Tag: Planned Parenthood

The GOP still has nothing to show for its anti-Planned Parenthood campaign

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Source:WashPost

Author:Dana Milbank

Emphasis Mine

At this point Republicans may wish to consider aborting to protect the health of the party.

They have been going after Planned Parenthood over the past few months like so many Captain Ahabs. They threatened to shut down the government to defund the group. Their insistence on a Planned Parenthood showdown drove House Speaker John Boehner to resign. They’re about to appoint a special committee to investigate Planned Parenthood. The party’s presidential candidates have made Planned Parenthood a central part of the campaign, and House Republicans are manufacturing new legislative vehicles to cut off the group.

And what do they have to show for it?

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that Americans have a more favorable view of Planned Parenthood than of any other entity tested, including the Republican Party and presidential candidates. The group’s favorable/unfavorable impression, 47 percent to 31 percent, is actually up slightly from July. What’s more, 61 percent oppose eliminating federal funding of Planned Parenthood. Even among the 35 percent who support defunding, only9 percent favor shutting down the government to do it.

Yet House Republicans pressed ahead with their quest Tuesday, hauling Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee for more than five hours of hectoring and finger-wagging about, among other things, her salary and the group’s travel expenses.

The hearing came about because of videos released in July purporting to show that Planned Parenthood was harvesting body parts from aborted fetuses for profit. In their memo announcing the hearing, committee Republicans proclaimed that the “disturbing content” of the recently released videos “raises questions about [Planned Parenthood’s] use of taxpayer funding.” But the videos turned out to be doctored, and committee Republicans declined Democrats’ requests to have the video maker, David Daleiden, appear before the panel. The committee didn’t get the full unedited videos, Chairman Jason Chaffetz (Utah) said, because of California court proceedings.

Two hours into the hearing, Chaffetz made the startling confession that “without the videos, we can’t have a good discussion about them.”

But we can shut down the federal government over them?

Dispensing with the videos, members of the panel got down to the larger purpose of the hearing: harassing Richards and her group.

Chaffetz flashed a chart on the screens showing that since 2010, the number of abortions at Planned Parenthood has surpassed the number of its “cancer screenings and prevention services.”

But no such shift occurred. The fine print on the chart showed that the number of abortions (327,000 in 2013) never came close to reaching the number of cancer screenings (935,573 in 2013) at any point.

The bogus graph didn’t seem to matter to Chaffetz, who drew the witness’s attention to the crossing lines showing abortions overtaking screenings.

Richards said the chart “absolutely does not reflect what’s happening.”

“I pulled those numbers directly out of your corporate reports,” the chairman said.

In fact, the chart said the source was the antiabortion group Americans United for Life — which Richards pointed out to Chaffetz.

“Then we will get to the bottom of the truth of that,” the chairman said.

The truth? Planned Parenthood gets money for women’s birth control, STD screenings and the like, not abortions — which Richards calmly reminded her inquisitors. She left it to Democratic lawmakers to proclaim their (exaggerated) outrage. “The misogyny!” wailed Rep. Gerald Connolly (Va.).

Republicans tried to inoculate themselves against the inevitable “war on women” charges. Chaffetz admitted three Republican women to participate in the hearing (there is only one GOP woman on the panel) and he started his own remarks by emotionally invoking his wife’s work with breast-cancer patients. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) thought it helpful to say that “I’m wearing a pink tie in solidarity with women’s health issues.” The majority dodged an awkward moment when Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), a pro-life lawmaker who, according to court records,encouraged his wife and mistress to have abortions, yielded his time to a colleague.

That colleague, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), told Richards “you’re profiting off death.” Likewise, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) proclaimed himself a “champion for the unborn,” while Walberg said “we’ve been brought into a frenzy and a concern about what happens to our babies,” and Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) asked what happens if “a child survives an abortion attempt.”

This would appear to justify Richards’s contention that the controversy “isn’t about Planned Parenthood. It’s about allowing women in this country . . . to make other decisions about their pregnancies.”

As if to confirm Richards’s suspicion, 28 minutes after the hearing ended, lawmakers went to the House floor to vote on legislation restricting abortion — for the 14th time this year.

See:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-still-has-nothing-to-show-for-its-anti-planned-parenthood-campaign/2015/09/29/1c79bd02-66e9-11e5-9223-70cb36460919_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_opinions

Carly Fiorina and the GOP Outsider Boom

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Carly Fiorina’s rise, Scott Walker’s fall, and Donald Trump being Donald Trump.

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Source:New York Magazine, via RSN

Author:Frank Rich

Emphasis Mine

arly Fiorina has risen faster than anyone in the Republican field since the last debate, while making a series of statements that have some commentators describing her “willful disregard … or ignorance of reality.” How do you explain her rise?

A willful disregard or ignorance of reality is hardly disqualifying in the GOP presidential sweepstakes! If nothing else, Fiorina’s fictional Planned Parenthood video suggests she might have more success cooking up gory B-movie scenarios in the San Fernando Valley than she had running Hewlett-Packard in Silicon Valley. In that real-life business horror story, Fiorina slashed 30,000 employees, not to mention shareholder value, while mismanaging what had been one of the most fabled corporations in American business.

Fiorina’s rise after the last debate is coming at the expense of the previous “skyrocketing” Republican contender, the retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson. The theory had been that Carson was the kinder, gentler “outsider” who would finally usurp Donald Trump. But, as it happened, the good doctor proved to have all the pep on-camera that one of his patients might exhibit shortly after being given anesthesia. Worse, despite his ostensible prowess as a man of medicine, Carson waffled when confronted with Trump’s debate fiction about a link between vaccines and autism. That both Fiorina and Carson have enjoyed booms, however transitory they may prove to be, makes one thing clear. The base would prefer almost anyone, and so far Trump most of all, to Jeb Bush or any of the other choices that the GOP Establishment has put its big bets on. In new polls out over the past couple of days, from Fox News and Quinnipiac, the results are markedly similar in the spreads separating Trump from Carson and Fiorina, and show that a majority of Republicans favor one of these three outsiders over the rest of the field combined.

Fiorina may be impaled by the Washington shutdown, should it happen; she endorsed what Karl Rove has called the “suicide” strategy of holding the government hostage to the defunding of Planned Parenthood. Should she crater, be assured that she has a strong understudy waiting in the wings: Meg Whitman, the current CEO at HP, who just announced her plan to lay off another 30,000 workers. The similarities don’t end there: Like Fiorina, who ran for Senate against Barbara Boxer, Whitman ran as a Republican for statewide office in California in 2010 (for governor, against Jerry Brown) and lost by double digits. Should she, too, get fired by HP, she’ll have the perfect résumé for entering the Republican presidential race.

Scott Walker, who started his run for the GOP nomination as the reported favorite of the Koch brothers, now says he’s been “called to lead by helping clear the field” of candidates — starting with himself. Does his campaign’s failure show the limits of super-pac politics?

Not necessarily. Walker was a ridiculous candidate and would remain so no matter how much money any billionaires poured into his super-pac. Back in early July, a few days before Walker announced his run, I was at a small gathering in Washington where a prominent Republican political operative (not affiliated with any of the 2016 campaigns, and not speaking for attribution) gave a rollicking tour of the field. Of Walker, he said, “There are two reasons he can’t win. First, he has a bald spot. Second, he’s stupid.”

Suffice it to say that Walker’s presidential run was farce from start to finish, from his three different positions on the issue of “birthright citizenship” to his calling Reagan’s busting of the air-traffic controllers’ strike of 1981 “the most significant foreign policy decision of my lifetime.” At the CNN debate, he had all the charisma of a department-store mannequin. Yet not long ago he was a rock star. He’s “the one guy in the race who has shown how to defeat the media and Democrat coordinated attacks on conservatives,” said Rush Limbaugh as Walker entered the race. He’s “a truly impressive individual,” effused the right-wing Washington Post pundit Marc Thiessen. Fox News hosts fell over themselves to boost him as a union-busting “hero.” At FiveThirtyEight in March, Nate Silver used what he called “totally subjective odds” to rate the first-tier Republican candidates on the likelihood of their getting the nomination and deduced that Walker was on top (at 26 percent), ahead of Bush (24 percent) and Marco Rubio (16 percent).

This week, after Walker dropped out, The Wall Street Journal ran a news story explaining that Rubio would benefit by inheriting much of Walker’s fund-raising apparatus and donors, since he, too, is a “fresh face ready to shake up Washington.” Never mind that Rubio, unlike Walker, is already in Washington (where his strategy for shaking things up seems to have been to miss more Senatorial votes than anyone else in the race). Or that the voters Rubio might inherit from Walker do not even amount to a rounding error; Walker was polling at less than 0.5 percent at the end. In any case, Rubio’s candidacy is almost uniformly described by the press and Republican pols as more substantive than most (especially on foreign policy), and he’s been widely judged as one of the strongest contenders — if not the strongest — at both debates. But with recent polling numbers still averaging at roughly 10 percent, Rubio, like Bush, is thus far a candidate who looks theoretically great on paper to all the professionals in the media-political complex, but not so much to Republican primary voters who are the actual deciders.

Donald Trump again played the (barely) coded racism card when he didn’t contradict a supporter’s birther canards about President Obama. Can he keep doing this without paying a price?

Seems so. The true answer to this question can be found not in Trump’s various outrages — whether the latest or all those that came before — but in the fact that most of his rivals respond to his slurs by either agreeing with him or refusing to take a stand altogether. The only three candidates who immediately criticized Trump this time — Chris Christie, Lindsey Graham, and Bush — had nothing to lose by coming out against bigotry. Two of them aren’t polling any better than Walker was, and Bush, though faring somewhat better, is fighting for his political life. The other candidates are cowering as usual or, in Carson’s case, going Trump one better by saying that Muslims should be barred from the presidency.

In 1961, Barry Goldwater advised Republicans that they should “go hunting where the ducks are” by currying favor with segregationist voters in the Deep South. Carson’s campaign manager, Barry Bennett, was similarly unapologetic about his candidate’s intentions in playing the Islamophobia card, telling the Associated Press this week that “Republican primary voters are with us at least 80-20.” Let’s not pretend otherwise.

 

See:http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/32646-focus-carly-fiorina-and-the-gop-outsider-boom

Anti-Planned Parenthood Group Caught Passing Stillbirth Photo Off As Abortion

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Source: Think Progress

Author: Tara Culp-Ressler

Emphasis Mine

The latest video intended to cast Planned Parenthood in an unflattering light relies on images of fetuses that were not actually aborted at Planned Parenthood clinics.

The Center for Medical Progress, a right-wing group engaged in a long-term video strategy to discredit the national women’s health organization, released its seventh video on Wednesday. Likeseveral videos before it, the newest footage relies heavily on an interview with Holly O’Donnell, a procurement technician who briefly worked for a biological company that partners with some abortion clinics to collect fetal tissue donations.

At several points, O’Donnell discusses the process of procuring fetal organs — which can be used to help advance scientific research, if abortion patients choose to donate the material after their procedure — before the camera cuts to photographs of fetuses. Although the video insinuates those fetuses are connected to the collection process that O’Donnell is describing, they’re actually recycled photographs from other sources, as RH Reality Check reports.

One of the photos (displayed at the video’s nine-minute mark) isn’t an aborted fetus at all. It’s actually a stillborn fetus prematurely delivered at 19 weeks.

The woman who took that photo, Alexis (or “Lexi”) Fretz, initially published it on her blog — where she also shared the story of grieving her stillborn son, whom she named Walter Joshua. In a Facebook post, Fretz said that she did not give permission for the Center for Medical Progress to use Walter’s photo, though she does not plan to take legal action against the group.

By Thursday morning, the description for the Center for Medical Progress’ YouTube video included a note at the top clarifying that the “image of Walter Fretz at 19 weeks” comes from a 2014 Daily Mail article about Lexi Fretz’s photographs of her stillborn child.

RH Reality Check notes that another photo featured in the new video is sourced to the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, an anti-abortion group that specializes in graphic images of fetuses. The group has become infamous for its “Genocide Awareness Project,” an exhibit typically installed on college campuses that “juxtaposes images of aborted embryos and fetuses with images of victims of historical and contemporary genocides and other injustice.”

For years, abortion opponents have relied on graphic descriptions and bloody imagery to make their case against legal abortion. The Center for Medical Progress appears to be leaning in hard to this particular strategy, hoping that Americans will be compelled by photos of fetuses and disturbed by headlines proclaiming that “Planned Parenthood clinic cut through dead baby’s face to get his intact brain.”

It’s certainly true that the videos targeting Planned Parenthood are giving anti-abortion lawmakers more ammunition. States are rushing to cut funding for the national women’s health organization, even as investigations into the group have been unable to turn up any evidence of wrongdoing.

However, it’s not clear that the activists behind the footage are successfully changing hearts and minds on the topic of abortion itself — a medical procedure that Americans have nuanced opinions about. Planned Parenthood remains popular, while the Center for Medical Progress has gotten plenty of negative press thanks to its misleading editing tactics.

Plus, as illustrated by the fuzzy line between an aborted fetus and a miscarried fetus, these issues aren’t nearly as straightforward as abortion opponents make them out to be. It’s possible to be grossed out by the details of an abortion procedure yet believe it should remain legal. It’s possible to grieve for the end of a pregnancy yet choose to donate fetal tissue to science. It’s possible to believe you are carrying an unborn child yet decide to have an abortion anyway.

“The campaign, masterminded by 26-year-old anti-abortion crusader and ‘proud millennial’ David Daleiden, is meant to let us in on the fact that abortion is disgusting,” writer Rebecca Traisterargued in New York Magazine earlier this month, pointing out that women hardly need to be educated about the complex nature of life in reproductive bodies. “Planned Parenthood didn’t invent abortions, and David Daleiden isn’t going to explain them in terms so grisly as to reverse thousands of years’ of women’s needs, desires, and lived experiences.”

See: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/08/20/3693340/planned-parenthood-video-photos/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tptop3

12 Most Insane Comments About Women and Health by GOP Contenders

It’s a long campaign season and the anti-woman competition is only just getting started.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Amanda Marcotte

Emphasis Mine

There are 17 Republican candidates for president that get the New York Timesstamp of legitimacy. In a field like that, standing out is hard. The easiest way to catch media attention—and attract voters in the notoriously conservative Republican primary voting base—is to get competitively nutters. Which most of the candidates are doing, hard, when it comes to bashing reproductive health care. It’s impossible to really hand out lifetime achievement awards when it comes to the ugliest slams against reproductive health care. But here are the worst things they’ve said recently.

1) Mike Huckabee. Huckabee is a notorious spewer of sexist garbage, but his latest –defending the Paraguay government forcing a 10-year-old rape victim to have her rapist’s baby—is low even for him. “When an abortion happens, there are two victims,” he argued. “One is the child, the other is that birth mother, who often will go through extraordinary guilt years later when she begins to think through what happened, with the baby, with her.”

Yes, he tried to argue he wants a 10-year-old to endure childbirth for her own good, lest she feel “guilt” over reneging on their Huckabee-prescribed duty to having babies for rapists. Not very convincing, that.

2) Scott Walker. During the Fox News GOP debate, Walker affirmed his support for forcing pregnant women to give birth, even if their doctors tell them it will kill them. He doubled down later in an interview with Sean Hannity, saying, “I’ve said for years, medically there’s always a better choice than choosing between the life of an unborn baby and the life of the mother.”

It is true that you don’t have to choose, since Walker’s preference, doing nothing, tends to kill both a woman and her fetus. How that’s “pro-life”, however, remains a mystery.

3) Ben Carson. “It brings up a very important issue and that is do those black lives matter,” he told Fox News host Eric Bolling recently when discussing Planned Parenthood. “The number one cause of death for black people is abortion.”

Undermining the Black Lives Matter movement while implying that black women are somehow race traitors because they control their own bodies? It’s a two-fer—maybe a three-fer—of the kind of viciousness that motivates the modern American right.

4) Rick Santorum. “It is not any more than the Dred Scott decision was settled law to Abraham Lincoln,” Santorum said, during the Republican debate, about a recent court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. “This a rogue Supreme Court decision.”

““We passed a bill and we said, ‘Supreme Court, you’re wrong!,” he continued, citing a 2003 law he wrote that undermined Roe v Wade. Dred Scott v Sanfordwas a notorious 1856 case where the Supreme Court ruled that black people cannot be U.S. citizens. That’s right. Santorum was suggesting that denying black people their basic humanity is somehow the equivalent of letting women control their bodies or letting gay people marry for love.

5) Bobby Jindal. “Today’s video of a Planned Parenthood official discussing the systematic harvesting and trafficking of human body parts is shocking and gruesome,” Jindal said in announcing an investigation of Planned Parenthood inspired by videos that have been repeatedly shown to be anti-choice hoaxes.

Investigations into Planned Parenthood have found, no surprise, that there is no “trafficking of human body parts” going on. Jindal has yet to weigh in on what other surgeries should be banned because they are “gruesome”, a word that can be used to characterize all of them.

6) Marco Rubio. Rubio’s argument on CNN for why women should not be allowed to remove unwanted embryos from their uteruses: “It cannot turn into an animal. It can’t turn into a donkey.”

“Well, if they can’t say it will be human life, what does it become, then?” he added. Could it become a cat?”

All surgery, as well as tooth removal and hair brushing, removes living human cells, aka human life. It’s not donkey. It’s not cat. Human. We look forward to Rubio’s upcoming ban on dentistry on the grounds that human life is not cat life.

7) Carly Fiorina. Fiorina considered denying her daughter the HPV vaccine, even though nearly all sexually active people will get it at some point in their life. “And she got bullied. She got bullied by a school nurse saying: ‘Do you know what your daughter is doing?'” Fiorina complained at a campaign event.

Sorry, Fiorina, but assuming that your kid will likely grow up and have sex one day is not bullying. Signaling to your kid that you expect her to be a lifelong virgin or risk cervical cancer? Now that’s what I’d call bullying.

8) Jeb Bush. Bush got a lot of negative attention for a campaign event where he said, “I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.” His attempt to “clarify” this, however, showed that he really does mean it. He proposes taking the money away from family planning clinics like Planned Parenthood and redirecting it to general service community health centers. Which is to say, to take away money bookmarked for women’s health, forcing women to give up their gynecologists and go to general clinics instead, where they can expect longer wait times, less direct access to contraception and less access to specialized services.

9) Ted Cruz. When the hoax Planned Parenthood videos came out, Cruz floated a conspiracy theory accusing the media of censorship. “The mainstream media wants to do everything they can to hide these videos from the American people,” he argued. “And the reason is virtually every reporter, virtually every editor, virtually every person who makes decisions in the mainstream media is passionately pro-abortion.”

In the real world, every major newspaper, cable news network, and many nightly news shows covered the videos. They also debunked the lies in the videos, though telling the truth is probably not what Cruz was hoping the “mainstream media” would do with these deceitful videos.

10) Donald Trump. Trump says a lot of foul things about women generally and reproductive health care generally, including calling Planned Parenthood an “abortion factory”. But he’s probably the candidate in the race who hates reproductive health care access the least, which is a sad statement about the state of the modern GOP.

11) Rand Paul. Paul has been pushing the idea of banning Medicaid patients from Planned Parenthood and redirecting them to already overcrowded general service clinics instead. “We’ve doubled the amount of money we put into women’s health care through government, and so it’s just an absurd argument to say we need Planned Parenthood,” he argued on Fox News last week. “It’s only about abortion.”

In reality, 97 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services are not abortion and 0 percent of federal money goes to Planned Parenthood’s abortion services. Nor can women just go to a community health center. When Texas defunded Planned Parenthood, there were over 63,000 fewer claims for birth control services. Community health centers try to pick up the slack, but it’s more than they can handle.

12) Chris Christie. Christie’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the religious right brought him to start defunding Planned Parenthood in New Jersey years ago. But his enthusiasm for preventing women from using contraception stops at his bedroom door. “I’m a Catholic, but I’ve used birth control, and not just the rhythm method,” Christie recently told a New Hampshire crowd.

Birth control for me but not for thee? It’s probably what all these candidates, none of whom have Duggar-size families, actually practice. But Christie doesn’t get bonus points for honesty. After all, he didn’t admit that this was hypocrisy and continues to bash Planned Parenthood every chance he gets.

There are five other white guys in the race, all eager to dump on affordable contraception services and legal abortion. But, as of now, few have shown the vim to really stand out from the crowd in their tedious denunciations of reproductive health care technologies that, in the real world, are a normal part of everyday life. But give them time. It’s a long campaign season and the anti-woman competition is only just getting started.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of “It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.”

 

See: http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/12-most-insane-comments-about-women-and-health-gop-contenders?utm_source=Amanda+Marcotte%27s+Subscribers&utm_campaign=b9a3a8cc36-RSS_AUTHOR_EMAIL&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f2b9a8ae81-b9a3a8cc36-79824733

Feds: Planned Parenthood Did Nothing Wrong, Republicans Are Lying

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Source: OccupyDemocrats.com

Author: Vera

Emphasis Mine

Conservatives are currently sobbing over the recent announcement that contrary to what they’ve been trying to make people believe with their Planned Parenthood sting videos, the organization has been cleared of any inhumane practices.

In an investigation on Planned Parenthood by the Department of Health and Human Services, it was found that the women’s health clinics had not violated any fetal tissue laws “among government researchers or the companies that supply the tissue” or wrongdoing.

This investigation was sparked after anti-abortion, conservative group Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released a series of strategically edited videos that made it look like Planned Parenthood was selling the  body parts of aborted fetuses. These videos were debunked, and it was clear that the officials displayed in the video were merely discussing tissue donation and legal reimbursement, but CMP desperately continued release more videos.

Official clearance of Planned Parenthood was announced on August 16th in a report fromPolitico, which stated that every one of the CMP’s deceptive attempts to smear Planned Parenthood’s name were based on lies.

The HHS’ assistant secretary for legislation explained to Sens. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Roy Blunt (R-MO) that the organization found “no violation of these laws in connection with research done at our agencies.” The letter read, in part:

“Furthermore … we have confirmed that HHS researchers working with fetal tissue obtained the tissue from non-profit organizations that provided assurances to us that they are in compliance with all applicable legal requirements.

Very little federal research is done with fetal tissue, but it has come under scrutiny since an anti-abortion group earlier this summer began releasing undercover videos alleging that Planned Parenthood was trafficking in fetal tissue and organs. Planned Parenthood has denied that, saying it facilitates legal tissue donation at a few of its locations.”

Nice try, conservatives. Anti-abortion CMP is going to have to do better than horrifically edited videos if they want to bring down a completely ethical organization that provides so many critical health services to women.  

In a hilarious twist, it turns out that CMP’s little smear campaign actually HELPED Planned Parenthood! Following CMP’s attempts to derail the women’s health organization, donations to Planned Parenthood increased and the organization doubled down by working with a PR firm to spread accurate information and debunk conservative fear-mongering lies. Executive Vice President of Planned Parenthood Dawn Laguens described this phenomenon best when she said:

“The benefit of having been a women’s health care provider for 99 years, and to being somebody who’s been there in the lives of 1 in 5 American women, is that when people come after Planned Parenthood, people tend to not like that, and it actually has the opposite effect. More people send money, more people ask what they can do to help, more people come to us for health care.”

Obama is also doubling down on halting the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood since CMP’s dirty video campaign. Recently, the Obama administration has threatened states attempting to cut off Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood with potential violation of federal law and promises to ultimately stop Medicaid funds to those particular states.

Currently, states that have canceled their Medicaid contracts to the women’s health provider are Alabama, Louisiana and New Hampshire, but more states intend to follow. Obama isn’t having any of it, and is reminding these states that they are not allowed to exclude health providers from Medicaid just because of certain services they offer. The Obama administration threatened to do this a few years ago, when Texas’ former Gov. Rick Perry stopped funding for low-income women’s health centers from reaching the state’s Planned Parenthood clinics. This forced Perry to fund his ill-advised plan with his state’s own money. 

From the beginning of his first term, President Obama has been a tremendous advocate and champion for Planned Parenthood, and has proven time and time again that he cares for women’s rights and women’s access to safe and affordable healthcare.

 

See:http://wp.me/p3h8WX-4OJ

The GOP’s contempt for women

chasdarwin1 Comment

Source: WashPost

Author: Katrina vanden Heuvel

Emphasis Mine

During the Republican primary in 2012, one of Mitt Romney’s most damaging gaffes was saying that he would “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. If only that were the Republican Party’s biggest problem with women today.

Leading in the early polls, billionaire blowhard Donald Trump ignited a firestorm of controversy when he said that Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who moderated last week’s presidential debate in Cleveland, had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” Trump was angry that Kelly had the gall to ask, among other things, how Trump justified his lengthy record of misogynist attacks on women. (“The big problem this country has is being politically correct,” he answered, ridiculously conflating political correctness with common decency.)

However, Trump’s ugly bombast is a distraction from a far more serious problem for the GOP. Three years after Romney lost the women’s vote by a double-digit margin, in part because of his support for defunding Planned Parenthood, the presidential debates last week made clear Republicans have only become more disrespectful toward women’s bodies, more deranged in their hatred of Planned Parenthood and more dismissive of female voters.

The rhetorical assault on women began in Thursday’s “undercard debate,” where seven Republican also-rans tried to breathe life into their listless campaigns. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal reflected the party’s disdainful attitude when he promised to investigate Planned Parenthood with “the Department of Justice and the IRS and everybody else that we can send from the federal government.” Carly Fiorina, who was crowned the “winner” of the debate by many observers, likewise attacked Hillary Clinton for “defending Planned Parenthood.” And despite being the only candidate who identifies as pro-choice, former New York governor George Pataki called for defunding Planned Parenthood, which he accused of showing a “hideous disrespect for life.”

But the most deplorable statements came when the top-tier candidates — all men, of course — took the stage in prime time. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio denied that he believes rape and incest victims should be legally permitted to have abortions, adding that future generations will “call us barbarians for for murdering millions of babies.” And Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker went a step further by defending his opposition to abortion even when the woman’s life is in danger, while criticizing Clinton’s “radical position” of supporting Planned Parenthood.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee delivered the most grotesque line of the night. “It’s time that we recognize the Supreme Court is not the supreme being, and we change the policy to be pro-life and protect children instead of rip up their body parts and sell them like they’re parts to a Buick,” he said. Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) echoed Jindal, pledging that he would order the Justice Department to investigate Planned Parenthood on his first day in office.

Finally, there was former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the supposed “moderate” in the race. “As governor of Florida, I defunded Planned Parenthood,” he boasted, adding, “We were the first state to do a ‘choose life’ license plate.” For Bush, the debate came just a few days after he got himself in hot water for saying, “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.” And while Bush later said he “misspoke,” insisting that he merely wants to divert funds from Planned Parenthood into community health centers, his record suggests otherwise: In Florida, Bush redirected money from Planned Parenthood into abstinence education and funded “crisis pregnancy centers” that discourage women from having abortions.

Regardless, what Bush meant to say is irrelevant. Women’s health is clearly not a priority for the GOP. Neither are women, in general. On the contrary, the gleeful cheering by the debate audience showed that disrespect for women’s bodies is baked into the party’s DNA. That’s why Republicans are attacking Planned Parenthood — an organization that has provided cancer screenings, birth control and other health-care services to millions of women in the United States — with increasing hostility, and it’s why the position that was once a liability for Romney has now become a litmus test for GOP contenders.

In the short term, GOP primary candidates may benefit from staking out such extremist positions, but they are undoubtedly alienating female voters and making it even more difficult to ever win a national election. As the party gets smaller and more conservative, GOP leaders’ anti-woman vitriol is getting worse and their stances on women’s health issues are getting more dangerous. Unless they change course soon, the party will only continue to shrink, and the cycle will continue. Indeed, with their distorted view of “life,” Republicans may be trapped in a death spiral from which they cannot escape.

Read more from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s archive or follow her on Twitter.

See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gops-problems-with-women-go-far-beyond-donald-trump/2015/08/11/d13a1c56-3f97-11e5-bfe3-ff1d8549bfd2_story.html

The 10 most important legal fights on abortion in the U.S.

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Source: Wash Post

Author: Juliet Elperin

As court fights have become increasingly critical in shaping the nation’s abortion laws, here’s a look at 10 of the most important cases pending right now in state and federal court.

1. Wisconsin. The American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood have challenged a law requiring every physician who performs an abortion at a clinic to have staff privileges at a local hospital, arguing that the measure would force two of the state’s four abortion clinics to close.In Wisconsin. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the law, which Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed on July 5; the judge will hold a hearing on the case this week.

2. North Dakota. The state’s Gov. Jack Dalrymple (R) garnered national attention in late March when he signed into law a bill restricting abortions as soon as a heartbeat is detectable, which can be as early as six weeks. But he has also signed off on bills prohibiting abortion based on sex selection and genetic abnormalities, barring non-surgical abortions and requiring hospital admitting privileges for abortion doctors. The Center for Reproductive Rights is challenging all of these bills, some in state court and some in federal court. The fetal heartbeat bill takes effect on Aug. 1, so there is a chance the federal judge overseeing that challenge would issue a preliminary injunction that would prevent it from taking effect in the state.

3. Virginia. NOVA Women’s Healthcare, the state’s busiest abortion clinic, just closed because its operators said it could not afford to comply with new regulationsrequiring costly upgrades in order to meet strict, hospital-like standards. A separate clinic, the Falls Church Healthcare Center, filed an administrative appeal petition in the Arlington Circuit Court in June challenging the new rules imposed by the Virginia State Board of Health. The Commonwealth has responded, so the case is going forward.

4. Arkansas. The ACLU, the Arkansas ACLU and the Center for Reproductive Rights are challenging a law barring abortions starting 12 weeks after fertilization, which was adopted after the Arkansas legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe’s veto of the law. In May the judge overseeing the case temporarily blocked the law, which was set to take effect in July.

5. Kansas. The Center for Reproductive Rights has challenged a sweeping anti-abortion bill. Last month the center got a preliminary injunction blocking two provisions of the measure, ones requiring providers to endorse specific literature on abortion provided to patients and redefining what constitutes a medical emergency for a woman seeking an abortion.

6. Arizona. The ACLU, the NAACP and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum filed suit in May against an Arizona law that bans abortion on the basis of gender and race selection, arguing that it is based on stereotypes about Asian Americans and African Americans.

7. Alabama. The ACLU, the ACLU of Alabama, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Southeast are challenging a law requiring abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. The judge in that case issued a temporary restraining order late last month against the measure, just as a federal judge had blocked a 2012 Mississippi law challenged by the Center for Reproductive Rights that requires any physician performing abortions in the state be a board certified or eligible obstetrician-gynecologist with admitting privileges at an area hospital.

8. Texas. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards said Saturday that her group was “evaluating litigation options” regarding the just-passed Texas abortion bill, which would not only bar abortions starting 20 weeks after fertilization but would impose an admitting privileges requirement and other operating requirements for abortion rules. Gov. Rick Perry (R) has pledged to sign the bill, but has not done so yet.

9. Oklahoma. The Center for Reproductive Rights has challenged both a law restricting non-surgical abortions and one requiring an ultrasound before a woman has an abortion. In both cases, the state supreme court has permanently blocked them. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider both cases, though it sent back a few questions to the Oklahoma Supreme Court regarding the suit involving medication abortions.

10. North Carolina. The Center for Reproductive Rights, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood have challenged a 2011 measure requiring abortion providers to show an ultrasound image to a pregnant woman, describe the features of the fetus and offer her a chance to listen to its heartbeat. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in the case in October 2011, and the case is still pending. Both the House and Senate in North Carolina have both recently passed more sweeping anti-abortion bills, and the governor has said he would sign the House version of that legislation. If signed, that bill could spark its own legal challenge.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/07/15/the-top-10-legal-fights-over-abortion-in-the-u-s/?wpisrc=nl_pmpol

11 GOP Positions Loathed by Young People — According to College GOP Report

Young people have strong disagreements with Republican policies and are far more likely to support progressive positions.

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Source:Think Progress via AlterNet

Author:Igor Volsky

“The College Republican National Committee released a report on Monday outlining the major challenges facing the GOP as it seeks to rebrand and redefine itself in the aftermath of the 2012 election. The survey criticizes the party’s singular focus on “big government” and “tax cuts” and calls on Republicans to become more tolerant and open on issues like same-sex marriage and women’s reproductive health.

But a close reading of the 90-page report finds that young people have strong disagreements with Republican policies — including large parts of former candidate’s Mitt Romney’s platform — and are far more likely to support progressive positions. Here are 11 examples:

1. GOP economic polices are to blame for the recession. “Although ‘Republican economic policies’ is the factor least likely to be viewed as playing a major role in causing the crisis, this is mostly due to young Republicans in the sample hesitating to pin blame directly on their own party, and an outright majority of young people still think those Republican policies are to blame – hardly an encouraging finding.”

2. Lower taxes will not create jobs.” In the August 2012 XG survey, there was not a strong consensus around the virtues of lowering taxes and regulations on business. Only 34% of respondents in that survey thought they’d be better off if the corporate tax rate were lowered, and only 36% thought such a move would make it easier for young people to get jobs.”

3. Increase taxes on the wealthy. “Perhaps most troubling for Republicans is the finding from the March 2013 CRNC survey that showed 54% of young voters saying ‘taxes should go up on the wealthy,’ versus 31% who say “taxes should be cut for everyone.”

4. End the attacks on women’s reproductive health. “[T]he issue of protecting life has been conflated with issues around the definition of rape, funding for Planned Parenthood, and even contraception. In the words of one female participant in our Hispanic voter focus group in Orlando, “I think Romney wanted to cut Planned Parenthood. And he supports policies where it would make it harder for a woman to get an abortion should she choose, even if it were medically necessary. That goes head in hand with redefining rape.”

5. Expand universal health care coverage. “Many of the young people in our focus groups noted that they thought everyone in America should have access to health coverage. In the Spring 2012 Harvard Institute of Politics survey of young voters, 44% said that “basic health insurance is a right for all people, and if someone has no means of paying for it, the government should provide it.” … As one participant in our focus group of young men in Columbus put it, “at least Obama was making strides to start the process of reforming health care.”

6. Provide comprehensive immigration reform. “The position taken most frequently by young voters was that “illegal immigrants should have a path to earn citizenship,” chosen by 35% of respondents… Some 19% chose “illegal immigrants should be deported or put in jail for breaking the law,” while another 17% took the position that “illegal immigrants should have a path to legal status but not citizenship.”

7. Cut the defense budget first. “Indeed, a large number of respondents pointed to the defense budget as the place where cuts should start. In the survey, 35% of respondents thought that “we should have a smaller defense budget and leaner military,” including 49% of young independents.”

8. Democrats are more responsive on student loans. “Many focus group members did think that Democrats were responding to the student loan crisis. “I think they’re more in tune to what we need right now with student loans, getting a job, fixing the housing market and the environment,” observed one participant from Orlando, with another adding that he had “heard Obama once say, oh, he has student loans, he went to school, he knows what we’re going through.”

9. Climate change is real. “Ultimately, while voters may say they are concerned about climate change, they rarely list it among the issues on the top of their minds.”

10. Bush’s wars blew up the deficit. “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan themselves, however, were largely viewed as having been a net negative for the U.S. In fact, during focus group discussions about the recession, one respondent said she felt that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had contributed in part to the economic crisis.”

11. Marriage equality for all. “Surveys have consistently shown that gay marriage is not as important an issue as jobs and the economy to young voters. Yet it was unmistakable in the focus groups that gay marriage was a reason many of these young voters disliked the GOP.”

Igor Volsky is a Health Care Researcher/Blogger for ThinkProgress.org and The Progress Report at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Igor is co-author of Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare. Reform.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.alternet.org/gop?akid=10516.123424.HktpYH&rd=1&src=newsletter849631&t=7

 

Busting Through the Media Firestorm: 6 Essential Facts About the Komen Controversy

How many of the rumors are inflated, and how many get at the real heart of why people responded to this decision with so much outrage?

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From: AlterNet

N.B.: Yet another example of the value of the first clause of the First Amendment! (“Congress Shall Make No Law Respecting an Establishment of Religion, “)

By: Sarah Seltzer

“The melodramatic tale of the breakup and pseudo-makeup between the Susan G Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood — and the ensuing media firestorm — simply will not die. Last week, after Komen announced it would end its grants to Planned Parenthood affiliates around the country and promptly spent several days fending off a barrage of criticism, it at last issued an apology and a promise to restore Planned Parenthood’s eligibility for grants.

But the fury at Komen hasn’t ended: it has outlasted the Nevada caucuses, the Superbowl and even Madonna’s halftime performance. And as with any incident that blows up in such a massive way, there are rumors and inflated facts obscuring the kernels of truth, and the important lessons embedded within a narrative which is constantly being added to by embarrassing leaks by insiders and revelatory digging by outsiders.

Komen is not the true champion of women’s health many thought it was. But how many of the rumors and stories are inflated, and how many get at the heart of why women responded to this decision with so much outrage?

Here, we push aside some myths and present the essential facts.

1. Yes, Komen reversed itself, but the exact future of the grants to Planned Parenthood remain unclear.

This is the most important thing to know. It’s true that the new rule that would have excluded Planned Parenthood from Komen grants has been changed. This stipulation previously barred any organization under investigation, but has now been altered so that the investigation must be criminal, not political.

So while Planned Parenthood is now once again “eligible” for grants from Komen, the funding is not yet assured.

As the Washington Post explains, “It did not specifically state that the foundation would fund Planned Parenthood but said that the group would be eligible to apply for future grants.”

There are a few more hurdles on the way back to funding, the article notes — for instance, it might be too late to apply for those Komen grants.

Martha Edmonds, vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Central New Mexico, said she thought it was unlikely her group could obtain Komen funding this year because the deadline for applying to the local affiliate has already passed.

“We didn’t end up submitting a grant application for this current cycle because we thought we wouldn’t be eligible,” she said.

Furthermore, in its reversal, Komen didn’t address its second reason for denying funds to PP — the fact that it provides mammogram referrals and initial screenings, not actual mammograms.

Again, from the Washington Post:

Nonetheless, because Komen officials have not backed away from their earlier talk of refocusing funding on groups that directly provide mammograms and other breast screenings, [Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life] said she is hopeful that the ultimate result will be that the foundation ceases future funding of Planned Parenthood.

So while the PR and initial fundraising victory was decisively Planned Parenthood’s, the story of this partnership is not necessarily written in stone, and it doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending.

2. The deeper problems with Komen include a lack of checks and balances and a strong connection to Republican politics.

Komen Foundation CEO Nancy Brinker, a well-known Republican donor who traded favors with George W. Bush, is both the chair of the Komen board and its president, while her son and several close friends serve on the board. “A review of the board of directors of Komen…reveals that Brinker has the likely votes to control board decisions at any given time, and that those votes are either Republican stalwarts or individuals personally loyal to her,” Buzzflash reports. In addition, Komen is one of many nonprofit giants with fairly high executive compensation (read all about it here (PDF).

Still, those who study the nonprofit world are less concerned with the more than comfortable salaries at Komen, and more with how the organization is structured. Lori Stahl at “She the People” spoke to experts:

James Abruzzo, a management and global business instructor at Rutgers Business School, said the picture that emerges from the Komen documents does raise several concerns, however.

First, he said, Brinker’s duals roles at Komen may hobble the decision-making process. “When you have a chairman who’s also the president, you have a lack of checks and balances,’’ Abruzzo said. “The founder generally populates the board with friends and associates.’’

And that’s where the problems come in.

3. Right-wing Republicans Karen Handel and Ari Fleischer both had direct influences on this decision that was so fateful for Komen’s brand.

Karen Handel, a Tea Party type who came on board as a Senior VP recently at Komen, has been the subject of much speculation about her link with this policy, despite repeated (and continued) denials from the company, and leaks which made it clear those denials were false.

At the Huffington Post, Laura Bassett received a particularly damning leak from within the organization:

“Karen Handel was the prime instigator of this effort, and she herself personally came up with investigation criteria,” the source, who requested anonymity for professional reasons, told HuffPost. “She said, ‘If we just say it’s about investigations, we can defund Planned Parenthood and no one can blame us for being political.'”

Emails between Komen leadership on the day the Planned Parenthood decision was announced, which were reviewed by HuffPost under the condition they not be published, confirm the source’s description of Handel’s sole “authority” in crafting and implementing the Planned Parenthood policy.

Meanwhile, another influential right-winger was involved in this catastrophic moment for the company, reports AdAge: “Former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, who had previously been brought in by Komen to assist with an executive search for a senior VP-communications, provided informal advice. “When Nancy called me, I gave her my two cents worth,” he said via email. ”

These kinds of facts, as well as the stories of the Brinkers’ history as big Bush donors, have torn the “pink curtain” off of Komen, revealing it to be far less neutral than its bland facade would seem.

4. Komen has led lobbying efforts against common-sense healthcare bills for years–even those that would help women.

In 2009, activists trained their ire on Komen because it retained Hadassah Lieberman–just has her husband turned against the public option in the health care reform fight. They cited her own ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

Komen has had a long history of lobbying for the wrong things–a shoddy Patients’ Bill of Rights, among others– and has stood in the way of research into environmental causes of cancer.

And this history is well documented. Back in 2002, AlterNet ran a story from Southern Exposure by Mary Ann Swissler that remains one of the most comprehensive exposés of the nonprofit giant’s extensive insider Beltway lobbying and corporate ties–ties that run much deeper than sponsorships by yogurt and soda corporations.

An example from the article:

It’s no accident the Komen side favors the Republicans. A July 12, 2001 agreement between the President and five companies to run a Medicare prescription discount card program for Medicare patients, included a company called Caremark Rx where Nancy Brinker was on the board of directors, according to financial records. Another vendor, Merck-Medco, is one of the many drug companies found in the Komen investment portfolio. (Nancy Brinker resigned all board seats, including Komen, when she was appointed). If approved, the discount cards would provide up to a 10 percent discount on brand-name drugs.

The entire story is loaded with these not-so-coincidental disclosures, showing the link between the Brinkers, their circles, and legislation they lobbied for–legislation that left poor women and the environment frequently in the lurch, and aided GOP Politicians and big corporations. Swissler profiles a small group of activists outmaneuvered by Komen and its huge feel-good races:

The races, they say, merely focus women on finding a medical cure for breast cancer, and away from environmental conditions causing it, the problems of the uninsured, and political influence of corporations over the average patient.

5. While the PR win of this brouhaha belongs to Planned Parenthood, the backlash has brought up some unfortunate myths — including the myth of abortion having a medical link to cancer.

There is no known link between abortion and breast cancer. The false ideas that has circulated both leading up to and in the wake of this decision by Komen, most notably by Rick Santorum (of course).

From the American Cancer Society, hardly a bastion of liberalism: “At this time, the scientific evidence does not support the notion that abortion of any kind raises the risk of breast cancer or any other type of cancer.” Every major study supports this.

In fact, before Komen took an anti-choice turn — Nancy Brinker herself called rumors of this link an “old wives tale” in her memoir, in the very same section where she mounts a vigorous defense of the exact same Planned Parenthood grants she was prepared to end last week (after an attack by the religious-run Curves fitness centers):

“The grants in question supplied breast health counseling, screening, and treatment to rural women, poor women, Native American women, many women of color who were underserved–if served at all–in areas where Planned Parenthood facilities were often the only infrastructure available. Though it meant losing corporate money from Curves, we were not about to turn our backs on these women.”

In the subsequent pages, Brinker dismisses the “ridiculous old wives’ tale that abortion causes breast cancer.”

So why, Jodi Jacobsen of RH reality Check asks, did Komen add Jane Abraham, of the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List (SBA) to their board? “Abraham is also closely affiliated with The Nurturing Network, a global network of crisis pregnancy centers,” Jacobsen writes, adding “Groups like Nuturing Network are the nucleus of lies about abortion and breast cancer. ”

6. The backlash against Komen was a widespread grassoots revolt, not a conspiracy by the “liberal media” (sorry, Ross Douthat):

Ross Douthat, unsurprisingly, uses his column space to bemoan what he claims is a media erasure of American “pro-life” voices — but he misses the story that many American women were furious at the decision regardless of their feelings on abortions. Viral videos and stories of women began to pop up talking about how their cancer didn’t give a crap about who was in office or who was “pro-life”–and therefore their cancer organization shouldn’t either.

Deanna Zandt, who created the Planned Parenthood Saved Me tumblr, has a post explaining who was coming to her site, which was gathering so much steam it hit the mainstream media: “You might think our crazy traffic came from those media mentions. Shockingly, no — most of the hits came before the major media. So, to repeat: telling and sharing our stories matters,” she writes.

The media saw this grassroots outrage growing on one hand — and then got crickets, or contradictory information from within Komen. And thus, a narrative was born.

Sarah Seltzer is an associate editor at AlterNet and a freelance writer based in New York City. Her work has been published at the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, Jezebel and the Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter at @fellowette and find her work atsarahmseltzer.com.

Emphasis Mine

seehttp://www.alternet.org/story/154030/busting_through_the_media_firestorm%3A_6_essential_facts_about_the_komen_controversy?page=entire