Mike Pence co-sponsored legislation that limited the definition of rape

Mike Pence co-sponsored legislation that limited the definition of rape
By Melissa McEwan OCTOBER 8, 2016
Republicans are now abandoning their nominee Donald Trump after public disclosure of his disgusting comments about grabbing women's genitals. But they cannot run away from their own record on women's agency — starting with a 2011 bill that sought to redefine rape to limit access to abortion.

In 2011, the House GOP provided a perfect insight into the intersection of anti-choice aggression and rape apologia, when they attempted to redefine rape in order to limit access to abortion.

Republican legislators, unhappy with exceptions to the Hyde Amendment which allow federal funds to pay for abortions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, wanted to limit the definition of the exception to “forcible rape,” thus excluding pregnancies resulting from incest, statutory rape, and rape via coercion or incapacitation.

That legislation, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” had 173 co-sponsors. Among them were Speaker Paul Ryan and the aforementioned Chaffetz, both now busily affecting a high dudgeon over Trump’s hostility for women’s agency.
Also on that list of sponsors? Then-congressman and current vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence.

Pence has built his career atop anti-choice measures, making Indiana one of the most unsafe places to be pregnant in the country — and now his party wants us to believe they’re horrified by Trump’s hostility toward women’s agency, even as they long for Pence to take his place.

The Republican Party’s position is essentially that sexual assault (forcing a woman to do something with her body she doesn’t want to do) is a Terrible Thing, but the denial of abortion (forcing a woman to do something with her body she doesn’t want to do) is a Moral Imperative.

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