The Assault on Womens Sexual and Reproductive Rights

[Kobi]

[Kobi]

[Kobi]

WASHINGTON — When the Republican National Committee gathers for its winter meeting here on Wednesday, the action will start a few hours late to accommodate anyone who wants to stop first at the March for Life, the annual anti-abortion demonstration on the National Mall. And if they need a lift to the meeting afterward, they can hop on a free shuttle, courtesy of the Republican Party.

“We thought it only fitting for our members to attend the march,” said Reince Priebus, the party chairman.

Abortion is becoming an unexpectedly animating issue in the 2014 midterm elections. Republicans, through state ballot initiatives and legislation in Congress, are using it to stoke enthusiasm among core supporters. Democrats, mindful of how potent the subject has been in recent campaigns like last year’s governor’s race in Virginia, are looking to rally female voters by portraying their conservative opponents as callous on women’s issues.

“Republicans have turned the floor of the House into the battleground for their relentless war on women’s health care and freedoms,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Every time they launch another extreme attack against women’s rights, they lose more ground with women voters.”

Aware that their candidates at times have struck the wrong tone on issues of women’s health, Republicans in some states are now framing abortion in an economic context, arguing, for example, that the new federal health law uses public money to subsidize abortion coverage. In the House in the coming weeks, Republicans will make passing the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” one of their top priorities this year.

Democrats say their success this year will depend on how close they can come, given lower turnout, to President Obama’s overwhelming margins with female voters; in 2008, he enjoyed a 14-point advantage among women, and in 2012, it was 12 points.

The fraught politics of women’s health care are already surfacing, as restrictions on abortion are appearing on state ballots and becoming the focus of debate in congressional races — many in places like North Carolina and Colorado that could hold the key to whether Republicans can sweep Democrats from power in the Senate and maintain their grip on the House.

“I don’t think this is a niche issue anymore,” said Drew Lieberman, a vice president at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a political consultancy concern, who has advised Democratic congressional candidates and has done polling for Naral Pro-Choice America.

In North Carolina, Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat in a difficult re-election fight, and her allies plan to make an issue of the new restrictions on abortion approved by the Republican-led state legislature.

In Colorado, where Senator Mark Udall, a Democrat, says anger over the Affordable Care Act could hurt his chances, social conservatives have succeeded in placing a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would enshrine legal protections for fetuses. Even if it fails, similar “personhood” measures in Colorado and elsewhere have given Republican turnout a boost in years past.

In Oregon, Senator Jeff Merkley could face a similar situation if supporters of an initiative there succeed in getting an anti-abortion measure with a fiscally conservative twist on the ballot: the measure seeks to outlaw the use of state funds to pay for any abortion unless the mother is in grave medical danger.

“We don’t make this a pro-life thing,” said Jeff Jimerson, who is organizing the petition drive. “This is a pro-taxpayer thing. There are a lot of libertarians in Oregon, people who don’t really care what you do, just don’t make me pay for it.”

Coupling the issue of abortion with a subject important to Republicans’ Tea Party followers — government spending — is one way the party is recalibrating its election-year message. Republicans say that by framing the abortion debate in terms of fiscal conservatism, they can make a connection to the issue they believe will ultimately decide who controls Congress next year — the Affordable Care Act.

“For a lot of members politically it ties into the issue they want to be talking about this election, which is Obamacare,” said Tom McClusky, vice president for government affairs for the March for Life.

Republican presidential candidates have almost universally opposed abortion rights. When Arlen Specter, then a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, ran for president in 1995 and declared he wanted to “take abortion out of politics,” the right balked, and his candidacy was short-lived. But Republicans do see a danger in talking about it the wrong way.

“It’s a matter of tone as well as substance,” said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, who noted how Republicans hurt themselves in 2012 by picking congressional candidates like Representative Todd Akin of Missouri, whose infamous “legitimate rape” comments cost him his Senate candidacy and put his entire party on the defensive over women’s issues.

What do they want us to talk about?” Mr. Reed said. “Rape and incest. What should the pro-life candidate talk about? Late-term abortions, sex-selection and Kermit Gosnell.” Dr. Gosnell was convicted in Philadelphia last year of murdering babies after failed abortions.

Mr. Priebus, the Republican chairman, will attend the March for Life this week, rare for a party leader. So will Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader. In years past, Republican presidents have addressed the march by phone or video message to avoid speaking in person.

Nowhere was the power of the abortion issue more evident recently than in the governor’s race in Virginia, where the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, won in November in part because women preferred him by nine percentage points over the Republican, Ken Cuccinelli, whom Democrats portrayed as extreme on women’s issues.

Nearly one-third — about $4.6 million — of the $16.4 million that Democrats and their allies spent on broadcast television advertising in Virginia last year dealt with abortion or birth control, according to an analysis by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising.

Abortion rights groups have built targeting models that allow them to predict an individual voter’s position on women’s health issues. These models, along with similar ones built by the Obama campaign, were factors not just in Virginia last year but also in Democratic electoral victories in 2012.

One state that Naral and Planned Parenthood Action Fund are studying is North Carolina, where they see parallels to Virginia. Demographic changes there are giving Democrats hope that it could swing back into their column.

One of the leading contenders to be Ms. Hagan’s opponent in November is Thom Tillis, the speaker of the State House, who voted for the tough restrictions on abortion. Democrats believe that would set them up to make the same kinds of sharp attacks that helped them prevail over Mr. Cuccinelli in November and over Mitt Romney in 2012.

While Democrats say such measures seeking to restrict abortions could stir votes, they acknowledge the limits of midterm turnout. “Off-year elections are difficult,” said Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “You have lower turnout, and a lot of drop-off voters are women. So in a lot of ways, making sure women are aware and voting is important.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/us...race.html?_r=1

[Kobi]

[Kobi]

Kentucky state Rep. Joe Fischer (R-Fort Thomas) has added an amendment banning abortions at 20 weeks to a domestic violence bill, saying that “the most brutal form of domestic violence is the violence against unborn children.”

The bill, HB 8, would expand domestic violence protections and is strongly supported by Kentucky house Democrats. Under current Kentucky law, only couples who are currently married or living together can get protective orders against an abusive partner. The new bill would ensure that victims in an abusive dating relationship who do not live with their partner still have access to domestic violence protections in the courts.

Fischer’s amendment—like a similar bill that was just introduced into the Kentucky senate, and like 20-week abortion bans across the country—relies on debunked science to claim that fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks.

“This tactic is really sad,” Derek Selznick, Reproductive Freedom Project director at the ACLU of Kentucky, told RH Reality Check. “It’s pushing a political agenda and ignores the daily realities that thousands of Kentucky women and men face trying to get protective orders from the court system.”

House Speaker Greg Stumbo (D-Prestonsburg) said he will likely rule that Fischer’s amendments are not germane to the original legislation and can thus be ignored.

For the past decade, as John Cheves of the Lexington Herald-Leader reports, the Democratic chair of the Kentucky House Health and Welfare Committee has kept new anti-choice legislation from reaching the floor. But if Republicans were to regain control of the house in November, Kentucky women could be vulnerable to new abortion restrictions as severe and numerous as those in Texas.

“Every year we come within a hair’s breadth of awful stuff,” Selznick said. “I never feel good until [anti-choice bills] actually die.”

Kentucky’s legislature is considering at least seven other anti-choice bills this year. Many are routinely introduced every session only to die in committee, such as forced ultrasound bills or requirements that “informed consent” be given in person rather than over the phone. One such informed consent bill passed out of a senate committee on Friday.

In addition to his 20-week ban amendment, Rep. Fischer has sponsored another informed consent bill, a bill regulating abortions after a fetal heartbeat has been detected, and a bill that would forbid minors from out of state from using Kentucky’s judicial bypass system if they need a court order to get around parental consent laws. Another house bill, sponsored by Rep. Stan Lee (R-Fayette), would prohibit the use of telemedicine abortions.

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/20...stic-violence/

[Kobi]

Republicans must fight the phony "war on women" tag that Democrats have slapped on them — a charge that is "incredibly demeaning" to U.S. women, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says.

"Every woman I know who has an IQ above broccoli tells you that it's an insult to them that the Democrats play them to be incapable of anything other than helpless and hopeless victims of their own gender, who are just sitting around wringing their hands hoping that Uncle Sugar will provide for them free birth control and a free abortion because it's the only thing in life that they really care about," Huckabee told "The Steve Malzberg Show" On Newsmax TV.

"That is incredibly demeaning," he said Monday.

"It's extraordinarily outrageous to assume that women, who are capable of running everything from major corporations in this country to running a household, that they're somehow incapable of controlling their own libido and their reproductive system to the point that if the government doesn't step in with $9 a month worth of birth control, they're going to completely fall apart," Huckabee said.

In recent years, Democrats have tagged the GOP as waging a "war on women" for its efforts to regulate abortion and because of a series of insensitive remarks by Republican lawmakers.

The most infamous example was that of former Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, who said that abortion in cases of rape was unnecessary because "if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Huckabee said he can't believe the GOP hasn't fought back against the Democrats' "ridiculous" tag — but he has a theory.

"Why Republicans haven't taken that on is beyond me except for this: you have to believe something in your heart before it can come out of your mouth with much effectiveness, and a lot of times, some of our Republican leaders, they're not too sure what they believe in their hearts, and therefore they find it more difficult to articulate," he said.

"But anybody who . . . thinks about it rationally and logically would say that on its face the Democrats [who are] creating this phony 'war on women' ought to be pushed back and the Republicans ought to be talking about . . . [women being] accepted as equals, for them to be respected as people who are not victims of gender but capable of anything that a man is capable of. That's what we ought to be talking about."

http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/mik...1/20/id/548004

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Sometimes words fail me.

[Kobi]

Roe v. Wade




Supreme Court of the United States

Argued December 13, 1971
Reargued October 11, 1972
Decided January 22, 1973