Women are the majority in this country yet they still elect and vote for those who take away their rights.

It appears that subjection is what the majority of America women want.

I do not agree with it but their voting patterns reflect it.

I consider myself a Christian but the Christ I was brought up to believe in has NOTHING to do with what these fundamentalists so-called "Christians" teach. They teach everything that I - and I believe the Jesus I was raised on - would find abhorrent. They might acknowledge that the Iraq invasion was a bad thing, but they prioritize their efforts in subjugating women, fighting the teaching of science, and defending the right to use violence in their households. (in approximately that order, based on my experience.)

It makes me almost physically ill when I think of the way some women relatives or friends of friends have been sucked into this evil.

I have a couple of female cousins whose primary reason for voting is restricting choice. One is a single mom who has a job at a plant that pays $9/hour, even after she's been there for years, and the other works part-time at Walmart.

I don't believe they have any issues that they care about other than abortion, and the GOP exploits this through the church. One is at the edge of poverty and the other is considered being in poverty. Yet they don't care about economic issues at all.

So it's people like them who are part of the problem, but I don't know how to break through. They don't seem to care at all that they enable the destructive GOP to remain in power.

Oh, and they live in NC, and we can all see how that state is circling the drain as it applies to civil rights.

This from people who can otherwise seem intelligent and thoughtful at times. But they have been so twisted up to believe in shit like the earth being 6000 years old (dinosaurs with saddles and all that), and there are websites and institutions that go into lengthy, logical-sounding (to their audience) arguments about why all that stuff is true. I wish I had the time to pick it apart piece by piece but still I think they would close their minds.

My current approach is to try to encourage appreciation for God's Creation as He* created it, in the hopes that they at least will realize that the mega-corporations that are destroying the planet are NOT on their side. It's a long shot and doesn't directly help with women's rights at all. But it's the only possible access point I've found so far.

* I tend not to think of God as gendered, but they do.

Before they care about This again like they did before. They'll have to have a dead daughter or sister, a dead friend.

It has to get personal.

And another

Laws that single out abortion providers by imposing irrelevant and onerous regulations are not good-faith efforts to make an already-safe procedure safer, but instead aim to make abortion care less accessible, according to a new analysis by Guttmacher policy experts Rachel Benson Gold and Elizabeth Nash. The authors trace how opponents of abortion rights are employing a state-level strategy to not only make it burdensome for women to obtain an abortion, but also block clinics from providing abortions in the first place.

"In many states, antiabortion legislators have mostly exhausted legal means to badger women into not seeking an abortion, for instance, by requiring multiple in-person visits or mandating biased counseling and medically unnecessary ultrasound exams," says Rachel Benson Gold, Guttmacher's director of policy analysis. "A wave of laws is now bluntly focused on driving providers out of business via a thicket of regulations designed not to benefit patients but, as some of their proponents admit openly, to make it impossible for many providers to come into compliance."

TRAP laws or regulations are now in place in 27 states, where 60% of women of reproductive age live. Some of these provisions require that:

bortion facilities or their clinicians have unnecessary and burdensome connections to a local hospital (21 states). As the analysis details, such links to hospitals do little to add to long-standing patient safeguards while effectively granting hospitals veto power over whether an abortion clinic can exist;
abortion facilities meet standards for ambulatory surgical centers (26 states), even though the latter provide procedures that are more invasive and risky than abortion. Twelve states specify the size of procedure rooms and the same number specify hallway widths, often giving a minimum width well in excess of what is actually needed to transport a patient in case of an emergency; or that
facilities that provide only medication abortion adhere to the same standards as those that also provide surgical abortion care (18 states).

<snip>

http://www.guttmacher.org/media/nr/2013/06/27/index.html

Many here at DU just don't give a shit.

But man, let the possibility that the government has 1/10th the info that most of us give private corporations for free, be raised by some "hero" hacker who happens to be a Paulite, and straight to the top of the greatest page for that.

WOMEN ARE DYING NOW.

But the possibility the big bad government may someday use some info against someone to harm said someone, just maybe, sometime in the future, is FAR more important to many.

No wonder the far right extremists are getting away with gutting women's rights.

we are in complete accord about this.

That's good enough for me.

Everyone would have condemned it other than a few freeper trolls.

It takes two to argue, perhaps if there wasn't a solid contingent bound and determined to defend government spying then we could spare some attention for other issues, like the legislative attacks on women who happen to make up over half of the voting public.

Abortion is more or less a settled issue on DU, OPs about abortion don't generate a lot of posts because it's not remotely controversial here. Government spying on the other hand is controversial and hence generates a lot of posts, a lot of clicks and a lot of recs.

Another thing to keep in mind is that North Carolina was chosen by the Democratic party as the state in which to hold the 2012 DNC. Clearly NC is looked upon as a model for the rest of the country by the Democratic party, why else hold the national convention there?

on this issue.

Yes, they're ignoring it.

no wonder we're losing the war for women's rights.

the women voting have little to no choice who they vote for.

Many races in Kansas do not have a Democrat running.

The Democratic party does little to nothing and if you do run you run with your own money and people for the most part.

There is no money and/or no will from the party to even attempt to reach the rural areas, they barely reach the populated areas.

When your governor has a 32% approval rating but there is not one democrat that is polled against him that can beat him then you are in major trouble. Mainly most people don't even know who the person running against him is, they are no names and personally I would rather not vote in a race than vote for someone I don't know about.

**I do take the time to learn about who is running, I was speculating on what I or others might do if they did not and believe me, Sam Brownback had a Democrat running against him. Just ask the people in Western Kansas who were surprised as hell when they saw his name for the first time on the ballot.

SO, there are many reasons for this and much of it in the really rural states, long abandoned by the party. Perhaps the women are not voting for them, perhaps they either are not voting or have no choice at all.

It's so frustrating that the 50 state state strategy was abandoned.

I was never a fan of Dean, still don't much care for him BUT this strategy worked. It would take a long term strategy in places like Kansas but it would work. We actually replaced a long loved Republicans (by some) old sports figure (that seems to mean more to Kansans than even being a veteran) with a female Democrat. This was in the more liberal populated area but still, he had been in Congress for a long time. Since the strategy was dropped we have Lynn Jenkins (R) often called "the great white dope".

At some point you learn to give up, then you fight, then you give up. The Koch brothers own us completely and there are no rich Democrats who can even touch this with businesses here.

Anyway, back to the initial point. I think most women do NOT vote against their interests. Many in these tiny farming communities have no other place than the church to congregate and spread the news. Many of the even lack grocery stores. My community has a church, a VFW and a tiny post office. Abortion is unlikely to be approved by many of those churches in such a staunch Republican area.

The other thing, probably church approved, is the voting the way my husband tells me to vote. Having done phone banks until my ear is deformed I can tell you that happens more than you would ever believe. I don't think that is just here at all. I have had husbands grab the phone away from their wives and yell at me for bothering her, "she don't know nothing about any of that, she does what I tell her and you should go home and submit instead of causing trouble."

Blaming women does not fly with me and we need to stop doing this.

The indifference on DU is appalling

and the old white men are working to take it all away. Women can stop this.

and white lots of white women of all ages.

I don't know how we can stop it. We're pretty dependent on the Courts and the record of success in challenging TRAP laws is not encouraging.

But we certainly need to raise our voices. And we need more young women. There's been a serious "graying" of the abortion rights movement.

A corpse has more rights in this country than a woman does anymore.

. . . because they believe, with good reason, that the Roberts Court will uphold everything. I dare, after the previous three sessions, they're probably right. Those strict constructionists are total hypocrites when it comes to legislating from the bench. The fix is in.

This is awful. Just awful. The only thing that can possibly turn it around now was the same thing that turned it around before. People, men and women, found that illegal abortion was intolerable. Now, a new generation has to learn what should be an obvious lesson.

while we have a (D) in the White House.


This court can't be trusted with a challenge to these laws even though they are unconstitutional.


There is no doubt that we have been losing ground on this fight but the fight is not over yet.

I'm always glad to see men contributing to threads on abortion.

I agree that we need a conservative justice to retire. It would be great if it was Thomas but even Kennedy would do.

To say we're losing ground is a huge understatement.

Scalia and Kennedy were both born in 1936 and Breyer in 1938. Thomas was born in 1948.


Stevens stuck it out until he was 90 but that seems to be unusual. I assume some of it was not wanting Shrub to name his replacement. Souter retired a few months before he turned 70 and O'Conner retired at age 76.


I am guessing that Scalia is going to try and stick it out so that Pres. Obama will not name his replacement, but if a (D) wins in 2016 he might then decide to give it up. Waiting until 2021 for him to go does not seem reasonable. I think that once he is in his 80's he will hang up his robe even if we do have a (D) in the White House.


It has been rumored for years that Ginsburg was considering retirement (she turned 80 in March). That would not give us a more liberal court but it would give us a younger one. If she does retire while Pres. Obama is in office I suspect we will get another woman to replace her.



The very best case would be Both Scalia and Kennedy retiring while we have a (D) selecting replacements so that we have a nice solid block to stomp on Alito, Thomas and Roberts for years to come. I think this is a real possibility if we can hold The Presidency in '16.

It is always implied that "retire" has two meanings.

It is just impolite to point it out.

Sometimes my heart overrules my head.

Ohio's abortion restrictions took effect July 1st.

They are some of the most restrictive in the country.

Kasich signed it on Sunday surrounded by men only.

in this link horrifies me (apologies for being so tech challenged that I can't even post a pic)

as do the provisions that asshole signed into law


<snip>

The new budget, which takes effect on Monday, includes at least five new anti-abortion provisions. HB 59 will defund Planned Parenthood clinics, reallocate family planning funding to right-wing “crisis pregnancy centers,” strip funding from rape crisis centers that give their clients any information about abortion services, impose harsh restrictions on abortion clinics that will force many of them to shut down, and require doctors to give women seeking abortion information about the presence of a “fetal heartbeat.”

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/07/01/2237701/ohio-budget-signed-into-law/

No need to apologize.

I am tech challenged as well.

not pro-choice their position on other issues is irrelevant to me because they will never get my vote.

while ALL public institutions are being gutted and the economy is in the ditch as we careen toward third world status.

The destruction of the American economy is a bipartisan affair.

Sorry, but abortion should NOT be the "most important" issue facing this country.

If a woman doesn't have a right to be autonomous then as far as I'm concerned politicians will respect nothing else, either.

want to - it doesn't get ANY more repressive and anti-society than that, since women are over half the population.

I think it could. The horrors that may happen until that occurs are the problem.

on the horizon. It has to happen-- we are not a theocracy.