Force the GOP candidates to answer whether they support freely available birth control.

Here’s how Christina Page addresses this question:

    • 98 percent of American women have done it.
    • 37 million Americans are currently doing it.
    • Most of the GOP candidates oppose it.
      What is it?

“It” is using birth control.   The GOP candidates have made it clear that they oppose the right of women to choose abortions.

The GOP candidates have not yet been forced to explain their generally ridiculous positions on this incredibly important issue of whether birth control should be freely available to consenting adults.  It’s time for this free ride to end.  They should be forced to take a position.  Why?  Honesty on this issue will reveal their ambitions to destroy additional personal liberties in order to hang onto the votes of fundamentalist zealots (I know that this is redundant).  Here’s how Page explains her position:

These guys [GOP candidates] may try to outdo each other on anti-abortion rhetoric and explain, unflinchingly, how doctors will be thrown in jail when Roe fails (an inevitability in their minds). But it’s the contraception question that really scares them. Because once the presidential debate focuses on how the candidates plan to alter the average American’s sex life (made possible thanks to family planning) it is lifted from the pink ghetto of “woman’s issues” and becomes a concern of male voters too.

For more evidence regarding the prevalent GOP position that birth control should not be freely available to American adults, see these previous DI posts:

Beware Claims of Pregnancy Resource Centers

The Bush administration relishes unplanned pregnancies – new evidence.

Focus of religious organization: Ban all birth control

Bush’s new head of family-planning programs opposes birth control

Protecting pharmacists who refuse to fill valid prescriptions for legal drugs

Those abstinence-only programs are really bringing down the teen pregnancy rate . . . or are they?

Conservatives: Stop having sex for the pleasure of it! 

Special proms for prepubescent fundamentalist girls 

Share

Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 6 Comments

  1. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth

    Here is some MUST reading for those interested in the GOP hypocritical war on sex:

    The central trouble with this war on sex is that early on in the history of Western civilization, sex has been demonized by religious leaders until today it is the norm to be ashamed of any sexual impulse whatsoever.

    http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/12/07/184442

  2. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth

    Today, Governor Mike Huckabee is scheduled to travel to Georgia to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. There he plans to join Georgia Right to Life to lend his support, as well as the focus of the national media, to HR 536. This legislation, also called the Human Life Amendment, is a state constitutional amendment that reclassifies the most effective and popular forms of contraception as abortion. The goal of the amendment is to create a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade while also defining life as beginning at fertilization. The anti-abortion movement believes that hormonal contraception (the pill, the patch, the depo shot, the nuva ring, the IUD) can destroy a fertilized egg. By setting in law the assertion — the unproveable assertion — that life begins at the moment of fertilization, the most common forms of contraception become abortion.

    For the full article by Christina Page of Huffpo, go here.

  3. Avatar of grumpypilgrim
    grumpypilgrim

    I have never understood why so many people fall for the nonsense argument that says, "if human life begins at conception, then abortion should be illegal." I've discussed this nonsense argument in detail in the following posts:
    http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=107 http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=912

    Simply put: the moment at which human life "begins" is irrelevant to the question of whether or not abortion should be illegal. Accordingly, proponents of abortion rights should point out this fallacy and force the so-called "pro-life" people to directly confront the real question.

  4. Avatar of Dan Klarmann
    Dan Klarmann

    I was wondering why there were bloody placard carrying pro-life picketers around Barnes Hospital today.

Leave a Reply