Times
