The last couple of weeks has seen a flurry of activity in the front line of our abortion war.
A Planned Parenthood clinic in Columbia, Missouri, which had not been allowed to offer abortion services since last fall, was intentionally set on fire on February 10. The fire did not do much damage, but the FBI is investigating it as a possible hate crime because abortions used to be performed there.
The Columbia Health Center was forced to stop performing abortions because it could not meet the requirements of new state laws in Missouri designed to halt abortions. The requirement is that "abortion providers must secure admitting privileges at hospitals located within about 15 minutes from their health centers." Hospitals in the area have refused to grant the clinic's physician admitting privileges because it's not worth the shit the hospitals will get for allowing a doctor who performs abortion to have those privileges. Those goddamn protesters would likely show up. And, by the way, if an emergency occurs, any hospital will take the patient, admitting privileges be damned.
On Friday of last week, a judge refused to place an injunction on the law, so Missouri, a state that has about 6 million people, over half of which are women, now only has one clinic, in St. Louis, in the center of the eastern border of the state. If a woman lives on the western side, or in the middle, where Columbia, a big university town, is, she has to drive hours each way, at least twice, since there is a 72-hour waiting period after a mandatory counseling session, including providing material meant to dissuade her from getting an abortion. As late as 2008, the state had five clinics.
Like Louisiana, Missouri is part of the barbaric abortion war with the battle being fought over regulations (something that conservatives were supposedly against) that target primarily poor women who cannot afford to get to clinics far away. And forcing them to give birth obviously contributes to the cycle of poverty. But, fuck it, say anti-choice assholes. Don't fuck if you're poor.
It keeps going, this insanity over a legal medical procedure. Donald Trump's Department of Health and Human Services released new guidelines that prevent Title X funding for family planning from being "used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning." In practical terms, it bars funds from being used for abortion or abortion referrals (like if, say, that clinic in Columbia wanted to refer a patient to the St. Louis clinic). It's an back door way of defunding Planned Parenthood, and it ends up directing a shit-ton of money to faith-based programs that lie about abortion and provide very little actual medical care. Obviously, it was challenged in court pretty damn quickly.
And then there's the battle over what exactly abortion is that played out in the United States Senate yesterday, where the skeevy Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, sponsored by skeevier motherfucker and GOP Senator Ben Sasse, was filibustered by Democrats. The thing was brought up so that Republicans can run ads with the lie that Democrats want newborn babies who dodged an abortion to be murdered. Except you can't fucking murder babies because that's fucking murder and it's already illegal.
The bill itself only applied to babies born after an attempted late-term abortion. In other words, if a fetus were so severely deformed or so severely damaged or ill that the baby simply wasn't viable, and if an attempted abortion failed, the law would have forced doctors to ignore the will of the parents who may want palliative care until the infant died. Doctors would have been forced to artificially keep the suffering baby alive even though it was a fruitless effort and faced arrest if they did not.
Oh, by the way, an extra dickish part of the bill defined abortion as using various means "to intentionally kill the unborn child of a woman known to be pregnant." The last time a federal law on abortion was passed, the ludicrous Partial Birth Abortion Ban, the text only talked about a "human fetus." So, yeah, they were trying to get the fetus declared a person, too.
Trump, a man who you know has paid for multiple abortions for multiple girlfriends and mistresses, tweeted out that "Senate Democrats just voted against legislation to prevent the killing of newborn infant children. The Democrat position on abortion is now so extreme that they don’t mind executing babies AFTER birth. This will be remembered as one of the most shocking votes in the history of Congress. If there is one thing we should all agree on, it’s protecting the lives of innocent babies.”
This is how it's all gonna be dumbed down for the consumption of the fucking idiots in the states that are filled with the most fucking idiots. Don't you think a medical clinic's doctor should have admitting privileges (even though the joint where you got your colonoscopy doesn't need that)? Shit, ask people what admitting privileges are and what they actually do. They don't fuckin' know.
And then it'll be all about how Democrats wanna straight up murder newborns, even though the legislation itself, assholish though it may be, never says that. That's not even nuance; that's just straight up lying. As if that matters anymore.
Meanwhile, the neverending abortion war goes on, fighting on a field made of dead women's bodies. Despite the fact that polls consistently say that a vast majority of Americans support safe access for abortion services for women, Republican motherfuckers, so desperate to prove to their evangelical base that they still matter, will keep marching over those bodies in order to create more.
