Thursday, January 26, 2017

Women's reproductive health: you can not out-crazy the crazies

From our I really miss George Carlin series.

Conservative American lawmakers regularly come up with wonderful laws to protect the rights of individuals and in particular with laws designed to put the health of women first. Well, first-ish because the rights of an unborn child trump those of the mother, but that's also for the best of the mother, so first-ish it is.

A couple of proposals will do:
Indiana House Bill 1210 required doctors to lie to women about abortion causing breast cancer despite medical evidence to the contrary in order to discourage women from having abortions. This was before the "post-truth era" officially started.
Texas Bill HB 15, called the Sonogram Bill, mandated a sonogram before abortion. Planned Parenthood described it like this: While a woman can opt-out of seeing the sonogram image and hearing the heart tone, she cannot opt-out of a medically unnecessary sonogram, nor can she opt-out of the fetal description except within very narrow parameters for situations of rape, incest, judicial bypasses, and fetal anomalies.

It is not that women have not fought back with pointed proposals beyond scientific arguments or a filibuster or two.

It is just that you don't hear about it.

For example, according to this web page, Ohio State Senator Nina Turner introduced SB 307, which requires men to visit a sex therapist, undergo a cardiac stress test, and get their sexual partner to sign a notarized affidavit confirming impotency in order to get a prescription for Viagra.

The blogster considers this a very reasonable bill, obviously designed to help men, while at the same time ensuring that any Viagra prescription won't end up on the black market if the beneficiary partner knows what's up. 

The intractable problem with trying to out-crazy the crazies in this manner is quite simply that US Democrats are not crazy enough to do it with the bible thumping relentlessness and outright authoritarianism the GOP has sustained for decades.







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