World News Korner

Pro-Choice lawmakers are finally starting to go on offense in protecting a woman's right to choose.

Courtesy of The New Civil Rights Movement:

On abortion issues, Democrats traditionally play defense. Over the last twenty years, that strategy has seen abortion rights eroded at an alarming rate. Once the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that states could regulate abortions to “safeguard the health of the mother”, states used that canard as a fig leaf to disguise their attempts to keep women from accessing an abortion; and the floodgates opened.

Clinics have been shuttered, but instead of fighting back, women just travel farther, often over state lines. States have demanded waiting periods and multiple visits, but instead of objecting, women take time off work, find someone to watch their kids, and stay alone in cheap motels, or sleep in their cars, because they can’t afford a room. Some states are forcing women to view sonograms and be impaled on unnecessary probes, but everyday women close their eyes and let it happen. In the states where they said “no convenient abortion drugs”, women sigh and spread their legs and endure the more dangerous surgical procedure.

In some states doctors have been given permission to lie to pregnant patients without penalty. In others, doctors are told they must lie if they think the truth about her pregnancy might make the woman decide on an abortion. And women have accepted that too; accepted every last indignity, like an abused woman who thinks there is nothing she can do to end the beatings but try not to make her abuser angry.

Finally, one lawmaker has had enough. Roll Call reported Wednesday, that Senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut, (left) will introduce the “Women’s Health Protection Act of 2013″, to stem what he called the “cascading wave of restrictions” states have been enacting.

Here is what the Women's Health Protection Act would accomplish:

• Require any restriction imposed by a state to be “medically necessary”.
• Preclude any state from enacting any restriction that world decrease access to abortion services.
• Make illegal any restriction requiring doctors to go against their best medical judgement. Stop states from subjecting reproductive clinics to requirements that are not imposed on other medical specialties.”
• Provide a legal benchmark for judges and justices deciding abortion cases.

And Blumenthal is not alone, Senator Tammy Baldwin, Senator Barbara Boxer, Rep. Marcia Fudge, Rep.Judy Chu, and Rep. Lois Frankel also pledged their support.

This is long past due in my opinion.

Too long have those of us on the pro-choice side allowed the debate to be defined by the other side, and too long have we been reacting to their aggressive anti-women policies instead of acting first to put in place policies that would protect women from religiously inspired lawmakers who want to keep women "in their place."

I hope that this is just the beginning and that soon we will see a whole crop of new bills introduced to protect our women from theocrats and misogynists.

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