The War on Women

[Elvis]

El Amigo » Wed May 20, 2015 8:58 pm wrote:

Elvis » Wed May 20, 2015 8:47 pm wrote:
Thorstein Veblen's 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, points out that the earliest form of private property was men owning women. The very notion of private property began with men owning women.




If men have sex with a woman, aren't they 'owning' her during the act?

No. Not ever. Since you ask.

[Project Willow]

Amigo, I'm not sure if you're a trolling MRA, a twelve year old, an alter of a certain regular, or some combo of all three.

Whatever the case, I'm really sorry you're so confused and have difficulty seeing women as anything other than an alien species (yep T), but I can't think of anyone here who would want to help you with that, and you're already coming dangerously close to violating our guidelines.

If men have sex with a woman, aren't they 'owning' her during the act?

No, and there's a gazillion ways to destroy that destructive cultural message, from the molecular level on up. Some people call it love-making, and you can't have love and intimacy with someone you view as an alien "other".

Okay, I've done my duty. Somebody flag the post when the inevitable happens.

[Twyla LaSarc]

Amigo, I see a burqua, a woman sweltering in heat that i have stripped down for (and most men from their culture, hypocritcal pricks in tank tops and shorts), and see repression. I didn't understand the printed language, but I understood the pictures of smiling cartoon women in burquas posted in my locality. It said "Keep Sweet".

Just because some hippie girls wear skirts and 'slave bracelets' and you find it sexy does not mean they are slaves. When I am not wearing huge frankenstein boots when working , I have been known to dress the same. I feel sorry for the girls in burquas, but because they will never feel the caress of the breeze on their skin or hair ( see photos of women in islamic lands taking off their headgear in nature) and will always be beholden to a fake 'eternity' held out by ugly, depraved heart men who feel that only they should be able to touch said body.

No man owns me during sex. My lovers know that and they respect that. I do what I do because I love them back, not because I feel obligated and idolization turns me off.

You think that if you do not actively hate women and want to idealize them, you are OK. Truth be told, you are part of the problem. As I said before, we do not wish Idealization, we only demand full humanity.

[Twyla LaSarc]

PS: I watched a couple of women as they quickly put their headgear back on at their bus stop after having been downtown for the day. I have seen girls unwrap themselves for a day at a remote park, only to wrap back up to go home...None of that shit is in any way a legitamate reflection of voluntary submission.

To have to go between madness and humanity and fear punishment, that is Sickness: it is an iron boot smashing a woman's face forever.

[Luther Blissett]

There are plenty of Muslim women who have said that their choice to wear whatever they choose, including the hijab or burqa, was revolutionary and liberating. It's difficult for me to understand that, but it doesn't make it any less true.

[Twyla LaSarc]

There are plenty of Muslim women who have said that their choice to wear whatever they choose, including the hijab or burqa, was revolutionary and liberating. It's difficult for me to understand that, but it doesn't make it any less true.

Perhaps so, but I have seen the gradual growth of veiled women in my neighborhood, women who didn't veil a few years ago, and muslim friends and co-workers who feel obliged to sell off or destroy cultural art that is not muslim (ala the record burnings of the not so distant xstian past) and I see the posters and stickers in the neighborhoods (like the burqua one). It is not liberating other than signaling to males of your culture that they refrain from targeting you for rape or sexual derision. Many of them peel off that shit while they are outside of the neighborhood and nobody is looking. I am uncomforable now in those areas because the threshold for 'asking for it' is so much lower now and the tacit hostility and sexism is harder to escape. Fine, you if you like being fully clad at all times, bully for you, but covering oneself from head to toe to shield from sexual oversight may be liberating in the short run, but still fucks up your (and other women's )freedom to be a human as you are.

[Luther Blissett]

Feminist activist Grace Mann murdered; blogger blames her death on feminist jokes about misandry

Last month, police say, University of Mary Washington student and feminist/LGBT activist Grace Mann was murdered — bound and asphyxiated by a male housemate and fellow student.

An antifeminist blogger is blaming her death on feminist jokes about misandry.

As Mike Oelke of the Feminism is a Fraud blog sees it, Mann’s death was the inevitable result of the unwillingness of feminists to “learn misandry is not a joke.” In an older post, Oelke had predicted that

one day a feminist wearing an “ironic” KILL ALL MEN t-shirt will walk down the wrong street, enter the wrong room and encounter the wrong man; a man that does not value her as a woman and chooses not to treat her as an equal. The man will not see the t-shirt as ironical humor, but be offended and beat her savagely, laughing as he licks the tears from her crying eyes.

WIth Mann’s death, he says, this “prediction has somewhat been proven true.” And he promises that there will be more violence directed at feminists who

constantly laugh off their misandry as a joke, while treating misogyny like a scourge. Some types of males are going to take that badly with predictable results.

While he says he doesn’t “feel good” about his prediction “somewhat” coming true, he also claims that

this young woman’s death serves a purpose. She “Took one for the team.”

That callous and cruel last line, whatever Oelke meant by it, seems more than a little ironic given the facts of the case.

While we still don’t know the motive of the man who allegedly murdered her, Mann’s death took place on a campus that feminist activists say has become an increasingly hostile environment for them.

The campus group Feminists United — of which Mann was a member — has faced a barrage of harassment and threats online and on campus since last fall when it started to “expose the insidious misogyny and hatred” on campus, as the group’s president Paige McKinsey put it in an op-ed for the school paper in January.

The most egregious example of this “insidious misogyny” was the violent chant — celebrating the rape of dead “whores” — that the school rugby team performed at a party last fall. Surreptitiously recorded by a (male) friend of McKinsey who happened to be at the party, the noxious chant was brought to the administration’s attention by Feminists United last November.

Once the school began disciplinary actions against the team earlier this year, its supporters reacted with outrage — and an even bigger wave of harassment against campus feminists, including hundreds of threatening comments made on the anonymous chat app Yik Yak.

There were rape threats and numerous vicious, sexually explicit personal attacks against McKinsey; Mann was also targeted and threatened with rape. One supporter of the team warned that feminists would “burn” if the team was suspended and that “there will be no survivors.” Another threatened that “Dandy’s about to kill a bitch … or two.” When Feminists United reported these threats to the school administration, they were reportedly told that the school could do little about them.

The rugby team was suspended in March. Mann, a prominent member of the group whose activism led to the team’s suspension, was murdered in April. The suspect, a returning student named Steven Vander Briel, was a former member of the rugby team.

And while there is as yet no clear evidence that there is any connection between the suspension of the team and her murder, it is hard not to wonder if she was killed, not for any ironic jokes about misandry, but for challenging the culture of violent misogyny that seems to infect the Fredericksburg, Virginia, campus.

Mann, who was gay, was not involved with Vander Briel, police say; she was assaulted during what was supposed to be a brief stop at her home after returning from a Day of Silence event to raise awareness about bullying and harassment directed against LGBT folks.

In the wake of Mann’s murder, Feminists United, along with the Feminist Majority Foundation, has filed a Title IX complaint with the Department of Education charging the University of Mary Washington with a “systemic failure to protect” members of the group “from a sexually hostile school environment, from sex-based cyber assaults, and from threats of physical and sexual violence.”

At a media event on campus announcing the complaint last Thursday, Frederickburg.com reports,

Attorney [Debra] Katz said the complaint does not allege that the university caused Mann’s death, but that it “failed to act in the face of vicious abuse and ridicule” Mann suffered.

According to Frederickburg.com, Julia Michels, a University of Mary Washington student and one of the complainants in the Title IX complaint, said at the media event that while

she hopes the threats did not have anything to do with Mann’s death … when she heard the news … her thoughts immediately went to the threats.

“I know she had been mentioned by name on Yik Yak, and I know she was scared, as I am,” Michels said. “I know she was angry, as I am. Most of all, I know she was disappointed in her school for failing to protect her, just as I am disappointed at UMW for failing me.”

We will know in time, one can only presume, what motivated Mann’s murderer. But the damage that can be done by the sort of violent misogyny that she and other members of Feminists United were subjected to on the University of Mary Washington campus — and which her friends still face — is already very clear.

“Misandry” is a joke. Misogyny can kill.

NOTE: This discussion thread is a NO TROLLS, NO MRAs, etc thread. If you’re a troll, an MRA or similar and you comment in this thread you will be banned.

EDIT: I have added a few things to highlight Mann’s LGBT activism.

[Twyla LaSarc]

Females aren't real people to these monsters. Little girls and women are simply baby gumball machines to them.

A quote in somewhere in commentary about the current news.

I am sorry to be emphatic, to have to speak out against the amigos to go all fucking Sojurner Truth on their asses.

I am a human. I made a choice to limit my spawn to three (and pregnancies to 2). I work as hard and I can eat as much as a man when I can get it. this neanderthal body I live in will graze you under the table.

I love men for the most part, I do not want to be advesarial. but why can't we just get along?

[seemslikeadream]

Scott Walker take your ultrasound probe...shove it up your ass... sit on it and swivel...you fuckin piece of shit...that's what I think would be cool

MONDAY, JUN 15, 2015 01:26 PM CDT


Supreme Court shuts down Scott Walker:

Today’s ultrasound decision is a big defeat for anti-choice warriors
The GOP contender thinks forced ultrasounds are "cool," but the justices just dealt the movement a big setback

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 ... tervention

If Mike Huckabee becomes president, he will consider using all available resources to stop abortions in the US – including a domestic military intervention.

At a succession of campaign stops this week, the former Arkansas governor said he would violate a landmark supreme court ruling to accomplish his goal of ending abortion.

“I will not pretend there is nothing we can do to stop this,” Huckabee said at one stop in Iowa.

The Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi pressed Huckabee at the next campaign stop, asking if he would use the national guard or the FBI to stop abortions. Huckabee responded: “We’ll see, if I get to be president.”

He then said he would use all resources available to stop abortions if he were to reach the White House.

On Saturday, the Huckabee campaign did not respond to a request for details of exactly how he would use domestic military forces and law enforcement to stop abortions.

But during press questions at the campaign stop, Huckabee said he would invoke the fifth and 14th amendments to protect what he believes to be humans. The fifth amendment protects against trial without jury and ensures the due process of law; the 14th addresses citizenship and the rights of citizens.

Huckabee also defended the potential move by exaggerating how common it is for presidents to violate a supreme court ruling.

Jesse Choper, professor emeritus of public law at the University of California-Berkeley, told the Topeka Capital-Journal that presidents who oppose supreme court rulings generally favor noncompliance instead of aggressive action – and said even that was a rarity.

“I think he’d better more carefully examine what he’s saying, because it is totally unprecedented,” Choper said of Huckabee.

As expected, reproductive rights advocates criticized Huckabee’s comments.

Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show and a founder of Lady Parts Justice, said: “Mike Huckabee wants to drive a tank into your vagina, so that’s a thing.”

“Well, we did say they’d stop at nothing,” tweeted Planned Parenthood, which Republicans are trying to defund, again.

Huckabee hit the headlines last weekend, when he told the rightwing media organization Breitbart that thanks to the Iran nuclear deal, President Obama would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven”.

It was not the first time the former Arkansas governor had caused controversy with a reference to the Holocaust.

Last November, while in Europe, he said: “If you felt something incredibly powerful at Auschwitz and Birkenau over the 11 million killed worldwide and the 1.5 million killed on those grounds, cannot we feel something extraordinary about 55 million murdered in our own country in the wombs of their mothers?”

It also emerged on Friday that Huckabee, who the feminist website Jezebel calls “An Incredibly Menacing Adult Cabbage Patch Doll”, made nearly $1m from speeches in 2014. He also made $2.9m as president of his publishing company, a filing said.

[seemslikeadream]

Federal Appeals Court Dropkicks Scott Walker's Bogus Abortion Law Into the Sun

A federal appeals court has ruled that Wisconsin’s law requiring that abortion providers have admitting privileges at a local hospital—effectively and deliberately shutting down clinics in the state—is unconstitutional, reports the Associated Press.

2013 Wisconsin Act 37 was enacted in July of 2013, and while it is purportedly designed to serve the safety and peace of mind of women seeking abortions, its real purpose is to make getting an abortion as grueling and inconvenient as possible. Section 2 includes the infamous “informed consent” provision, which requires that pregnant women receive an ultrasound prior to the procedure. Section 9 explicitly allows the “grandparents” of the “unborn child” to sue the abortion provider for “emotional and psychological distress.” Act 37 is a bullcrap law.

The law also said that all abortion providers must have admitting privileges at a hospital “within 30 miles of the location where the abortion is to be performed.” Planned Parenthood and Affiliated Medical Services—two organizations who provide abortions in Wisconsin—sued the state, arguing that this particular provision “amounts to an unconstitutional restriction on abortion.”

From a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report:

In a statement, Planned Parenthood said only four health centers provide abortions in Wisconsin. If the law took effect, the group said, the largest of those centers would be forced to close immediately, leaving the remaining three unable “to absorb the unmet need.”

The group argued that would amount to restricting access to abortions in Wisconsin. State attorneys contended the mandate will ensure continuity of care for women hospitalized with abortion complications.
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ three-judge panel found the state’s “continuity of care” argument unconvincing, according to the AP report:

Judge Richard Posner told the state there was no rational basis for the law, saying it didn’t provide any health benefits for women seeking abortions and was clearly designed to close abortion clinics.

Judge Daniel Manion noted that complications could arise from abortions carried out through medication that women take at home. In those instances, complications could occur 100 miles or more away from the hospital where the doctor who gave her the medication has admitting privileges, he said.

The third judge on the panel, David Hamilton, questioned how the state could suggest it was acceptable for women to travel to Chicago or Minneapolis if the law forced the Milwaukee clinic to close.
The Journal Sentinel reports that a spokesperson for Governor Walker says the state intends to appeal. In the meantime, the ridiculous informed consent provision is apparently still law. The AP says Wisconsin’s now-blocked law and other, similar laws that have been blocked in other states “may ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

[seemslikeadream]

apparently this op needs to be bumped .....there is at least one person here that missed it completely......6/30

The New, Ugly Surge in Violence and Threats Against Abortion Providers
The deadly shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic is part of a distrurbing trend.
—By Nina Liss-Schultz | Sat Nov. 28, 2015 6:00 AM EST

Firefighters battle a blaze at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Washington September 4, 2015. KREM.com/AP Photo
Three people were shot dead and nine injured Friday at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic, the first time since 2009 that anyone has been killed in an incident linked to activity at an abortion clinic. The attack comes amid an exponential increase in threats and violence against abortion providers since the release of a series of viral—and widely debunked—videos.

While police have not discussed the alleged motives of the suspect, who has been arrested, the attack began at the clinic. According to authorities the gunman entered the facility Friday afternoon and began shooting. During an hours-long standoff, he exchanged fire with police, killing one officer.

Since the release of the Center for Medical Progress' videos that purport to show Planned Parenthood selling fetal issue, harassment, threats, and attacks against abortion providers, their staff, and facilities have surged dramatically across the country, according to new numbers from the National Abortion Federation.

"We have been quite worried that this increase in threats would lead to a violent attack."
The clinic attacked on Friday is part of the Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains affiliate, which was featured in the Center for Medical Progress' videos.

"Since the series of highly-edited, misleading anti-abortion videos was released in July, we have seen an unprecedented increase in hate speech and threats against abortion providers" says Vicki Saporta, the president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, which has been tracking violence against providers since the 1970s.

"We have been quite worried that this increase in threats would lead to a violent attack like we saw" on Friday, she added.

The Federation is suing Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress for allegedly setting up a sham biomedical organization and misrepresenting their identities in order to gain access to and record a federation meeting.

Abortion providers have grappled with harassment and threats for years, but the tide of vitriol began rising dramatically in July, after the first video was released. Soon after that, an anonymous reader posted a message on Fox Nation's website.

"I'll pay ten large to whomever kills Dr. Deborah Nucatola. [She] should be summarily executed. I'll do it myself if no one else does." A month later, another physician, Dr. Savita Ginde, came home to find 50 people protesting outside her door. They left fliers around her neighborhood that said, "Savita Ginde Murders Children."

Nucatola and Ginde both work for Planned Parenthood and were featured in videos surreptitiously recorded by the Center for Medical Progress. They are among a handful of abortion providers who have been catapulted into the public eye by the group and its public face, David Daleiden. But harassment has not been limited to the providers spotlighted in the series—the first video of which has received more than 3 million views on YouTube.

CLINICS TARGETED

Violence against reproductive health clinics dates back to at least Roe v. Wade, when anti-abortion animus swelled in reaction to the 1973 landmark Supreme Court case. In 1982, an Illinois-based provider and his wife were kidnapped, and three clinics in Florida and Virginia were bombed in the same year. In 1984 there were more than 25 cases of bombings and arson across the country.

Coordinated attacks reached a fever pitch in the early 1990s. Anti-abortion activists, led by Operation Rescue—a group whose president, Troy Newman, is also currently the secretary of the Center for Medical Progress—created large-scale human blockades in major cities across the United States. These protests prevented anyone from leaving or entering clinics, which led to hundreds of arrests by law enforcement.

Meanwhile, the number of violent incidents also increased, and in 1993 Dr. David Gunn was shot and killed in the parking lot of a clinic here he worked in Pensacola, Florida. Gunn had been the subject of wanted-style posters distributed by Operation Rescue. In 1994, an abortion doctor, a clinic escort, and two receptionists were killed in two separate incidents.

Since July, incidents of harassment against Planned Parenthood facilities increased ninefold compared with June.
Congress enacted the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 1994, making it a federal crime to injure, intimidate, or interfere with abortion providers or those seeking their care. But in January 1998, an abortion clinic security guard was killed during a bombing at his workplace. And in October, abortion doctor Barnett Slepian was murdered in his home.

Two weeks after Dr. Slepian’s death, Attorney General Janet Reno created the Task Force on Violence Against Health Care Providers, led by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and staffed by investigators from the FBI and other federal agencies. Violence plummeted in the years following the clinic access law and the creation of the task force. According to the FBI, in 2012 violations of the clinic access act made up only 2 percent of the bureau's civil rights cases.

A NEW SURGE

But harassment, threats of violence, and attacks against clinics have gone up again following the release of the Center for Medical Progress videos in July, according to recent National Abortion Federation court filings. That month, incidents of harassment against Planned Parenthood facilities increased ninefold compared with June, and those numbers continued to rise through August.

In the four months following the release of the videos, there have been at least four suspected arsons that targeted abortion clinics, compared with just one in all of 2014 and none in 2013. There have been at least five cases of vandalism since August. In comparison, there were 12 total cases of clinic vandalism in all of 2014 and just five cases in 2013, according to federation figures.

In one of the recent vandalism cases, a young man entered a Planned Parenthood in New Hampshire and destroyed medical equipment, phones, and computers. This month, an unidentified person smashed the windows of Kentucky’s only full-time abortion provider, twice in three weeks.

Anne, the executive director of the clinic, who declined to give her last name for security reasons, told Insider Louisville that in its 20 years of operation, the clinic had never before been vandalized.

The last slaying linked to activity at an abortion clinic was in 2009, when Dr. George Tiller was murdered at his church in Wichita, Kansas.
The deaths of three people at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood on Friday were the first slayings linked to an abortion clinic in six years. The last was in 2009, when the abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was murdered at his church in Wichita, Kansas. Scott Roeder, who was found guilty of Tiller's murder, said he'd shot the doctor because "preborn children's lives were in imminent danger."

The FBI has also reported an increase in the number of attacks on reproductive health care facilities across the country since the videos were released in July. A spokesperson from the FBI was not immediately available for comment.

"It's a concerning time," says duVergne Gaines, director of the National Clinic Access Project.

The project, which is a program of the Feminist Majority Foundation, has trained clinic escorts and helped clinics increase security with surveillance cameras, alarm systems, bulletproof glass, and vests. When Gaines spoke with Mother Jones earlier this month, she said "the trifecta of efforts: excoriating, and inspiring individuals to go out and target providers by demonizing them" leaves providers vulnerable and that they were lucky no one had yet been hurt.

"But we fear that may be around the corner," Gaines said at the time.

The violence is intended to silence providers and drive them away from their jobs, but officials from the National Abortion Federation and the National Clinic Access Project, say women should feel safe going to clinics. Law enforcement agencies are aware of the issue, they added.

Indeed, the number of abortion providers decreased 38 percent between 1982 and 2000 and continues to decline. According to research from an anti-abortion group, the number of surgical abortion clinics dropped to 582 in 2013, down from more than 2,000 clinics in the early 1990s. And in the last two years, surgical abortion clinics have been closing at a rate of 1.5 clinics every week.

And though it's hard to pinpoint every cause for the decline, "stigma and fear of violence…are powerful barriers to abortion provision," according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

For some abortion doctors, violence only deepens their resolve to provide abortion care. LeRoy Carhart quit doing surgery and opened his abortion practice in 1991 after a massive fire on his family's 65-acre Nebraska farm. The day after the fire, Carhart said he received a letter that said the abortions made his property a target for the fire. No one was ever convicted.

The physician now operates a clinic in Nebraska and travels to Maryland each week to perform abortions. For security reasons, he says he avoids staying in the same hotel twice and tries to take different routes to work.

"After the fire, it totally changed everything. That's when we decided to just do abortions full time," Carhart said, "It was my way of getting back."

[zangtang]

[quote="Pele'sDaughter » 28 Nov 2015 15:18"]http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/01/mike-huckabee-end-abortion-military-intervention


Last November, while in Europe, he said: “If you felt something incredibly powerful at Auschwitz and Birkenau over the 11 million killed worldwide and the 1.5 million killed on those grounds, cannot we feel something extraordinary about 55 million murdered in our own country in the wombs of their mothers?”

Not fit for public office, evidently...........

[seemslikeadream]

SATURDAY, OCT 31, 2015 05:30 PM CDT
The war on women is not a war at all: It’s a one-sided assault by sad, insecure little men
Conservatives don't give a damn about the direction of the culture. They just want to control women's bodies
VALERIE TARICO, ALTERNET


The war on women is not a war at all: It's a one-sided assault by sad, insecure little men
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
AlterNetThe so-called ‘war on women’ is not a war; it’s a one-sided assault. It is conservative men, drunk on power, calling women sluts and then rolling up their sleeves and knocking us back into place. It is conservative men letting us know that they own our bodies and reproductive capacity, which according to the Bible have been theirs since the Iron Age. It is conservative men making damned sure women get punished for failing to keep our legs together, for daring to pursue intimacy and sexual pleasure on our own terms and without their permission. It is conservative men ignoring our pleas that we don’t want to be pregnant and denying us the ability to resist impregnation as deliberately and aggressively as if they had our arms pinned.

If that’s not an assault, I don’t know what is.

We need to get our language straight because words we use carry associations and implications that change the way we think. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff (Moral Politics; Don’t Think of an Elephant) popularized the term “framing” among progressive activists. He explained why the metaphors we use can be more powerful than any amount of rational argumentation or evidence—undermining or supporting our position by activating a whole neural network of ideas and images that may operate below the level of consciousness.

Consider the implications of calling the right-wing assault on reproductive rights a “war”:

Men aspire to be warriors. They play with toy guns as children and get addicted to fast-twitch war games as adolescents. They drive Humvees and pose in high fashion camouflage as adults. They liken the winner-takes-all competition of capitalism or elections or football to combat. They go out for drinks and tell “war stories.”

In wars, both sides are armed. Soldiers are comrades whose loyalty to each other trumps all else. They are taught to dehumanize their enemies. They come home heroes. They get medals.

Politicians use war to arouse nationalistic pride. Philosophy teaches us that war can be just or noble or an art form. Religion teaches that it can be righteous or even commanded by God. Onward Christian soldiers. In the quest to win a war, lives and families destroyed are mere collateral damage. Economic devastation is a means to a higher end. Any man fighting in a war thinks he is one of the good guys. To paraphrase author Chris Hedges, war is a force that gives men meaning.

Assault, by contrast, is unequal and often unprovoked. One side is the clear aggressor. There’s nothing glorious about assault. In fact, perpetrators are widely reviled. Nobody organizes a victory or veterans’ parade to celebrate assailants. A man who forces his will on a child or who forces pregnancy on a woman is a repulsive villain, not a hero.

Republican lawmakers and candidates who spend their days toying with women in front of the C-SPAN cameras in order to excite men who get off on female disempowerment may think of themselves as “culture warriors.” But let’s call them what they are: perpetrators of assault—the assault on women.

[seemslikeadream]

Tennessee Self-Abortion Arrest Highlights Dangers of War on Women
'The Tennessee legislature is responsible for the coat hanger, however, Ms. Yocca is on trial and that is unacceptable.'
byDeirdre Fulton, staff writer

"Many people would love to see an end to abortion, but a majority of even those people don't want to see women locked up in prison." (Photo: Sean Hobson/flickr/cc)
A Tennessee woman is facing an indictment for first-degree attempted murder after she tried to self-abort, offering a stark illustration of how restrictions on reproductive healthcare and criminalization of abortion can impact individuals in the United States.

According to Tennessee's Daily News Journal, 31-year-old Anna Yocca was arrested last week and is accused of using a coat hanger in an attempt to end her pregnancy in September. She was 24 weeks into gestation. The Murfreesboro Post adds that Yocca was booked into jail on a $200,000 bond.

Detective Tommy Roberts charged that Yocca filled a bathtub with water, "took a coat hanger and attempted to self-abort her pregnancy." Because of the amount of blood, she "became concerned about her safety" and her boyfriend took her to Saint Thomas Rutherford Hospital. Yocca was then transported to Saint Thomas Midtown in Nashville where medical professionals were able to save the fetus, which weighed 1.5 pounds.

Fetal homicide is a crime in 38 states, including Tennessee.

The Washington Post reports:

In 2012, the state passed legislation expanding the definition of “another person” to include fetuses at all stages of development, making it one of 23 states with such a broad definition. People could now be prosecuted for harm done to a fetus or embryo.

The law exempts only pregnant women who undergo a “lawful medical or surgical procedure” performed by a licensed medical professional — in other words, a legal abortion.

However, access to legal abortion is already severely restricted in Tennessee. Not only is abortion illegal in the state after 12 weeks, but a bill signed in May requires women make two trips to a clinic, 48 hours apart, before they can undergo the procedure.

In addition, the use of telemedicine for the performance of medication abortion is prohibited, the parent of a minor must consent before an abortion is provided, and public funding is available only in cases of life endangerment, rape, or incest. The National Women's Law Center gives Tennessee an "F" grade when it comes to healthcare access; and the Guttmacher Institute says that as of 2011, 63 percent of Tennessee women lived in counties without an abortion clinic.

Such restrictive and punitive polices lead to "acts of desperation" like Yocca's, said Cherisse Scott, founder and CEO of SisterReach, a reproductive justice organization based in Memphis.

"The Tennessee legislature is responsible for the coat hanger," Scott said on Monday, "however, Ms. Yocca is on trial and that is unacceptable."

Scott added: "These acts of desperation will happen more frequently unless the Tennessee legislature reconsiders its posture about both current and potential anti-abortion legislation and the fetal assault law which allows a penalty of up to 15 years in prison for fetal harm."

Indeed, a study from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project published earlier this year after a draconian anti-abortion law resulted in the closure of about 20 clinics in the state, found that at least 100,000 Texas women have attempted a self-induced abortion.

It warned: "[W]e suspect that abortion self-induction will increase as clinic-based care becomes more difficult to access."

This conclusion supported a separate analysis from the Guttmacher Institute in September, which outlined how the surge in state abortion restrictions could lead to self-induced abortion becoming a "more common phenomenon."

"The impact of restrictions on abortion services falls hardest upon low-income women," said Andrea Rowan, author of the Guttmacher analysis. "Some women want to terminate their pregnancies but live in hostile geographic areas and have limited resources and support. They are left with no practical options other than to self-induce, which in turn may put them at risk of prosecution. This situation is all too familiar in some countries where abortion is highly restricted."

Earlier this year, Purvi Patel was sentenced by an Indiana court to 20 years in prison for the crime of feticide. Calling the ruling "traumatic and frightening," National Advocates for Pregnant Women executive director Lynn Paltrow said at the time: "Many people would love to see an end to abortion, but a majority of even those people don't want to see women locked up in prison."