The G.O.P.’s Abandoned Babies

[ProSense]

The G.O.P.’s Abandoned Babies

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Republicans need to figure out where they stand on children’s welfare. They can’t be “pro-life” when the “child” is in the womb but indifferent when it’s in the world. Allow me to illustrate just how schizophrenic their position has become through the prism of premature babies.

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Dr. Jennifer L. Howse, the president of the March of Dimes, which in 2003 started a multimillion-dollar premature birth campaign focusing on awareness and education, has said of the decline: “The policy changes and programs to prevent preterm birth that our volunteers and staff have worked so hard to bring about are starting to pay off.”

The bad news is that, according to the March of Dimes, the Republican budget passed in the House this month could do great damage to this progress. The budget proposes:

• $50 million in cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that “supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs.”
  
  
• $1 billion in cuts to programs at the National Institutes of Health that support “lifesaving biomedical research aimed at finding the causes and developing strategies for preventing preterm birth.”
  
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[ProfessionalLeftist]

1. I think everyone else needs to figure out where Republicans stand on children's welfare

They KNOW where they stand. And it is a correct assumption that they don't give a damn about children (born or unborn) or their welfare.

What they DO give a damn about is controlling women. They do so via their uteruses under a guise (pretense) of "morality". Society needs to grok a clue about this and stop swallowing whole the Republican propaganda. Most often they're SAYING one thing, yet DOING something else.

Same here. You know as well as I do that they cannot go around saying they "want to control women". That wouldn't sell. But piously claiming they "care about innocent unborn babies" sells. So they use that instead.

[Vicar In A Tutu]

2. Nah, most of them don't even give a fuck about that.

They just know that they have a big issue to exploit at every single fucking election. You know what? On a personal level, I'm not in favour of abortion - I couldn't be with someone who would want one for a non-essential issue (health of the mother / if the child had next to no hope of surviving / the mother had been victim of a sexual assault and impregnated as a result) but - and this is a big but - once you take all control away from the mother, you are going down a hugely slippery path. I'm with certain provisions and limitations but to outlaw the procedure from conception? Craziness. Before you know it you'd have women who found it impossible to get a termination because there "wasn't enough evidence" that they'd been raped or that it "wouldn't pose quite enough danger" to the health of the carrier.

For the GOP, the appeal is simple. It gets a certain subset of voters out every election, voters who are too blinkered to ask themselves why their beloved party have yet to do what they've had countless opportunities to.

[CrispyQ]

3. Jon Stewert nails it on 2/22 episode:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-february-22-2011/mother-f--kers

He hits it out of the park at 0:45 - 1:15.

Warning: If you play past that & hear the Michele Bachmann clip, it will make you sick. Get a bucket.