{"id":52225,"date":"2012-10-24T11:15:32","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T16:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=52225"},"modified":"2012-10-24T16:26:32","modified_gmt":"2012-10-24T21:26:32","slug":"the-science-of-lady-parts-and-the-gop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/10\/24\/the-science-of-lady-parts-and-the-gop\/","title":{"rendered":"The Science of Lady Parts and the GOP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Last Thursday, Republican Representative and Tea Party favorite, Joe Walsh (R-Ill), told reporters that when it comes\u00a0to abortion, \u201cthere\u2019s no such exception as life of the mother\u201d because of\u00a0“advances in science and technology.\u201d This astounding claim was\u00a0news to the medical community<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Walsh joins the ranks of some other prominent Republican men who don\u2019t understand basic lady parts science: Representative Todd Akin (R-MO), who claimed that pregnancy from \u201clegitimate rape<\/a>\u201d is \u201creally rare\u201d because \u201cthe\u00a0female body has ways<\/a>\u00a0to shut the whole thing down,\u201d and conservative comedian Rush Limbaugh, who\u00a0doesn\u2019t understand<\/a>\u00a0the basics of birth control\u00a0pills. (He thinks you take a pill every time you have sex!)<\/p>\n

These remarks would be humorous if it weren\u2019t for the fact that these men are part of a broader effort by the\u00a0extreme wing<\/a>\u00a0of the Republican Party to take aim at women\u2019s reproductive health.<\/p>\n

At the state level, Republican lawmakers enacted a\u00a0record number<\/a>\u00a0of anti-abortion measures in 2011, four times as many as the previous year. A study from the Guttmacher Institute shows that legislators in 45 state capitals introduced\u00a0944 provisions\u00a0<\/a>to limit women\u2019s reproductive health and rights in the first three months of 2012. These states are proposing\/passing abortion ultrasound requirements, gestational limits, health insurance exemptions for contraception coverage, and stringent limitations on medical abortions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the past two years, 19 states have introduced bills modeled on\u00a0a Nebraska law that bans abortion 20 weeks after fertilization. The Oklahoma State Senate redefined \u201cperson\u201d as starting at conception, while the Mississippi House\u00a0approved a bill requiring women who want an abortion to undergo an examination to determine if there is\u00a0a fetal heartbeat. Texas and Virginia require women to undergo an ultrasound prior to receiving an abortion, and many other states have similar proposals underway. Texas recently cut reproductive services for\u00a0130,000 poor women<\/a>.\u00a0 As this chart from\u00a0NARAL\u00a0<\/a>indicates, twice as many states passed anti-choice laws in 2011 than in 2010.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n
\n

At the federal level, in 2010, the newly elected\u00a0House Republican majority was quick to propose major cuts to reproductive health services. They made\u00a0several attempts<\/a>\u00a0to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, the largest family planning provider in the U.S. that has been around for a century. They also tried to gut Title X, a program that funds family planning and preventive breast and cervical cancer screenings.\u00a0Both proposals were stopped by Senate Democrats. Ironically, on the same day that House Republicans tried to eliminate Title X funding, Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) proposed contraceptive funding for\u00a0wild horses<\/a>\u00a0(something that we desperately need<\/a>, actually).<\/p>\n

Congressional Republicans also proposed an amendment to the health care bill that allows federally funded hospitals to turn away women in need of an abortion to save their lives. This is by far the most\u00a0brazen<\/a>\u00a0attack on the \u201cmother\u2019s health\u201d exception to restrictions on abortions. In May of 2012, Republicans proposed a veto on\u00a0sex-selective abortions\u00a0<\/a>that failed to pass the House, despite broad Republican support for the bill. And in early 2012, Republicans in Congress held hearings on whether the new health care law should include contraception coverage. These hearings included virtually\u00a0no female experts<\/a>, so\u00a0House Democrats\u00a0held more inclusive hearings that (gasp) included women. Limbaugh\u00a0assailed<\/a>\u00a0one\u00a0hearing\u00a0participant, Georgetown student Sandra Fluke, calling her a \u201cslut\u201d and a \u201cprostitute.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prominent conservatives<\/a>, including Republican Party\u00a0leadership<\/a>, have roundly dismissed the assertion that the party is engaged in a War on Women, but\u00a0the recent flurry of legislation curbing reproductive freedoms tells a different story.\u00a0Given baffling comments from the likes of Walsh, Akin, and Limbaugh, the generals in\u00a0this War on Women\u00a0obviously need to include lady parts science\u00a0as part of\u00a0basic training.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0——————<\/div>\n
Caroline Heldman is a professor of sociology at Occidental College<\/a>. \u00a0You can follow her at her blog<\/a> and on Twitter<\/a> and Facebook<\/a>.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog. Last Thursday, Republican Representative and Tea Party favorite, Joe Walsh (R-Ill), told reporters that when it comes\u00a0to abortion, \u201cthere\u2019s no such exception as life of the mother\u201d because of\u00a0“advances in science and technology.\u201d This astounding claim was\u00a0news to the medical community. Walsh joins the ranks of some other prominent Republican […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2083,2056,55,3920,85,8121],"class_list":["post-52225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abortionreproduction","tag-crimelaw","tag-gender","tag-nation-united-states","tag-politics","tag-election-2012"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52225"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52230,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52225\/revisions\/52230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}