Cali is one who has posted about this many times. I'll tell you what i told her. We should be using this as a lesson. The Rethugs are not idiots, and they are not fools. They may be wrong on the issues, but they are not idiots. Before I go any further, I want to clarify that the Rethugs are wrong on this issue too.

Take a look at this legislation. Look at the arguments. The article says it sounds deceptively reasonable. But we did not do anything about it. Instead of being smart ourselves, we knee jerked and started shouting. We did that because we knew what the goal was, but we didn't think before we acted. The answer was so obvious and we ignored it thinking we could get what we wanted by shouting and screaming and pointing at the Rethugs as we yelled a lot.

The arguments for this law breaks down pretty easily. If I go to a Oral Surgeon, and he performs the procedure in his office, then he has the authority to admit me to the Hospital if there is a problem. He has privileges to practice medicine at the local hospital. If something does go wrong, then he can do more than dial 9-11 and wish me a nice day as I'm loaded into the Hospital. So the obvious truth is that sometimes things do go wrong. Complications happen no matter who the surgeon is, no matter how minor the procedure appears to be on the surface. A patient of a Doctor expects the Doctor to be there through the entire process, from start to finish. Abortion is just as invasive a procedure as having my wisdom teeth removed. Yet, the Doctor there has no ability to admit me to a Hospital if something goes wrong. Precious minutes are lost as the Ambulance wheels me into the Emergency room while the Doctors there are trying to get up to speed, because no phone call from a colleague preceded me to the Hospital.

As I said, it looks simple enough to the average person, and it appears to make sense. Even the requirements that rooms in which procedures are performed that require inspections seems reasonable, I mean, we inspect fast food joints once a year, why not a room and office where relatively simple procedures are performed.

AGAIN I AM NOT SAYING THAT THESE ARGUMENTS ARE RIGHT! I apologize for shouting but there are many here who would claim that.

Our response was as stupid as it could have been. We started shouting that Rethugs were going to restrict a womans right to choose. We started calling them names, and saying that they were liars. Why didn't we take their argument and run with it? Why didn't we turn their argument back upon them judo style?

The truth is that many times the Doctors only come in once or twice a month to perform the procedures. Obviously it is prohibitively expensive to be given privileges to a dozen different hospitals and be covered by a dozen different agreements. So why didn't we get smart too? Cali and I discussed this in several threads before, and I don't know why nobody on our side thought this through.

Imagine if you will a Doctor from Houston. A well known trauma surgeon who is going to Dallas to watch the Cowboy's play football. A terrible accident happens, or terrorist attack, whatever. Part of the stadium collapses. This Doctor under these laws would be prohibited from providing anything more than the most basic of first aid. He could not do much more than put a band aid on the victim because he does not have admitting privileges at the local hospitals. We have taken a Surgeon with years of experience and turned him into a horribly overqualified paramedic. How many patients are going to die because of the laws which prohibit him from assisting in this disaster? I would point out that this Doctor is licensed to practice medicine in Texas, afforded full privileges in Houston, just not in Dallas.

At Hawaii in 1941, Doctors came from where every they were to provide whatever assistance they could during the Pearl Harbor attack. These people showed up and and worked for days with little respite to save life and limb of as many as they could.

So why would we not act to afford more privileges for the Doctors in Texas? We should have proposed a law that any Doctor who is licensed to practice medicine in the state of Texas is able to admit a patient into any hospital when an unforeseen situation happens and saving lives is the important thing isn't it? Otherwise we have essentially given the licensing requirements to whatever hospital group exists in a city. We are allowing the insurance groups and shadowy boards that own the Hospitals to restrict the access to trained medical personnel in an emergency.

Let's say that you have a rare heart condition. The best Doctor for that procedure is in Dallas. You are in Lubbock. If they move you, you won't survive the trip. While the Doctor is negotiating the ability to practice medicine in Lubbock with the Hospital, days and many lawyers later, you die from complications. Under the proposed law from Democrats (The one we should have put forward) This Doctor could have come there and saved your life.

But we won't put that argument forward. Instead we'll sit around hoping that Wendy Davis overcomes the 12 point disadvantage in the Reddest of states and somehow she is able to single handedly overturn this rethug law. That she would be powerless to actually do so is another truth we refuse to accept.

colonoscopies, etc. have a strict protocol for the highly unusual instances when something goes really wrong with a patient - call 911. Whether the physician (or oral surgeon) performing the procedure has admitting privileges to a local hospital is totally irrelevant. When the shit hits the fan the patient needs to be taken care of by qualified emergency docs, which is why the patient is transported to the emergency care unit at the nearest hospital. At the most, in an outpatient setting the only thing done is to try and stabilize the patient until the paramedics arrive. The whole issue of requiring admitting privileges for professionals doing outpatient procedures is phony from start to finish.

The average person, you know those who vote one way and then in the next election the opposite way. Those folks think that these rules sound reasonable. Sure the Surgeon calls 911. But that same oral surgeon has also done procedures at the hospital, and has probably been called for a few emergencies too where teeth were involved, like after a major accident.

Simply jumping up and down and shouting it's all bullshit isn't going to win this argument. The only way to win is to turn it back on them by being even more reasonable. But for some reason, we won't even consider that. We're too busy jumping up and down shouting that Republicans are Stupid. Stupid and they hate Women. Yeah, that does really well on the boards here, and it probably does well in a room with a handful of Democratic supporters. But it isn't doing well in the rest of the nation.

We made the fatal mistake. The same mistake losers have made through history. We underestimated our opponent, and we got over-confident. Until we start taking Republicans seriously, and putting some thought and effort into our arguments, we're going to keep losing. This is but the first from the Republicans.

Hey, you want another analogy for the statewide recognition of a licensed individual? Fine. Let's say your Lawyer had the same restrictions. He shows up from Dallas to Lubbock and asks to speak to you while you are in custody. The Sheriff checks the list, and says. "You ain't got no privileges with the local court. So you're practicing law without a license."

Are the laws any different in Lubbock? Are they written in Sanskrit? The individual is a lawyer in Texas, admitted to the BAR. That lawyer can practice law anywhere in the state. Why should doctors be any different?

Lawyers are licensed to practice throughout a given state in all courts of that state. Doctors are also licensed to practice anywhere they like in a given state. The issue here is one of WHO gets admitting privileges at a given hospital, the rules for which are established by each individual hospital. There are no state laws governing how doctors are admitted to practice in any hospital.

Make admitting priveleges part and parcel of being a Doctor. Sorry you missed it in my original response. I thought it was painfully obvious.

institutions (most owned by large corporations) and are free to hire and/or extend admitting privileges to whomever they choose. In fact, that's the problem, as most hospitals don't want to get on the wrong side of the Xian antiabortion fundies, so they refuse to extend admitting privileges to anyone working at an abortion clinic.

I'm not convinced that what I think your argument is (i.e. forcing hospitals to extend privileges to all doctors licensed in their state) is at all realistic nor is it easily explainable to the public at large. However, the cold, hard fact that the TRAP laws are a solution in search of a problem might well be better understood.

"Sorry, your dentist had to close down. These eminently reasonable rules mean he had to."

Suddenly those rules start looking really stupid.

Something that Democrats probably aren't going to do. It's just more rewarding to shout and scream and jump up and down.

The last three times I sent suggestions to a Politician the only response I saw was a flurry of requests for political donations. Besides, they don't do well when I suggest that a blue collar worker from Georgia seems to be smarter than they with their combined decades of experience in the matter. I get plenty of requests for donations all ready thank you very much.

I've said this before and I am going to keep saying it:

If a woman wants an abortion badly enough, she's going to find a way to get one. This has been true historically, and it is still true today.

That is why abortion needs to remain safe, legal and private.

I had this "argument" with several young women at the time the law was passed. I live in Texas and (as indicated in the post), several young women that I regularly speak with were not concerned about the passed of this law at all. They saw it as something reasonable. The GOP'ers looking out for the safety and welfare of the women who wanted to have an abortion.

I did my best to explain the REAL motivation to them.