Women: we care during elections, but during session, please piss off | by Carrie
So Rep. Hartnett's last-minute amendments to SB 419 passed. The first one imposed severe restrictions on late-term abortions in ways that can seriously endanger pregnant women's lives and put families through unimaginable emotional pain. It doesn't matter if your kid has a thirty-second life expectancy; if you found out too late because you didn't have health insurance, hey, that's your fault, you layabout, and you're going to have to go through labor and give birth because we say so. The second one required parental consent for minors to have abortions. It's not as bad as HB 1212, which got killed last week, but it's still bad. It makes it so much harder for young women in abusive homes to have a range of reproductive options available. And who exactly do you think is most likely to be in need of an abortion, someone who's got a sitcom-perfect relationship with her parents or someone whose parents are beating her up or who had a family member rape her? Hello? Did someone miss Molly Ivins' heartbreaking column on this?
Why are there no cranky email alerts flying around about this except from organizations that work solely on reproductive rights? Why did the TX blogosphere largely ignore these events?
I give props to Rep. Pena for his play-by-play, to Byron over at Burnt Orange Report for for his mention, and to the fine folks at PinkDome for noting how left-field and sneaky the amendments were. But what I haven't seen is much outrage.
When other things happen that involve far less risk of, you know, being kicked out of your house or being maimed or killed, my RSS reader and inbox fill up with overblown rhetoric before you can say spam.
So why not this time? Because Ds take women for granted, that's why. We depend on women to vote Democratic and then hope they won't notice when we ignore their interests during session. Also because many Ds are just too damn spineless to stand up for repro rights for fear of '06 election repurcussions. These two issues are controversial, to be sure, but when other Republicans are standing up and basically saying, hello, have some compassion for families going through this, and Molly's already told us what these girls are going to go through... come on! Who the hell are we if we're not standing up for the most vulnerable among us?
Let me sum up:
Dear Women: All your bodies are belong to us. Love, the Lege
P.S. We don't care enough to do anything about that. Love, most of the Democrats