The following article was penned earlier this evening. The photos and editorials from the protests in Austin are courtesy of the bottle of wine I found chilling in my crisper.
Still went home alone.
Were you drunk when you made this sign?
You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores
Is it that the government is small enough or that you're...?
Just one? Now we know why you're there...
Today, the Texas legislature began its second special session. The issue on the lips of people the world over to be determined during this session? Abortion rights. The bill at hand was presented to be voted on by the Senate last week, but due to a catheter-using, pink-shoe-wearing nightmare of a woman and her loud-mouthed followers, the bill could not be voted on in time to make it under the deadline for the initial special session. Not to be outdone, Governor Rick Perry called a second session to show that obnoxious anarchists would not act as a determining factor in Texas legislation under his watch.
So what does this bill really say? It states that abortions after 20 weeks would be banned in the state of Texas. That is 5 months. A woman has 5 months to decide if she would like to have an abortion. Additionally, it would raise the standards for those clinics providing the abortions to make them safer for women receiving the procedures. Part of this would necessitate that the performing physician have admitting rights at a hospital within 30 miles of where the procedure would take place. Due to geographic locations, this would hurt most clinics. Only 5 would be left running as they would be the only ones able to comply with these stringent new rules.
Also, for the record, this is a fetus at 20 weeks gestation. And yes, that is a face, not a clump of cells.
In 2008, the Allen Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood's research affiliate) reported 1.21 million abortions were performed in the United States alone. While the CDC compiles its own figures, a number of states fail to contribute their statistics, leaving the numbers hopelessly skewed. A common argument for allowing abortions is "what about victims of rape and incest?" Rape and incest comprise approximately 1% of all abortions performed and according to the 1987 by the institute, 95% of that 1% claimed a motive beyond the rape or incest for wanting the procedure. In 2004, an updated study by the Guttmacher Institute found that 92% of the women surveyed sought out a medical abortion for "social or other reasons", that is to say, medically unnecessary for the health of both the mother and child. "Social" reasons ranged from not being able to afford a child to not wanting to be a single parent and even to not feeling mature enough to have a child (but they were mature enough to have sex, go figure.)
The remaining eight percent was left with 4% of mother's fearing for their health, 3% fearing for the fetus's and 1% for rape/incest.
Anytime this issue is adressed, it seems to become a "war on women" with men trying to control the bodies of their fairer counterparts. However, I propose that in seeking to limit the scope of abortionists, the politicians are not mounting a war on women, but attempting to diffuse a war against people of color. Hear me out. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a devout racist. In a 1939 letter she penned, she said "We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the negro population?" While democrats like Barack Obama laud Ms Sanger's establishment of the clinic, they fail to adress this inconvenient fact alongside the fact that many of her clinics have come to reside in urban neighborhoods much less frequented by white faces. According to the US Census, in 2007 of all white women in the United states age 15-44, the abortion rate was 13.8 per 1,000 women. Among African Americans, the abortion rate was 48.2 abortions per 1,000 women, just shy of 4 times the rate in white women. For other races, the abortion rate was 21.6 per 1,000 women, almost twice the rate of white women.
According to Gallup polling, currently, approximately 48% of Americans identify as pro-life and 45% identifying as pro-choice. An inconvenient truth for the likes of Wendy Davis? Maybe, but she'll be dammed if she's going to let the public know THAT statistic.
If you are at all squeamish, look no further. A huge part of the aim of SB5 is to improve the quality of facilities and doctor performing these operations to prevent abortionists like Kermit Gosnell from harmng Texas women. The following is just a few pictures from his little shop of horrors.
(Clockwise from top right) A refridgerator with parts of aborted fetuses, an aborted fetus that was approximately 30 weeks old and was joked by Gosnell to be "Big enough to walk to the bus stop", another aborted fetus and the snipped spinal cord of a baby that was "aborted"
Waiting room Gossnell's patients (victims) waited in prior to their procedures
Many consider Gossnell's atrocities to be a problem that was an outlier in the system far removed from Texas, but it is not. As late as May 2013, abortionist Douglas Karpen of Houston, TX has been accused of murdering babies able to sustain outside of the womb in late term abortions in his THREE clinics. While his actions are considered illegal under even the current restrictions, cracking down on abortion clinics and more strictly regulating those that do operate would go a long way in preserving the sanctity of life for both the mother and child.
