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Written by Miriam Pérez for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post. It feels like every time I turn around, there's another offensive teen pregnancy or parenting ad campaign. The Candie's Foundation, which was created by Neil Cole of the apparel company Candie's that is popular with young girls, joined the fray with its own offensive ad campaign for Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month in May.
Veronica Bayetti Flores at Feministing.com broke that one down nicely. Then an ad campaign was released by the Chicago Department of Public Health featuring alarmist photos of teenage boys with photoshopped baby bumps, like this one:
While campaigns like the one launched by the Candie's Foundation have celebrity endorsements that propel them, I'm always more disgusted to see campaigns like Chicago's, or the one in New York City earlier this year, where public funding has been used to make them happen—public dollars that could be used in many other ways that actually might have an impact on the lives of teenagers and parents of all ages. The Chicago campaign also has the strange side effect of being transphobic, accidentally depicting what could be a pregnant transgender man.
All of these campaigns have left me to wonder if there is a teen pregnancy prevention campaign I would support. Sadly, the crux of most of these campaigns, and especially the Candie's Foundation and New York City campaigns, isn't actually teen pregnancy prevention—they are teen parenting prevention campaigns, which I could never get behind. I would never support an initiative that shames and defames teen parents and spreads statistics that are taken out of context and claim teen parents, especially teen mothers, will never succeed. This response to the Candie's Foundation campaign illustrates how statistics commonly used to defend teen parenting prevention campaigns can be distorted:
(Via Fuck Yeah Teen Moms on Tumblr)
The only kind of prevention campaign I would support is an unwanted pregnancy prevention campaign. Because that is the only kind of pregnancy I think we should be trying to prevent. We shouldn't try and prevent people we think are too young, too old, or too irresponsible from conceiving. Every person has the right to parent when they see fit. Instead, we should be trying to get the correct tools and information into the hands of people who don't want to become pregnant, but who might not know how to prevent it. And the way to execute this kind of campaign isn't to discourage teens from pregnancy by telling them how horrible life will be once they have a child, but by telling them how not to get pregnant.
Among the many terrible things they promote, like stigma and shame for an already stigmatized group, these campaigns also seem to support the idea that teens get pregnant because they don't know how hard it will be to be a teen parent. I think that's absurd.
Written by Angela Bonvoglia for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
In announcing its final rule concerning the Affordable Care Act's guarantee of access to birth control without a co-pay for all American women—including the Catholics and non-Catholics who work in religiously sponsored schools, hospitals, and social service agencies—the Obama administration bent over backwards to accommodate the Church's concerns. The goal was to spare Church fathers from the anguish of getting their pristine hands dirty by, as the Bishops charged, being forced to sell, buy or broker birth control coverage for women, including students. The final rule allows that either the insurance company used by the institution—or, if it is self-insured, its plan administrator—will have to pay, with reimbursement coming through a series of convoluted steps.
In a repeat of the Church battle over the Affordable Care Act, Sister Carol Keehan, head of the Catholic Health Association, last week publicly approved the administration's final rule, issuing an explanation for the association's members about how to implement it. Not so the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The week before, its head, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, released his statement expressing dissatisfaction with the compromise, saying that the bishops are subjecting it to further "analysis," feel their "religious freedom" is still under threat, and plan to continue "defending our rights in Congress and in the courts." Count on the 60+ lawsuits by Catholic diocese and universities around the country, joined by secular employers who also don't like birth control and want to exclude it from their insurance policies, proceeding apace.
It is maddening that the Administration had to go to such extremes to placate the Church fathers, who dare to put "moral" and "money" as it applies to this deeply compromised institution in the same sentence. How pure, really, were the hands of the Church fathers who began decades ago to secretly spend millions of dollars in hush money to silence child victims of clergy rape and sodomy, and rid themselves of the evidence of their paternal crimes? Hush money that came from the faithful in the pews, who paid for all those ever-escalating insurance premiums, and from selling the churches and schools out from under those same working-class Catholics? The victims merited all the compensation they got and more, but the Church fathers literally stole that money from the Catholics they served and lied about it.
When the Bishops realized how much money they had to lose by even these secret settlements, hiding the goods from the victims became the next best strategy. So how pure, really, are the hands of Cardinal Dolan, the leading voice claiming the moral high ground in the battle to keep any of the church coffers from supporting birth control for women? Files just released by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee turned up a letter showing that when Dolan served as the Archbishop of that diocese, he secretly and successfully, and even as the Archdiocese was preparing to file for bankruptcy, petitioned the Vatican to bury nearly $57 million in a cemetery trust fund in order to protect those assets "from legal claim and liability," aka, child abuse victim compensation. And this was on top of his paying off some priest child sex abusers $20,000 a piece to leave the priesthood, reportedly defended by Dolan in one case as "an act of charity," so that, irony of ironies, the priest "could pay for health insurance."
And how pure, really, are the hands of the Church fathers regarding money when we look at the shenanigans at the Vatican bank? Still laughably named the "Institute for the Works of Religion," the Vatican Bank is literally drowning in mounting accusations of money laundering and mobster connections. Most recently, Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, an accountant for the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, which manages the Vatican's property and investments (and a Vatican account-holder himself), was arrested and charged with conspiring to transfer some $26 million from Switzerland to Italy to dole out to his rich friends.
Given this sad financial state of affairs, how does paying for a health service like birth control for women become such a threat to Church fathers that they've made a major campaign out of it?
Written by Carole Joffe for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
No school district, employee or agent thereof, or educational service provider contracting with such school district shall provide abortion services. No school district shall permit any person or entity to offer, sponsor or otherwise furnish in any manner any course materials or instruction relating to human sexuality or sexually transmitted diseases if such person or entity is an abortion services provider, or an employee, agent or volunteer of an abortion services provider.
The above provision is contained in a nearly 50-page bill that recently went into effect in Kansas. (A judge temporarily blocked two other provisions of the law, but allowed this one to remain.)
To be sure, the relentless assault on abortion that we are currently seeing in other state legislatures—Texas, Ohio, and North Carolina, among others—are far more consequential in the short run. Ambulatory surgical center (ASC) and hospital admitting privilege requirements really do have the capacity to shut down clinics. Should the Texas bill currently being considered become law—as is likely, despite the heroic efforts of the thousands of orange-shirters gathered at the capitol—the number of Texas abortion facilities would go from 47 to five in that huge state. Already, due to a similar ASC requirement, earlier rammed through the Pennsylvania legislature as a cynical response to the Gosnell scandal, a number of clinics in Pennsylvania have closed. And the bans on abortions after 20 weeks, adopted by a number of states, will affect a relatively small number of women, but typically those in desperate medical and/or social condition.
But other provisions of abortion legislation, of which the Kansas one cited above is a prime example, do a different kind of damage. They further the stigmatization and marginalization of abortion providers by making clear that these individuals are not welcome in that most central of community institutions: the schools. It is not just participation in sex education from which Kansas providers are barred. As Stephanie Toti, senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is challenging this law, told me, "This is unprecedented discrimination against abortion providers. ... The prohibition on providers serving as 'agents' of a school district has the effect of barring them from serving as chaperones on field trips and engaging in most other volunteer activities."
So abortion providers are at this moment banned from Kansas schools—and supposedly this will promote the safety of adult women getting abortions, as is the typical sanctimonious rationalization of the various laws we are seeing.
Written by Sharona Coutts for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
On August 13, 2010, an 18-year-old New Jersey resident arrived in a clinic in Elkton, Maryland, to undergo a surgical abortion. She was 21-and-a-half weeks pregnant, and had driven just over an hour from a clinic in Voorhees, New Jersey, where the day before, Dr. Steven C. Brigham had initiated the procedure.
Just 15 minutes into the surgery in Maryland, the patient suffered major injuries. Her uterus was ruptured, and her bowel had been perforated and was protruding into her vagina.
Instead of immediately calling 911 for emergency assistance, her doctors—Brigham and his associate, Nicola I. Riley—waited nearly two hours, according to findings from the Maryland State Board of Physicians. They then dressed the patient, who was still sedated and slumped over, and lifted her into a wheelchair. They rolled her outside, put her in a car, and with Brigham at the wheel, took her to a nearby hospital. Her injuries were so severe that hospital staff had her airlifted to Johns Hopkins Health Center for emergency treatment.
The patient survived, and as was reported Thursday morning in the New York Times, her story now forms a key part of the evidence that is being used in an administrative proceeding brought by New Jersey's attorney general to have Brigham's medical license permanently suspended or revoked.
However, what has not yet been reported is the extent to which legitimate providers in the states where Brigham practiced went to warn state officials of the threat Brigham posed to the health of the women he served.
In numerous complaints, emails and phone calls over a period of more than two decades, legitimate abortion providers from New Jersey and neighboring states alerted authorities to Brigham's dangerous conduct, furnishing warnings they say went largely unheeded. Doctors provided copies of many of these complaints, as well as extensive logs of their calls, to RH Reality Check.
An investigation by RH Reality Check shows that New Jersey officials responsible for overseeing healthcare in that state could have prevented injuries to this and subsequent patients, had they acted on warnings about Brigham that predicted this exact scenario.
"If they had listened right in the beginning and taken appropriate action, I think these harms would have been prevented," Jen Boulanger, a clinic administrator who has spent years amassing complaints about Brigham and his associates, told RH Reality Check. "I think state agencies were afraid of raising eyebrows about abortion, but they just should have handled it like they do any other field of medicine."
A spokesman for the New Jersey attorney general's office, which has ultimate oversight of the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners, said the office could not comment on Brigham, because of the ongoing dispute over his medical license.
Attempts to reach Brigham, as well as attorneys listed as his representatives on official documents, were unsuccessful.
Brigham has now had his medical license suspended or revoked in up to six states, but public records show that he remains at the helm of an abortion chain called American Women's Services, which is based in New Jersey, and owns or is affiliated with 15 clinics in four states. There is no requirement that the owner of a medical facility actually possess a medical license, state officials said.
The issue of abortion has once again leapt to the forefront of state and national politics. Already this year, dozens of anti-choice laws have been proposed or have passed at the state level, and a 20-week abortion ban recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Anti-choice advocates, including activists, and state and federal politicians, have capitalized on the case of another rogue provider—Kermit B. Gosnell—to falsely claim that he represented the norm in abortion care.
TIMELINE OF EVENTS
1986: Brigham graduates from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In the coming years, National Abortion Federation leaders grow concerned about his skill level. Brigham fails to complete his NAF training, and his application for membership is denied.
APRIL 1992: Brigham agrees to voluntarily retire from practicing medicine in Pennsylvania in exchange for the state dropping a pending investigation regarding him. His license is placed on permanent inactive status, and he is ordered not to ever apply for renewal or reinstatement.
NOVEMBER 1993: The New Jersey attorney general's office files its first complaint about Brigham with the board of examiners. Two more complaints are filed in July and December of 1994.
JANUARY 1994: New York suspends Brigham's license, calling him an "imminent danger to the health of the people of New York."
FEBRUARY 1994: New Jersey restricts Brigham's license, determining that his unrestricted practice presents a clear and imminent danger to the people of New Jersey.
NOVEMBER 1994: New York revokes Brigham's license, finding him guilty of gross negligence and negligence on more than one occasion in practicing medicine.
FEBRUARY 1995: Florida suspends Brigham's license.
JUNE 1996: Florida revokes Brigham's license.
AUGUST 1996: Upon a favorable ruling by the Office of Administrative Law on the three complaints filed by the New Jersey attorney general, New Jersey reinstates Brigham's medical license subject to conditions that Brigham only perform abortions during the first trimester of pregnancy in the state.
SEPTEMBER 2005: A complaint lodged online by a doctor with the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners warns that Brigham was performing second-trimester abortions in New Jersey.
SEPTEMBER 2009: Pennsylvania bans Brigham from owning or running abortion clinics in Pennsylvania.
FEBRUARY 2010: A group of New Jersey doctors, abortion clinic administrators, and counselors send a collection of complaints to the enforcement bureau of the New Jersey attorney general's office and to William Roeder, executive director of the New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners.
AUGUST 2010: An 18-year-old patient is injured at Brigham's Elkton, Maryland, abortion clinic and is airlifted to Johns Hopkins Health Center for emergency treatment. Maryland issues a cease and desist order to Brigham, demanding that he stop practicing medicine in Maryland without a license.
OCTOBER 2010: New Jersey suspends, but does not revoke, Brigham's license.
FEBRUARY 2013: A patient dies at Brigham's Baltimore abortion clinic.
The documents provided to RH Reality Check, however, show that reputable providers tried for years to sound the alarm on a rogue provider. In Brigham's case, they made sustained efforts to prompt officials in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland to enforce the regulations that already existed to ensure safe abortion care. The documents provided show that authorities were often slow to respond to those warnings, if they acted at all.
For the providers who spent years trying to stop the problems they saw at Brigham's clinic, the fact that he is still involved in women's health—and being used as justification for restricting access to abortion—signals systemic problems with how the authorities and politicians treat reproductive health issues. They also said they believe many of these new legal restrictions—in addition to being medically unnecessary—could push more women into the hands of rogue providers, such as Brigham or Gosnell.
"It's heart-breaking," said Claire Keyes, who worked for more than 30 years as director of the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center in Pittsburgh, where she treated dozens of patients who had been to clinics owned by Brigham. "This isn't throwing women under the bus. This is like backing up over and over and over them."
A Long History of Problems
Brigham had already accrued a long history of harming patients by the time he botched the abortion in 2010.
Over a period of more than two decades, Brigham has left patients with severe bowel injuries, severed ureters and sweeping lacerations to the uterus, and requiring emergency hysterectomies for procedures that, when done by a properly trained provider, has a very low risk of complication, public records show.
In fact, Brigham first came to the attention of national abortion providers shortly after graduating from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1986. His prestigious education and natural charisma led many colleagues to give him a warm welcome into the professional community.
"We were very enthusiastic about this doctor when he first came," said Suzanne Poppema, a former board chair of the National Abortion Federation (NAF) and Physicians for Reproductive Health. "He was young and socially adept and seemed to say all the right things, and asked good questions that you would expect someone just starting out to ask."
But that impression changed quickly, Poppema said. Colleagues noticed that Brigham continued to ask the same questions at subsequent meetings, which struck them as odd. And then they began to hear troubling reports about the young physician's medical practices.
"Right away we started hearing that he was moving into both early and later second-trimester abortions. And he had a complication," she said, referring to a problem with an abortion procedure.
In the hands of a skilled provider, abortion carries a very low risk of complication, even after 20 weeks' gestation, and certainly lower than the risks associated with giving birth. However, the risk of complication increases as the pregnancy progresses, and like any complex medical procedure, specialized training is required. NAF board members believed Brigham lacked those skills, and decided to confront him to express those concerns.
"I sat down with him and three other physicians, and we said to him, 'You have to promise that you will not do any second-trimester abortions until you have spent two weeks with one of our senior physicians,'" Poppema recalled.
But Poppema said Brigham never completed that training. NAF rejected his application for membership, and lodged their concerns with Pennsylvania authorities, including the attorney general and the State Board of Medicine.
By 1992, however, Pennsylvania's board of medicine had already become concerned about Brigham's conduct. In April of that year, Brigham reached a deal with the board in which he agreed never again to practice medicine in Pennsylvania. In exchange, the board dropped an investigation against him, according to court documents later filed in Florida. RH Reality Check was unable to ascertain what prompted that investigation.
"We thought that just getting his license revoked would take care of it," Poppema said. "But it turns out, it didn't do any good to revoke his license. He just goes to another state, or better yet, he figured out he doesn't need a license to open a clinic."
Indeed, two weeks after he agreed to stop practicing in Pennsylvania, Brigham botched a 23.5-week abortion in New York, leaving his patient with a lacerated uterus, a severed ureter, and a colon so damaged that she required a colostomy—a form of bowel surgery that frequently leaves patients needing an external bag to drain their digestive systems.
‘What Kind of Abortions Are We Willing to Let Texas Women Have?’: An Expert’s Testimony Against SB 1
Written by Amy Hagstrom Miller for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
The following is invited testimony on Texas' SB 1, as given by Whole Women's Health CEO Amy Hagstrom Miller to the state Health and Human Services Committee at the special senate hearing Monday.
Read more of RH Reality Check's coverage of the recent reproductive rights battles in Texas here.
Madam Chairwoman and honorable committee members,
Thank you for inviting me as an expert witness for the hearing today. I appreciate the opportunity to lend my expertise to the committee, and I invite your questions. My name is Amy Hagstrom Miller, and I oppose these bills. I am the president and CEO of Whole Woman's Health. We operate five licensed abortion facilities and one ASC [ambulatory surgical center] in the state of Texas.
In my testimony I will address four main issues:
There is no safety problem related to abortion care in the state of Texas that this bill is addressing.
The existing abortion facility regulations are rigorously enforced and are sufficient to ensure the health and safety of women in Texas.
Medication abortion is safely offered in clinic settings and falls completely outside the scope of practice for an ASC.
Requiring MDs to have admitting privileges is not equally enforced over other medical specialties, nor is it necessary to ensure the health and safely of Texas women seeking abortion care.
We have over 40 years of safe abortion on record in Texas, and the current regulatory system is more than adequate to ensure women's health and safety. The ASC requirements put forth in this bill are unnecessary and completely unrelated to patient safety.
Written by Bridgette Dunlap for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
On June 28, the Obama administration released the final version of the contraceptive coverage rule. Beginning January 1, 2014 women who aren't already benefiting from the Affordable Care Act's mandated contraceptive coverage, like those employed at religiously affiliated organizations that took advantage of the enforcement safe harbor, will be able to receive contraceptive coverage directly from their insurance companies, rather than their employer-provided plans. This "religious accommodation" makes employers' involvement in contraception use even more remote, while ensuring that women still have access. [1]
The bishops and other anti-contraception crusaders will not be happy with the religious accommodation, so expect the lawsuits dismissed as premature or held in abeyance back in court soon. That aside, it is important to understand how far the Obama administration bent for the contraception opponents and how little it demanded in return. Organizations are not even required to make their religiously based objection to birth control public.
Granting the religious accommodation without abandoning women with religiously affiliated employers is possible because of the unusual economics of contraceptive coverage: the Obama administration can tell insurance companies to cover contraception without a co-pay, because providing it is cost-neutral for insurers. All (reasonable) parties can have their way—employers don't have to provide plans with coverage, but employees can still get it, and insurers don't have to pick up "the bill" because there really isn't one. But the problem remains that religiously affiliated employers are being excused from the law without having to make even the smallest disclosures about their organizations in return. This sets an unwelcome precedent for future demands for special treatment.
I argued both in a piece for RH Reality Check and in a comment to the rule that the "self-certification" for the religious accommodation should entail explicit and public disclosures about how the organization "holds itself out as religious," who determines what constitutes the religious beliefs of the organization, and what those beliefs are. In releasing the final rule, the government acknowledged it received comments to that effect, but further reduced the disclosures required for the accommodation. In order to qualify for the religious accommodation, organizations need only fill out a two-page form and file it with their insurer. And the form no longer even requires organizations specify the contraceptive services to which they object.
This is an invitation for organizations to characterize themselves as religious when they want an exemption from the law but secular when they want government funding.
Written by Robin Marty for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Republicans in the Texas legislature have held not one but two special sessions to try and pass anti-choice legislation. Ohio Republicans bundled their abortion restrictions into the yearly budget bill to avoid debate. Now, in North Carolina, a bill meant to ban Sharia law has been amended to include multiple abortion restrictions that had been proposed earlier in the year.
HB 695, titled the "Family, Faith, and Freedom Protection Act," was written to protect the state from the influences of "foreign law." The bill was modified to include a ban on abortion coverage in insurance offered in the state health exchange, a ban on sex-selective abortions, changes to the Women's Right to Know Act that would require a physician to be present during both surgical and medication abortions, additional protections for health-care providers who have "conscience" objections to assisting with abortion care, and a requirement that abortion clinics be held to the same standards as ambulatory surgical centers, requiring a transfer agreement with a local hospital, among other things. In short, the Sharia law bill combines a number of the pending abortion restrictions proposed throughout the North Carolina legislative session into one massive omnibus bill.
The revamped bill was unveiled late Tuesday evening; lobbyists in favor of the bill were reportedly being given notice prior to the evening's committee meeting, but the bill's opponents were not, according to WRAL.com. "This is a cowardly move intended to silence pro-choice voices because they know that if they show their extreme agenda in the light of day, they'll hear from us," Suzanne Buckley, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina, said in a statement. "Within minutes of introducing these amendments, they've land on the Senate floor for a vote—in so little time that North Carolina's pro-choice majority won't be able to weigh in with the very legislators who represent them."
The state senate is taking the bill up for a full debate and vote Wednesday at 9 a.m. (Livestream available here.)
Written by Andrea Grimes for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Two months ago, when I signed up to attend the National Right to Life Convention (NRLC) in Grapevine, Texas, I could not have known that it would kick off the morning after Wendy Davis' epic filibuster. Two months ago, the media was hailing a legislative session of compromise in Texas, with lawmakers reportedly agreeing to an ostensible truce on the abortion issue, focusing instead on restoring funding to family planning in my state. That was before Gov. Rick Perry pulled a bait-and-switch on progressives who'd had the bad sense to take the Republican Party at its word.
But there I was, in the lesser of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport's two Hyatt hotels, stepping off the elevator with two men in priestly garb, their waists cinched with rope. I arrived a few minutes after registration had closed for the day, but a nice lady took pity on my tardiness and handed me my badge and a thick packet of programming notes and baby-plastered propaganda.
I milled around that evening visiting sparsely supervised vendor booths stocked with t-shirts and DVDs before happening upon a deeply unsettling table full "Umbert the Unborn" cartoons. It seems that "the world's most lovable baby hasn't even been born yet!" Umbert is a "pre-born infant of yet undetermined gender," but of course the poster fetus of the National Catholic Register nevertheless prefers male pronouns; his "mother's womb is his private universe, playground and think-tank from which he can anticipate life and the world that awaits him."
My outlook was perhaps less sunny than Umbert's. Despite Tuesday night's resounding pro-choice victory, during which 500 people chanted Republican Lt. Governor David Dewhurst into cowed frustration in the state Senate chamber, I had no illusions about what came next: a second special session, with abortion legislation at the top of the agenda. I came to NRLC ready to find myself surrounded by fired up right-wingers revved up with the glory of their God.
Instead, I found a few hundred unfailingly polite white people, mostly middle-aged or older, shuffling sedately from conference room to conference room. It was, in a word, jarring. These were the people who would see Texans die behind legislation that would put 800 miles between a pregnant person and an abortion provider?
Sometime that first night, a flyer appeared under my hotel room door. It warned me: "National Right to Life Cannot Be Trusted."
Alright, I'm listening.
Between phrases like "radical homosexual agenda" and "Mitt Romney's assault on liberty," I was able to gather that the NRLC is not nearly right-wing enough for the personhood crowd, who consider Ann Coulter and Billy Graham to be inveterate baby-killers. I did enjoy discovering, after visiting a suggested website, that the authors of this flyer consider Donald Trump to be a "Republican pretender." Common ground in the unlikeliest of places.
Written by Amanda Marcotte for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Less than a day after pro-choice activists and Democratic state senators defeated a massive anti-choice bill designed to shut down all but five abortion clinics in the whole state of Texas, Republican Gov. Rick Perry announced he would force a second special session of the legislature to force the bill through. He then went on to rub salt in the wound, making mockery of and condescending to state Sen. Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth), who conducted an 11-hour filibuster to keep the bill from a vote, a move that ultimately succeeded despite efforts by the GOP to rig the vote. Just in case you were unsure of Rick Perry's apparent belief that the main purpose of government is control and surveillance of female sexuality, Perry went on to turn the creepy up to ten, saying, "The louder they scream, the more we know that we are getting something done."
It's hard to understand his belligerent, misogynistic behavior in service of a bill that only serves to hurt women's health while creating a black market for abortion. After all, despite Texas's conservative reputation, 80 percent of the voters in the state oppose calling special sessions to restrict abortion rights. Perry is doing this song and dance for only one out of five voters, the hardcore religious right, pretty much the only people who approve of this move by Texas Republicans to exploit a legislative loophole set up to deal with emergencies to cram through anti-choice bills that won't pass regular legislative sessions. How has it gotten to the point where only 20 percent of the voters basically control the politics of a huge state like Texas, putting their vile obsession with punishing other people for sex above more pressing issues like jobs, infrastructure, and the economy? To understand how it happened in Texas is to understand why it is that anti-choice forces in general have so much power in a country where the majority of people are pro-choice and have been for decades.
In sum, the religious right is smart about exploiting the primary system, and your average Republican voter doesn't know or care enough about how radical their politicians are to stop voting for them. Anti-choicers and hardline conservatives generally are way more likely to vote in primaries than your average voters, which means they consistently pick the most conservative candidate, even if the more moderate one has more experience or a better grasp on reality. The two most prominent voices on the anti-choice side during this abortion battle—Gov. Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst—both have learned in the course of their careers that you either pay fealty to the religious right because of this, or you will not be able to move forward in your political career.
Written by Adele M. Stan for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
At a Capitol Hill news conference called in May by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) in support of her legislation to address sexual assault in the military, Brian Lewis, a former petty officer in the U.S. Navy, told of how, at the age of 20, he was raped on board a ship by a superior officer, and then drummed out of the service and denied his Veterans Administration benefits when he took his complaint to his commanding officer.
While the Navy never denied the assault took place, according to the Guardian, Lewis’ attacker went unpunished. At the press conference, Lewis said that instead, he suffered retaliation for having made the complaint in the form of a false diagnosis of a personality disorder by a Navy psychiatrist—a diagnosis that led to his separation from the service without benefits.
Lewis’ story is not unlike those told by many military women who suffer sexual assault by members of higher rank, who endure sexual assault during their time in the service at more than five times the rate of men. (Indeed, at the same press conference, Jennifer Norris, a former sergeant in the Air Force Reserve, told of suffering post traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] after enduring several sexual assaults, and then losing her security clearance because of her PTSD diagnosis.)
Despite the higher rate of sexual assault in the military against women, Pentagon statistics estimate a greater number of assaults against men—some 53 percent of all sexual assaults in the military—based on the fact that the services are overwhelmingly male. With the upcoming release of Justice Denied, a documentary that focuses on the stories of men who suffered sexual assault while serving in the armed forces, an emphasis on their stories is moving to the fore. And that’s a good thing for all survivors, one would assume, for it exposes a pervasive culture of sexual predation in the military.
But if a recent New York Times front page story is any indication, attempts are already being made to distinguish the rape experiences of male survivors as inherently worse than women’s, and to continue framing assaults on women in terms of the rapist’s sexual desire, not the same quest for domination that motivates those who assault men.
Given society’s default position in disbelieving the woman who dares to accuse her rapist, advocates for sexual assault victims express the hope that with more men coming forward to tell their stories, the military brass will take the problem—an estimated 26,000 incidents of unwanted sexual contact in a single year, according to a recent Pentagon report—more seriously. Another reason that the generals and admirals have failed to prioritize the problem is that it’s seen as a "women’s problem," and women comprise a mere 15 percent of the force, Anu Bhagwati, executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), told the Times.
With more men coming forward, she said, “I think it places the onus on the institution when people realize it’s also men who are victims.”
