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?
Here is some MUST reading for those interested in the GOP hypocritical war on sex:
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/12/07/184442…
Oh, yeah. Back for an encore, many reasons to have lots of sex. http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=693
Like we NEED a reason!
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.
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.
I was wondering why there were bloody placard carrying pro-life picketers around Barnes Hospital today.