#WaronWomen: Pennsylvania State-Sanctioned Rape Law is Most Cruel Yet
Pennsylvania is going all-in on the War on Women. Like Alabama, it requires your urgent attention. HB 1077 faces a full vote in mid-March. Call or email Governor Corbett. Sign this petition. (Pennsylvanianians, search for and call your representative.)
Yes, I mixed my metaphors, but do you really want me to make an “all-in/poker/vagina” joke? I didn’t think so. Let’s just cut right to the chase, shall we?
From Raw Story:
Even as the transvaginal ultrasound bill in Virginia was causing national outrage, Pennsylvania conservatives were quietly pushing a even more restrictive abortion bill. The legislation is designed with so many difficult and differing restrictions that long-time abortion policy analyst Elizabeth Nash at the Guttmacher Institute told Raw Story, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
In addition to mandating the much-maligned transvaginal ultrasound requirements since rejected by the state of Virginia, Pennsylvania legislators proposed strongly encouraging women to view and listen to the ultrasounds, forcing technicians to give the women personalized copies of the results and mandating how long before any abortion the ultrasound much be preformed — and that’s just for starters.
That last requirement has already been passed and struck down in Louisiana, partially over concerns of patients’ privacy and potential risks for women in abusive relationships, Nash said.
~snip~
Additionally, Nash points out that the length of the legislation hides bizarre and unprecedented requirements, such as asking women who gets an ultrasound more than 14 days before her abortion to view a state-approved video on fetal gestation. The bill, unlike many other ultrasound requirements, does offer exceptions for victims of rape and incest; the bill does not require victims to have reported the incidents to the authorities.
~snip~
Considering that more than 60 percent of women who obtain abortions nationally are already mothers, Frietsche said, “This legislation is insulting to women.”
Indeed, the ACLU of Pennsylvania issued a satirical open letter to Virginia earlier this month with the title, “Yes, Virginia, there is a state more demeaning to women than you,” which listed a number of reasons why the proposed Pennsylvania legislation is worse than Virginia’s much-decried “transvaginal ultrasound” bill.
~snip~
The bill faces a vote in the full Pennsylvania state house in mid-March, when the legislature is back in session. A petition at SignOn.org has collected nearly 15,000 signatures opposing the legislation.
The “Women’s Right to Know Act” House Bill 1077 [PDF], was authored by state Rep. Kathy Rapp (R). Watch this video, uploaded on Rep. Rapp’s YouTube channel on February 16, which supports the passage of the bill:
Another bill that treats women as if they are stupid.
Fight back.
Sign this petition and call or email Governor Corbett. Find your representative’s contact info.
[via Raw Story; Keystone Progress]
[cross-posted at ABLC]
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
-
[…] in half. The ride mechanic has been out sick for several months. It’s terrifying- as in, they might take all of my rights away and I won’t be able to do anything, but it’s also exciting. Because […]
Todd T. Squirrel is now formulating social policy for the GOP.
And I just got an email from PP with a new front opening up in Texas
Okay, enough of this shit. As of 1600 MST, I am ordering all vaginas be armed with Photon torpedoes, PDQ, in the offending states. Keep low, and your powder dry. We are lousy with wingnuts. Fuckers are ever where.
“Women’s Right to Know Act”
There’s that fucking phrase again, and again I must ask: do these legislators really think that women in general are so fucking stupid that they need to be told and shown that there’s a fetus in their womb? Wingnuts, we’re not all as stupidly misinformed as you are regarding human reproduction. Christ.
I’d almost prefer more honesty about the motives, something like “Yeah, this is cruel and painful and there’s no medical purpose for it, but we hate sex and we hate the idea of women making decisions, and hey, gotta keep the loony voters satisfied somehow, so open wide.” But no. Instead we get this bullshit Victorian-behavioral-manual-level “Oh, you poor dear fragile little innocent flower, let me hold your hand as we make the discovery together that sex makes babies.” Agh. And agh.
@Narcissus:
No, see, Todd Squirrel wants bitches to take their cunt pills, because he ain’t wearin’ no gunny sack. Although the GOP is probably going after gunny sacks soon enough.
(To the uninitiated: I’m not being sexist, I’m quoting Achewood! It’s a funny webcomic and you should read it!)
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=02062004
There was supposed to be a link here. Ah!
@Spaghetti Lee: It was a funny webcomic. At some point it turned into an unfunny drudge through cynicism.
Anyway, you can expect a lot more of this over the next ten months. Their game plan for the election looks like a real loser, so they’re falling back on ‘social conservative’ issues.
Fight this legislation wherever it pops up, and try to punish them at the ballot box come November. It’s all we can do.
Another woman co-sponsoring another bill that invades women’s bodies. To paraphrase Madeline Albright, there should be a special place in hell for women who oppress other women.
How can we do more to encourage voters in these states where unpopular Republican nutjobs are doing unpopular nutjob things, like PA, WI, OH, VA, MI, FL, and so on, to begin to, I don’t know, recognize some kind of fucking pattern here? Because the bottom line is that, even more than the money, the big problem with American governance is the idiots who are voting.
@Peter:
Yes, I’ll admit that. I think the author has some pretty deep personal issues that finally bubbled up over the last few years, but in its heyday, man, not much made me laugh harder.
Vaginas cannot be issued willy-nilly to anyone. They’re dangerous weapons. It’s high time we admitted that only licensed and authorized and properly trained citizens be allowed to possess them.
“Okay, sure, go ahead, vote Republican: Here’s what you’ll get.”
@Anya:
That place may be filled up, which is why these loons are on the loose. No more room at the inn.
I have no concept of how a woman could inflict this shit on other women. I can see how some men are such douche bags that they would think this kind of shit is OK, but women? My brain just can not compute this. Must be some pretty strong koolaid.
Oh Gawd, I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. This used to be a moderately-liberal state. Gov. Bill Scranton actually created the Pa. Higher Education Assistance Act (PHEAA) that enabled me to go to college on low interest loans and he was a Republican! Of course, no one respects any responsible legislation from any Republican nowadays but I have to think they are being kind of suicidal here. PA is not AL or even VA.
@fasteddie9318:
Maybe a chart comparing the number of anti-abortion/anti-contraception legislation being actively debated in Democratic v. Republican controlled legislatures.
@fasteddie9318: It’s just as much the idiots who are not voting. All those shitty governors were elected in off years.
@Jimbo316:
When I lived in OH for a while I kept hearing of people from Pennsultucky. I got the impression that a lot of the state outside of Philly can be/has been pretty purple. I could be wrong.
So, am I crazy, or do Republicans only seem to give a shit about this sort of thing when a Democrat is in the White House? I don’t remember anti-abortion, anti-voting, or anti-immigrant hysteria at the state level between 2001 and 2009.
Turns out, a fetus can be implanted in a male abdomen and carried to term, then delivered by caesarian.
Rick Santorum, come on down!
@Anya: Amen! I HATE that shit!
Keep your BIG Govnt Hands off my Vagina!
I guess tea party was just a push for more social legislation masked in economic lingo
@Spaghetti Lee: Well, based on the last discussion of a similar law, it seems that the purpose is to give another administrative task to clinics so that prosecutors, grandparents and fathers can sue them and put doctors in jail. The point is to insert as many interested parties into the pregnancy as possible. Have a miscarrage – see a policeman. Prosecutor X wants to make a name public if she opted not to look at the picture, there will be a record so the doctor goes to jail. Get to relive the experience for the courts if records aren’t properly kept.
That, in a nutshell, is the point.
I find it no less surprising that the recent Gallup poll found women surveyed almost the same as men on the contraception health care coverage debate.
I don’t understand this at all.
“I don’t remember anti-abortion, anti-voting, or anti-immigrant hysteria at the state level between 2001 and 2009.”
The wackos cleaned house in 2010 and have super majorities across the states now cause a bunch of lazy asses didn’t bother to vote and stayed home
@Spaghetti Lee: Oh man yeah, I was really big into it back in the day. I had a Dude and Catastrophe hoodie and pair of pint glasses and everything.
But then we spent months with Theodor sucking a dying man’s dick in the back of Nice Pete’s van and I just sort of looked around and realized how long it had been since Achewood had done anything other than depress me.
@THE: Is it normal to ask who you “sympathize” with in a public policy poll? That seems a strange way to ask the question.
I comment so seldom and yet read BJ so often…that I’m about to get whiplash from colliding ideas in my exploding brain!
Is anyone in our happy hovel a legislation writer? Or can anyone convince a Dem in each state legislature wherein women are under attack to submit a bill?
My thought here is that if we are forced to give birth, but we really for whatever reason don’t want/can’t afford/can’t raise a child, then the state legislators who sponsor these attacks on us (whether against contraception or abortion itself) MUST BY LAW ADOPT THESE CHILDREN AND RAISE THEM AS THEIR OWN WITH THEIR OWN MONEY. Additionally, if we die in childbirth because we should have aborted like we wanted to but had inadequate prenatal care when we weren’t allowed to abort, then the legislator/s who sponsor these bills MUST PAY $________________ TO MY FAMILY, NAMED RECIPIENTS OF MY WILL, HEIRS, ETC.
Can you guys put that together?
@Baud: Don’t know, Baud, outside my knowledge.
@Jacquelyn: Hey, they did their bit admitting that the unborn child was precious in God’s sight.
If God wants to step up and pay for the kid, well, that’s his business. They’ve already done their part.
See ladies, it’s like this. The fetus inside you is really a fully grown human being from the future, who is anchored in the past by a temporal disruption too complicated to explain. Every time a woman has a abortion, one more freedom fighter from the year 3468 vanishes from the space time continuum, and the now sentient x-box 360 based synthezoids are one step closer to converting all of humanity to 2009 circa Zunes.
At what point will the women in these states stand for themselves? It just seems like those of us who care about these issues are fighting the battles for them thereby allowing them to have it both ways (I’m talking about you “pro choice” republican women). It’s exhausting and I’m quite frankly tired of it. It’s like listening to Catholics who ignore there own church’s teaching on bc, benefiting from all the advantages bc allows, and expecting the rest of us to live in their paradox because to point this out would offend their sensibilities. Sorry, but enough already. If they stand by and elect these gross old perves, maybe they should have to live with it for a while. Maybe that would bring home the absurdity of it all.
A lot of you menfolk are awesome. Really. But I have never been happier to be a lesbian as I have during this election cycle. Usually the election cycle is about making gays feel bad. So, hooray?
PPP says Man-on-Dog’s last minute extra crazy is helping in today’s polls. He make eek out a victory, tomorrow.
@mikefromArlington:
Not true — lazy has nothing to do with it. We sent a message! No more lesser-of-two-evils. And the country listened.
@Ruckus: It’s the same as it ever was. They’ll get birth control or abortions as needed because they are the right kind of people and they are connected to the medical professionals that will help them out.
To them this is like the gay fight. It’s very easy to make yourself feel virtuous if you decide the worst evil in the world is something you would never do. It really helps distract them from the fact that they aren’t dealing with their own issues. I think we had fewer problems with these kinds of ladies when the family doctors were handing out Valium like candy.
@Jimbo316: It still is moderately liberal, like other places turn out sucked in November of 2010. What people are learning is that voting every year is a must. Just not in Presidential years.
thank you for keeping us informed about this war
@mikefromArlington: The wackos cleaned house in 2010 and have super majorities across the states now cause a bunch of lazy asses didn’t bother to vote and stayed home
You really don’t understand why people vote, do you? Especially those groups that lean Democratic.
I’m from central PA and everything between Philly and Pittsburgh is Pennsyltucky… It’s almost as redneck as suburban Atlanta (where I now live).
The issue continues to be that idiots rule in off-year elections and Phil Perspective has it right– reasonable people have to show up at every election or we are well and truly flunked, as we have been for 30 years.
New AP poll has O way up w/women.
He’s even w/ the two creeps among men, so women are giving him his
entire lead in head to head polling.
Better, the GOP base loves the women-bashing, so I don’t know what Romney does now.
@Clark Stooksbury: That’s because it was being done at the national level — the US Attorneys scandal was all about voter suppression, GOP anti-immigrant fervor doomed Bush’s plans for immigration reform, etc.
@Spaghetti Lee:
The packaging isn’t meant for you/us, it’s meant for themselves. They don’t want to look in the mirror and see cruel and pain-inflicting sociopaths, they want to look in the mirror and see caring, loving husbands who are only holding the hands of their dear fragile little innocent flowers because they care so much.
@gex:
This. QFT.
I think someone coming in for abortion knows that they might be preggers. A bit of a tautology, really.
@WereBear (itouch): I want pregnant GOP candidates for every office, stat. If they start now they can deliver on live TV on Election Day.
Good news, there’s a new Virgnia PAC called Women’s Strike Force set up specifically to oust those Virginia legislators who supported the ultrasound bill. We need one in all 50 states.
@Ruckus:
Don’t be overly surprised. It’s older women that often enforce genital mutilation as well. Social power is a tricky thing.
Can the brands of a big letter A on women’s foreheads for Abortion be far ahead? They’ve already tried it in the permanent medical records, but that doesn’t warm the men of delicate religious sensibilities of the dangers. Back to the spit that would etch metal I am.
@kay:
Sure seems like it, and there are dispatches from MI, that Santorum is surging again, or something like that. Whoever wins the nom, may only get their mommas vote, and maybe their wives, maybe. Crazy times.
@Bago:
According to that asshole in Alabama, we women are still a little unclear on the concept of what’s in there. Apparently we need to be forced to look at pictures because we’re still thinking there might be a hot dog up in there.
@Clark Stooksbury: PA now has an All-Repug govt. previously had Repug legislature, but a Dem Governor for the last 8 years. VA now has an All-Repug govt too.
Wikipedia says there are now 23 Republican-controlled governments
we are now experiencing the Horror of the 2010 vote results.
@Southern Beale: If only there’d been some instruction on the topic in, oh say, school so that women could pick up such tricky concepts earlier. Silly Silly Silly scav, the things you think of.
OT: Check out Daytona 500. Bad fire.
Real progressives know we have to suffer now, for better later.
@scav:
Yeah, well, Bill Maher had the definitive response to this ultrasound nonsense last year (35 second video).
@Davis X. Machina:
That’s nothing, till you read Rick Perstein’s mother of all firebagger series over at Rolling Stone. He refs Digby quite a bit, in the usual “Obama is doin’ it all wrong”. And needs to be more like republicans, or something along those lines.
@Clark Stooksbury:
Close. Republicans only give a shit about this stuff when it’s an election year, the economy is doing better, and we aren’t getting bombed by Muslims. It’s their fallback issue.
Hey I know a Stooksbury in Tennessee, you got people around Knoxville by chance?
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero): I had considered mentioning Rick Perlstein’s piece here in the context of enraging all the good people who’d be outraged to hear an accusation of some sort of Obama imperfection, but I was also pretty sure someone else would take care of it.
Because ‘Obama needs to be more like Republicans or something along those lines’ was exactly what he was saying, right?
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero): Nach Romney, Wir! It is inevitable. The impersonal course of history brooks no resistance, nor allows another outcome.
you women got this? or can a humble big penile-american help?
i keed, i keed
done.
Watching Tweety, he had a Politico poll showing Kenyan dictator has a 74% personal approval rating.
Clearly, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
@Ruckus:
Phyllis Schlafly and Ann Coulter feel rights should be taken from them…such as the right to vote.
It’s so ridiculous and insulting. It’s the assumption that when we see these little blobs with heartbeats, we’ll suddenly become emotionally bonded and unable to let them go.
For my early ultrasounds with my 2 sons, they looked like beans with heartbeats. We called them Refried and Pinto.
@gex:
Valium. I remember that shit. You may be on to something. Had a doc once prescribe 5 mg 3x/day. One 5mg per day put me sleep for 15-20 hrs a day. Three? NFW.
So now that docs can’t/don’t prescribe valium what is the favorite, don’t give a shit drug among the happy homemaker/hypocritical womens set?
Back on topic. It seems like some of the “every fertilized egg is sacred” women are using BC and/or having abortions so they must have their heads stuffed some place dark or their brains really aren’t that useful for anything.
@El Cid:
Did I sound outraged in my comment? Actually, I got a good chuckle out of it for being about the dumbest thing I’ve read in a long time. I don’t care for rigid ideologues nor their never compromise ravings. And yes, one of the things he was saying was be more like republicans, something about planting flags on extreme positions and they will come to you. I think it is more simple than that, and involves the color white. Current pol conditions would tend to favor my view, no? But I can see why you might have liked his article.
One sign you might be a conservative Catholic woman? You confuse eating coleslaw with having an abortion.
BREAKING: PPP says Man-on-Dog pulls ahead — up by 5 points in Monday polling. Michigan: Santorum 39, Romney 34, Paul 15, Gingrich 10.
Looks like the extra crispy crazy is working.
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero): You don’t actually know whether or not, or to what extent, I “liked” Perlstein’s article.
I thought he was ordinarily considered a fairly sainted figure, considering some thought his work bolstered the view that the way to understand much of modern American politics was to summarize that the left/hippies brought in Nixon and thus ruined American politics, so I thought it would be interesting to see how quickly he turned into an idiot given he said something which seemed other than complimentary regarding Obama’s approaches to governance.
@Felonious Wench:
That’s how Frances Bean Cobain got her middle name.
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero): Spectacularly, unsurprisingly, transvaginally WRONG.
The point of both articles is that Obama, while championing a Reaganesque above-both-sides stance tactically, forgot about the plant-your-political-philosophy-flag-firmly strategy part that Reagan did so well.
In other words, had Obama made the case for liberal policies guided by liberal principles and THEN compromised, we’d be in a much better position, EVEN IF THE EXACT SAME POLICIES WERE ENACTED.
Only an idiot or malevolently willful misreader could have missed that.
@Trentrunner: Vaginally?
@scav:
You are right, I was just not thinking back far enough in history. Yeah we had to brand women cause a man wouldn’t want to stick that thing anywhere any other filthy fucker had been. That’s because he knew what he had done with his. Sheep, goats, other barnyard animals, the odd young boy’s ass, any women he could pay or just have his way with.
I love the puritans. They have fucked up so much shit in this country(around the world actually). And even still they are only the scapegoats for this, most religions are not any or much better at keeping their mitts on those who want to believe and have to keep fapping away at the rest of us.
One thing that would be interesting to find out is the person behind all these GOPer bills. They are all pushing variations of the same thing. Who was the original ALEC mastermind who no doubt drafted them all?
@Trentrunner:
Nice to know I can still summon the firebaggers out of the woodwork.
And then there was the catfood commission, the stimulus was to small, and we coulda got the public option, yadda yadda yadda. I think we are sitting very pretty about now, you can think what you will.
@El Cid:
My dog is the only sainted figure on earth.
…he wouldn’t have been Obama. First, he’s not, and wasn’t a liberal in the way liberals use the term.
Second, no small measure of Obama’s 2008 electoral appeal, especially to independents, and new voters, and especially in contrast to Mrs. Clinton, is that he represented a potential end to the political trench warfare of the two prior presidencies. (Nominating Mrs. Clinton, fairly or not, was often considered a guarantee that it continue.)
That Fairey “Hope” poster wasn’t resonating with people consumed by a longing for the Revolution and the withering away of the state, or a return to the Democratic coalition of ’36, or ’66, or ’74, or ’96.
What you see, depending on where you stand, is the virtue of Obama’s vices, or the vice of his virtues.
@Felonious Wench:
Refried and Pinto.
Did the names stick, or was that a little too over the top?
I guess we have not advanced nearly as far as I had hoped in we would in my lifetime.
Actually yes.
I would like to thank whoever it was that mentioned the Weebly web site builder the other day. I’m having all kinds of fun building a photoblog with it.
Mean Rachel shows why there was not much fuss over Texas’s ultrasound law:
(h/t Juanita Jean)
You watch: the next provision in these laws will be that the blob of tissue has to be officially given a name and certified.
Is there not some good ole’ 4th amendment doctrine that can trump all of this ultrasound garbage. It really has turned my stomach in the past two weeks. “To be secure in their persons” seems like pretty solid terminology. And geeze, there is so much of the “particularly describing the place to be searched” this is really pretty screwed up.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
@noodler: Three magic words, and all you need is a court to find them — ‘compelling state interest’ — and the Fourth’s protections go up in a cloud of con-law smoke.
Here’s what happened when one woman in Pennsylvania tried to contact her elected representative about this bill.
@Ruckus: My guess is that the temptations of political power overcome her own self-interest and sympathy with other women. Besides, if you’ve got enough money and connections, you can make sure the younger women in your family get the help they need, while punishing all those hussies out there who need to be kept in line.
@Cowbelle:
WOW !! how creepy is that?
@Cowbelle:
so now playing, “we know who you are” is the new way to force “civility” amongst every other horrible thing that letter says about readshaw.
that is awful. of course, i am unfortunately sure, the troglodyte political “establishment” in that district would eat it up, because he showed her. he won’t have to buy a beer at the elkmoose club for weeks.
@David Koch:
I predict Man On Dog wins, followed by Dog On Car then Bitten By A Rabid Dog and then last, Man Wants A Dog.
The right wanted man on rabid dog on car action and they got it!
All the while we’re howling with laughter at them.
I wrote to my state rep (an R) last week, and he replied that he is “pro-life” and inclined to favor such bills. He said there are 60 amendments to the bill pending and more on the way and that the eventual bill voted on will probably be more to my liking.
I will write again this week.
The same letter went to my state senator, and I haven’t heard back. She’s also an R but ordinarily saner than a lot of the Ds.
@Scamp Dog:
I get that people are hypocrites. I get that people are selfish. I get that people believe in magic stories in old books of superstitious fiction. I get that they think the world revolves around the stick stuck up their asses.
I just don’t get how they can live with themselves doing it.
@Cowbelle:
Is there another way to get to this? It won’t load for me.
@Southern Beale:
It needs to be a superPAC, and then start cramming these asshole politicians hard and heavy.
@catpal: The damned stay at homes get the government they deserve. Too bad we’re stuck with it too.
I want women to be informed. I want men to be informed. Everyone get a medical degree, or at least some sort of medical technician’s training, before they even visit a doctor.
When my son’s eye got injured when he was maybe ten, the eye doctor invited me to look at his injured eye through some microscope-type thingie where all I saw were these red squiggles (blood vessels, I assumed). The doctor was sure I would be able to see the evidence of injury. I had no idea what I was looking at, except a bunch of red squiggle blood vessel thingies. I felt like a very bad mother somehow because I hadn’t been board certified as an ophthamologist before I gave birth. Thank god I gave birth to my son before ultra-sounds and all that. I’d have had to be board certified as an ob-gyn first.
@Southern Beale: Not only do I have people in Knoxville, that’s where I live.
What if it turns out that the majority of people in PA like this legislation?
It’s stupid, invasive, medically unnecessary, anti-woman, etc., but is there an outcry in PA? At least the women (sensible men) in VA got up and fought back.
I guess you guys will be signing a lot of petitions about similar laws in every state dominated by the GOP.
I signed the SignOn petition yesterday. I just now looked up the bill at the PA General Assembly site. HB1077 was “removed from the table, Feb 7, 2012, [House].”
It did not appear on either my State Rep’s page or State Sen’s page.
I wonder what is really happening with this bill. Was it already aborted? Was there transvaginal ultrasound of this bill prior to being removed from the table?
You know, it would be one thing if we had taken care of all the things that really need fixing – like funding for education, housing, food – for the people already living. But these idiots are the most unholy of Xians I can imagine. I agree with Madeline Albright’s quote earlier on this site “special place in hell for women who oppress other women.”
Just called my representative (I live on Pittsburgh’s South Side) and discovered that he (Dem. Harry Readshaw) was a *co-sponsor* of the bill. I urge other Pennsylvanians to call and protest, it’s the only way we’ll be able to beat this.
@fasteddie9318: It’s not really the case of idiots who are voting here, but idiots who are NOT voting. People in PA barely fucking bothered to show up for the Corbett-Onorato election and now we get whatever the hell Corbett wants to dish out because he basically controls the whole government in PA now.
Frankly, we deserve what we get. I say let them basically outlaw abortion and maybe the fucking idiots who just take their rights for granted and don’t bother to educate themselves or vote will finally stand up and pay attention. I’ve just about had it fighting for people who can’t be bothered to even care.
[…] in half. The ride mechanic has been out sick for several months. It’s terrifying- as in, they might take all of my rights away and I won’t be able to do anything, but it’s also exciting. Because […]