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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA New Bill Introduced in Congress Would Constitute a Total Abortion Ban
http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/01/new-heartbeat-bill-in-congress-would-constitute-a-total-abortion-ban.htmlOn Thursday, Iowas Republican Representative Steve King introduced a bill in Congress that would constitute a total abortion ban on a federal level, Rewire reports.
H.R. 490 (legislative text found here) would prohibit abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected. This can occur as early as six weeks into a pregnancy a time period before many women know theyre pregnant.
Since Roe v. Wade was unconstitutionally decided in 1973, nearly 60 million innocent babies lives have been ended by the abortion industry, all with a rubber stamp by the federal government, King said in a Thursday press release from his office. If a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected.
King reportedly worked on the bill with Janet Porter of Faith2Action; per Right Wing Watch, Porter said that when she recently attended Phyllis Schlaflys funeral, she was able to speak with King and convince him to introduce a federal version of her bill.*
H.R. 490 is similar to the Ohios heartbeat bill, which failed when Governor John Kasich vetoed the portion that would restrict abortion at six weeks (a 20-week ban was still instituted).
guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)Now King is a Constitutional expert as well as a corporate hack?
WhiteTara
(29,719 posts)they disagree with. I'm sure WE are unconstitutional as well.
longship
(40,416 posts)One does not get one without the other.
Oh! One more thing. The contraception ban will be framed under the rubric of religious freedom. Bet on it!
Of course, so will be the roll back of LBGT rights.
We're going to hear a lot about "special rights" in the next four years.
Bet on it!
Sheesh!
CousinIT
(9,249 posts)They have already been griping that SHitler's nominees are NOT EXTREME ENOUGH when it comes to issues of women's human rights. (because women are NOT human in their minds - only cattle/incubators)
Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding
https://www.thenation.com/article/reproductive-rights-and-long-hand-slave-breeding/
The pursuit of reproductive freedom and civil freedom need to be seen as one and the same.
I need to hit the pause button on the argument for a moment, because the considerable scholarship that revisionist historians have done for the past few decades has not filtered into mass consciousness. The mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms of economics, labor, color, men. Women outnumbered men in the enslaved population two to one by slaverys end, but they enter the conventional story mainly under the rubric family, or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-Jezebel-Sapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings. Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm Xs distinction between the house Negro and the field Negro, erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the favorite that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
We dont commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their stock, their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen.They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion.Reproduction and its control became the planters prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a windowabortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.
This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Toms Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: If we could get a breed of gals that didnt care, now, for their young uns would be bout the greatest modrn improvement I knows on, says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.
The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewaters argument, which continues thus. If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom. . . .