DTCAB

Heather Corinna fields this gem at RHRC:

I’m in an on again-off again type relationship with my “girlfriend.” We get along and everything, but on some things we don’t see eye to eye. We’ve had sex before, and that’s kind of the problem. She keeps pressuring me into having sex! You don’t really hear it this way with guys, but it’s the truth. She knows what she wants, and she wants it now! It’s not that I don’t want to have sex with her, or that I don’t LIKE having sex with her, but sometimes I just enjoy romance. Or just hanging out. Sex isn’t everything. And another thing: she want’s a baby! She’s nineteen, and I’m eighteen. I’ve reminded her that neither of us drive or have jobs. I just graduated high school (at the time I was still IN school) but still, I can’t change her mind. So I don’t really know what to say. How can i get through to her that sex isn’t everything, and that we’re definitely not ready for a baby?

And then she takes a whole lot of words to say what can be ultimately boiled down to just a few. At the risk of using sexist language?

DUMP THAT CRAZY-ASS BITCH.

You don’t need to “get through to her” that sex isn’t everything, or that you’re not ready for a kid. You just need to get the hell away from her before she has another chance to get your cum inside her. You can use condoms, but they can be sabotaged, and if she is determined to conceive a child, she will do so. You can’t stop her from being a terrible parent to some other guy’s issue, but you can stop her from forcing YOU into premature fatherhood. Get out of there and get on with your 18-year-old life. Don’t explain, don’t apologize, don’t look back.

Sperm from stem cells! The sky is falling!

I am telling you, this story is just…asking for the fertility-controls-you crowd to start losing their shit. More than usual, I mean.

Caroline Parkinson at BBC reports that Japanese scientists have successfully bred mice using sperm made from embryonic stem cells:

Japanese researchers successfully implanted early sperm cells, made from the stem cells, into infertile mice.

The working sperm which they made was then used to father healthy, and crucially fertile, pups, Cell journal reports.

A UK expert said it was a significant step forward in infertility research.

If you’re now thinking, “this is just begging for jumping to conclusions,” you’d be right.

But he said the Kyoto paper was “quite a large step forward” in developing a process by which sperm could be made for infertile men, perhaps by taking as a starting point a cell from their skin or from something like bone marrow.

He added: “Clearly more work needs to be done to refine this process, but it’s hugely exciting.”

That much is fine, but somehow, the comments on the Jezebel story are all about how this means men are about to become obsolete.

Victory against the non-existent coerced abortion

Robin Marty tells us about a court order to prevent Planned Parenthood of York from performing an abortion on an unwilling 14-year-old. The story was supposedly that this girl’s parents scheduled an abortion for her, but she wanted to keep the baby, and the father’s parents also wanted her to keep the baby, so the Independence Law Center came to her defense in court.

Now she points us to Paul Carpenter at the Morning Call, who reports that the injunction probably doesn’t exist.

The release listed Dyan Cross as its contact person. Cross was unable to answer any questions, referring me to the Pennsylvania Family Institute, which then referred me to Randall Wenger, chief counsel for the Independence Law Center, also mentioned in the press release. “The Independence Law Center,” it said, “helped the girl from York, Pa., to fight the abortion in court. The mother and stepfather of the girl had scheduled an abortion for their daughter against her wishes and against the wishes of the family of the unborn child’s father.”

Also, the Law Center’s website listed various cases it was pursuing, including that of a York student fighting a school ban on an anti-abortion T-shirt. I found nothing, however, on an injunction against parental abortion atrocities in York. When I called Wenger to ask for details on that phantom injunction, he did not return my calls.

Still, there were other leads. “The court-ordered injunction,” said the press release, “was presented to the girl’s parents and Planned Parenthood of York.”

Planned Parenthood often helps families with abortions or birth-control advice, so it’s logical that it may have been helping the parents. Planned Parenthood of York referred me to Suellen Craig, head of the regional Planned Parenthood of Southcentral Pennsylvania, who knew nothing about any injunction.

Carpenter’s story goes on to explain how Wenger is perfectly happy to fight for parents’ rights to force their minor daughters to give birth against their will.

Now, the issue here isn’t that the girl’s parents have won their bid to force their 14-year-old daughter to abort. The issue here is that the injunction doesn’t exist because it wasn’t necessary. Planned Parenthood isn’t interested in performing abortions on unwilling women, including 14-year-old girls with non-supportive parents. If the girl comes in for her appointment, she can just say to any clinician that she doesn’t want the procedure, and they’ll let her go, no harm, no foul.

Also, Independence Law Center? The wishes of the fetus’s paternal grandparents are irrelevant. If the girl’s options are to abort or leave her parents’ home, then the father’s family can offer to take her in and provide for her and the baby until the girl is grown up and able to support herself, but the decision is ultimately hers. The outcome of her pregnancy is not theirs to claim.

Guilty of having a working uterus

The Guardian outlines some of the ways a woman in various parts of America can be charged with murder:

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby’s death – they charged her with the “depraved-heart murder” of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

She failed to prevent pregnancy while addicted to cocaine and then she failed to quit cocaine while pregnant. Ergo, the stillbirth of her child must be seen not as a tragic, spontaneous physiological event, but as a crime that earns her a life sentence.

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.

Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

If you’re pregnant in Indiana, you’d better not have any mental health problems. This is also the state which is now trying its darnedest to defund Planned Parenthood, so really, just try not to have a working uterus in Indiana unless your life is totally stable and baby-ready.

They’ll pass the “Third World America” bill any day now.

Yeah, yeah, we get it, assholes, you hate women:

In a 251 to 175 vote this evening, 16 anti-choice Democrats joined every House Republican present in passing H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act.

And by “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion,” they mean things like, D.C. cannot use its own Medicaid funds to pay for abortion procedures, and that women cannot use their HSAs, itemized deductions, or tax credits to pay for abortions, and that any woman who presumes to use her pre-tax income to pay for an abortion needs to explain herself to the IRS.

The bill is not likely to make it through the Senate, and even in that unlikely event it still won’t make it past Pres. Obama’s veto pen, but in a way, it has still made its point. The House GOP would rather put its energy into drafting and voting on a bill that shows how much contempt they have for women who don’t want to live and die at the mercy of sperm and egg, than address the issues of, say, the economy, the environment, the educational system, the wars we’re fighting, etc.

However, since their response to the environment is “Drill, baby, drill!”, to the wars is to keep occupying Iraq until the second coming of Christ (I’m not even exaggerating here, truth to tell), to the economy is to keep cutting taxes on the people who can most afford to pay taxes, and then they want to balance the budget by gutting education and slashing aid programs that benefit the needy children they so strenuously demand that women produce, you know, perhaps they’re so gung-ho to make women’s lives between menarche and menopause as difficult as possible because they really have nothing else to say. They can’t give us better jobs, better healthcare, better schools, safer streets, better access to nutritious food, cleaner air, or bring the troops home, but they can demand more babies. They can demand that we create more vulnerable human beings to compete for jobs and take the pressure off corporations to pay their employees a living wage. They need those babies to grow up to become cannon fodder because we’re not getting out of Iraq or Afghanistan. Education is a privilege reserved for kids born to families that can pay for schooling. As for those youngsters who can’t find jobs and can’t make it into the military; well, we have prisons for that. Keeping more prisoners means we need more guards, and that means more jobs, so win-win!

Time to go on reproductive strike

Nick Baumann at Mother Jones tells us of the latest development in HR3:

Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?

…

In some cases, the law would forbid using tax benefits—like credits or deductions—to pay for abortions or health insurance that covers abortion. If an American who used such a benefit were to be audited, Barthold said, the burden of proof would lie with the taxpayer to provide documentation, for example, that her abortion fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions. “Were this to become law, people could end up in an audit, the subject of which could be abortion, rape, and incest,” says Christopher Bergin, the head of Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit tax policy group.

…

Barthold replied that the taxpayer would have to prove that she had complied with all applicable abortion laws. Under standard audit procedure, a woman would have to provide evidence to corroborate facts about abortions, rapes, and cases of incest, says Marcus Owens, an accountant and former longtime IRS official. If a taxpayer received a deduction or tax credit for abortion costs related to a case of rape or incest, or because her life was endangered, then “on audit [she] would have to demonstrate or prove, ideally by contemporaneous written documentation, that it was incest, or rape, or [her] life was in danger,” Owens says. “It would be fairly intrusive for the woman.”

[insert ironic remark about "small government" here]

Natalie Portman is cooler than Mike Huckabee, film at 11

Since everyone is talking about this, I think I’ll point another gun at that fish in a barrel.

Mike Huckabee says stupid shit about Hollywood actresses getting pregnant outside of marriage, the latest example being Natalie Portman:

You know Michael, one of the things that’s troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having these children, and they’re doing just fine.’ But there aren’t really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie. And I think it gives a distorted image that yes, not everybody hires nannies, and caretakers, and nurses. Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out of children wedlock.

You know, right now, 75 percent of black kids in this country are born out of wedlock. 61 percent of Hispanic kids — across the board, 41 percent of all live births in America are out of wedlock births. And the cost of that is simply staggering.

The attempt to draw a causal relationship from expectant mothers like Natalie Portman to the numbers of single mothers who are poor, uneducated and unable to get a job is really quite hilarious. I suppose he thinks poor, marginally employed, undereducated women are so stupid as to look at a wealthy actress in a stable relationship with her child’s father (engaged to be married, no less), and think that if she can show a pregnancy before the wedding, then they can get pregnant regardless of relationship status and it’ll be just ducky. Or perhaps what he’s trying to suggest is that there wouldn’t be so many children born out of wedlock if we didn’t have these glamorous Hollywood types showing us that it’s perfectly acceptable.

And if only everyone would just get married as soon as the stick turns blue, there would be no poverty, no hunger, no kids living without health care. Right?

But since Huckabee is clearly so concerned about so many children growing up without the proper family setting (the wedding ring has to come first!), I guess that means he’s pro-choice, right? And all in favor of better contraceptive access?

Oh, wait.

Yeah, that.

Although, as others have pointed out, having a baby outside of marriage is a decision worth defending if your name is Jamie Lynn Spears or Bristol Palin. I think that what really gets his goat about Natalie Portman is that she’s a grown, accomplished, successful woman who isn’t married yet but is in a committed relationship, and is pleased as punch to have a baby on the way. Her pregnancy is not a crisis for her family, it has not created a disaster that needs to be brought under control. Her impending motherhood is not an embarrassment for which she needs to apologize. She knows who the father is and he’s here to stay. She’s in control of her life and owns her fertility. How dare she.

 

No, Bobby Franklin, you do not get to rename your state “Gilead”!

Your blogger just devoted precious neurons to reading the text of Georgia HB1, which legislates against “prenatal murder.” The arrogance at work is really quite astounding. Do all state-level bills involve this much posturing?

The essence of Rep. Bobby Franklin’s (R-eprehensible) big-talk is basically summed up thus:

(12) The United States Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to hear or decide the case of
64 Roe v. Wade or any other case pertaining to a state’s punishment of the crime of prenatal
65 murder;
66 (13) As it had no jurisdiction to hear the case, certainly the United States Supreme Court
67 lacked the authority to pass, or order all states to strike or refuse to enforce, a law that is
68 outside of its subject matter or federal jurisdiction;
69 (14) Even if the United States Supreme Court had jurisdiction, its authority is limited to
70 the case or controversy before it, and its opinion extends no further than between the
71 parties to the case or controversy;

[snip]

(24) As the United States Constitution confers to no federal branch either the authority
99 over the definition or prosecution of murder, or the power to nullify the laws of a state
100 that do the same, Roe v. Wade is ‘no law,’ is a nullity, and carries no legal effect in
101 Georgia;

Shorter version: “The state of Georgia is going to disregard Roe v. Wade because the SCOTUS doesn’t get to tell us what to do! You’re not my mother! You can’t send me to my room!”

Assassins for Family Uterine Conscription

In the latest round of Satire Is No Longer Possible, there is a law under consideration in the South Dakota legislature that says abortion providers’ lives are forfeit. Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones:

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state’s legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person “while resisting an attempt to harm” that person’s unborn child or the unborn child of that person’s spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman’s father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one.

Let’s spell this out here: if you are the parent, spouse/partner, or child of a woman who is planning an abortion, you may kill the abortion provider before the procedure, and get away with it.

Let’s move those fig leaves around a little

Siddartha Mahanta reports that H.R. 3, “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion,” has been relieved of its “forcible” rape language since half the Internet and part of the House threw an unholy shit fit over it.

Now, Smith has retreated, excising the “forcible” rape language from the bill, reports Politico. “The word forcible will be replaced with the original language from the Hyde Amendment,” Smith spokesman Jeff Sagnip says, referring to the ban on the federal government paying for abortions that’s been in place since 1976.

In real terms, this is not much of an improvement. The Hyde Amendment supposedly makes exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the mother’s life, but Medicaid hardly ever covers an abortion even on those conditions. If women have to prove they were raped in order to get abortion coverage, most of them don’t get coverage, even if the rape doesn’t need to leave them beaten to a pulp. If that means women have to default on their rent after being impregnated by men who drugged them into unconsciousness, that’s not really a problem for pro-life politicians. The point of the Hyde Amendment was not to make a principled libertarian compromise between abortion rights and using pro-life Americans’ tax money; the point of the Hyde Amendment was to stop as many women as possible from having abortions. Amie Newman quotes Henry Hyde:

“I would certainly like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle class woman, or a poor woman. Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the HEW Medicaid bill.”

He couldn’t get in the way of rich women having legal abortions, but poor women could be attacked. When chipping away at rights, always start with the most vulnerable. That they’re taking the “forcible” language out of the bill in favor of the status quo won’t help more than a handful of women per year. When we force women to prove they’re worthy of abortion coverage, most of them fail to meet the criteria. Changing the conditions of rape exceptions from brutal to unenforceable still means vulnerable women are screwed over. Hyde knew what he was doing.