Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
I have written a number of posts for the Turley blog about The GOP’s war on women and proposed extreme anti-woman legislation which has been sponsored by members of the Republican party (here, here, here, here, here, and here). In a piece for Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer said that Paul Ryan has a “long history as a culture warrior”—and that people are taking “a fresh look” at it since Mitt Romney named Ryan as his running mate. I thought I’d do some investigating of my own to find out more about the Wisconsin “culture warrior’s” position on women’s issues.
According to Laura Bassett, Rep. Ryan “voted to defund federal family planning programs, authored a budget that dismantles Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, all of which disproportionately aid and employ women, and voted multiple times to prevent women in the military from using their own money to pay for abortions at military hospitals.”
Sylvia Casablanca, a medical doctor and holistic psychotherapist, wonders if Ryan will now “head the conservative war on women.” Casablanca wrote in a VOXXI article that Ryan “sounds, thinks, acts, so much like Rick Santorum!” She added that both men have spent much of their public lives “battling the things that matter most to women.” She continued, “He [Ryan] has been opposing contraception, eulogizing women who quit successful careers to be stay-at-home moms (like their own wives have done), and vowing to defund Planned Parenthood and repeal the Affordable Care Act. And, Ryan voted against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.”
Casablanca feels that Ryan’s stance on the issues mentioned above are “zilch” compared to his “support of a federal ban on abortion in all circumstances, including incest and rape.”
In her Mother Jones article, Mencimer also wrote the following:
What isn’t so well known about Ryan’s record, though, is that one piece of legislation he supported is so extreme that it would have turned Romney’s children into criminals.
The Sanctity of Human Life Act, which Ryan co-sponsored, would have enshrined the notion that life begins at fertilization in federal law, thus criminalizing in vitro fertilization—the process of creating an embryo outside of a woman’s womb. In IVF, doctors typically create multiple embryos and then only implant the healthiest ones in the woman. Some of them stick and become babies, and some don’t. The embryos that don’t make it to the womb are either frozen for later use or destroyed. The Sanctity of Human Life Act, if passed, would make all those embryos “people” in the legal sense, so if they aren’t used or don’t become babies after being implanted, they would essentially become murder victims under the law.
H.R. 212: Sanctity of Human Life/Personhood Bill
Sponsor’s Summary: To provide that human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilization.
Excerpt from the text of H. R. 212:
SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS.
For purposes of this Act:
(1) FERTILIZATION- The term ‘fertilization’ means the process of a human spermatozoan penetrating the cell membrane of a human oocyte to create a human zygote, a one-celled human embryo, which is a new unique human being.
(2) CLONING- The term ‘cloning’ means the process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, that combines an enucleated egg and the nucleus of a somatic cell to make a human embryo.
(3) HUMAN; HUMAN BEING- The terms ‘human’ and ‘human being’ include each and every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, beginning with the earliest stage of development, created by the process of fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent.
Link to MSNBC Hardball Video: Revisiting Ryan’s extreme pro-life positions: Chris Matthews talks with Kate Michaelman, former head of NARAL, and Politico’s Maggie Haberman about Paul Ryan’s extreme pro-life stance, and his support for a federal ‘personhood’ law.
In addition, Rep. Ryan is a cosponsor of some other “extreme” anti-woman legislation that has been introduced in Congress. To wit:
H.R. 3805: Ultrasound Informed Consent Act
Sponsor’s Summary: To ensure that women seeking an abortion receive an ultrasound and the opportunity to review the ultrasound before giving informed consent to receive an abortion.
H.R. 3: No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act
Open Congress Summary: This bill would make permanent and expand the Hyde amendment restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortions. It seeks to prohibit even indirect funding streams that may potentially come in contact with abortion services. For example, it would deny tax credits to companies that offer health plans that cover abortions and it would block anybody with insurance that covers abortions from receiving federal subsidies or medical cost tax deductions, even if the abortion portion is paid separately with personal funds. Women who use tax-free Medical Savings Accounts would have to pay taxes on the costs of abortions.
H.R. 358: Protect Life Act aka “Let Women Die” Bill
Open Congress Summary: Amends the new health care law so that no federal money could be applied to health insurance plans that cover elective abortions, even if the abortion coverage is paid for entirely with private funds. It also states that a federal agency can not force a health care provider that accepts Medicare or Medicaid to provide abortion services, even in cases when the mother’s life is endangered.
From Human Rights Watch:
US: House Vote Puts Women at Risk
Bill Would Permit Hospitals to Let Women in Need of Care Die
(Washington, DC) – The United States House of Representatives approved a bill on October 13, 2011, that would put women’s lives at risk, Human Rights Watch said today. The bill, if it becomes law, would reverse longstanding federal policy requiring hospitals to provide life-saving care regardless of expense, Human Rights Watch said.
The Protect Life Act, HR 358, would amend the healthcare reform law to grant hospitals far-reaching powers to deny patients abortion care, without any exception for emergency situations. US law currently requires hospitals receiving federal funds to provide emergency care to anyone in need up to the point at which they can be stabilized or transferred, if the original hospital is incapable of providing the care they need.
“The misnamed Protect Life Act is about allowing women to die if they need an emergency abortion,” said Meghan Rhoad, women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “It is a vicious attack on women’s rights and on the most basic right to life.”
The Paul Ryan Vision: Ban Abortion, Defund Contraception, Outlaw In Vitro Fertilization
What do you think about Paul Ryan’s position on women’s issues?
SOURCES
Paul Ryan: the ‘Personhood’ Crocodile? (Huffington Post)
Paul Ryan Sponsored Fetal Personhood Bill, Opposes Family Planning Funds (Huffington Post)
Paul Ryan, new head of the Republican war on women? (VOXXI)
Bill Press: The Paul Ryan-Mitt Romney ticket: trouble for GOP (Newsday)
Sandra Fluke: 8 Points on Ryan’s Voting Record on Women’s Issues (Politic365)
Rep. Paul Ryan Supported the “Let Women Die” Bill (Blog for Choice)
How Did Your Representative Vote on the “Let Women Die” Bill? (Blog for Choice)
See How Your Lawmaker Voted on the “Let Women Die” Bill, H.R.358 (Prochoice America)
Sandra Fluke: Paul Ryan on women’s issues — so bad it’s unbelievable … but true (Lean Forward/MSNBC)
Five Reasons Why Paul Ryan Is Bad For Women’s Health (Think Progress)
The Paul Ryan Vision of America: Ban Abortion, Defund Contraception, Outlaw In Vitro Fertilization (Democracy Now)
List of Bills Sponsored and Cosponsored by Paul Ryan (Open Congress)
Paul Ryan: the small government champion who could force transvaginal ultrasounds on pregnant women
Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential pick is an anti-choice fanatic
By Amy Goodman
8/16/12
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/16/paul-ryan-small-government-champion-force-women-ultrasound?newsfeed=true
Excerpt:
Ryan is considered by many a champion of small government. For women, though, the federal government that Paul Ryan envisions is big, intrusive and controlling. Paul Ryan would ban all abortions, with no exceptions, even in cases of rape, incest or the health of the mother. In other words, the mother could die as a result of complications from the pregnancy.
The Planned Parenthood Action Fund highlighted several other issues, among them, “his budget plan to dismantle Medicaid, jeopardizing the basic health care millions of women rely on, [and] his vote last year to end funding to Planned Parenthood, putting at risk the cancer screenings, birth control, STD testing and treatment, and other preventive care that nearly three million Americans rely on each year.” The anti-choice National Right to Life Committee stated, “Ryan has maintained a 100% pro-life voting record.” He is a co-sponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, what critics call the personhood bill, now in Congress, that would define in federal law that:
“the life of each human being begins with fertilization … irrespective of sex, health, function or disability, defect, stage of biological development, or condition of dependency, at which time every human being shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.”
The law goes on: “a one-celled human embryo … is a new unique human being.” As reported in Mother Jones, this law would make normal in vitro fertilization (IVF) practices illegal, as the process creates multiple fertilized eggs, one or two of which might be used to help a woman have a child. The others are frozen, used for research or destroyed, which, under this bill pushed by Ryan, would become murder. Mother Jones points out that at least three of Mitt Romney’s sons have relied on IVF to give birth to several of his 18 grandchildren. Likewise, the IUD, intrauterine device, which prevents the fertilized egg from implanting, would be illegal.
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell introduced Mitt Romney at the Norfolk event. McDonnell was recently in the national spotlight for promoting a state law that would force women seeking an abortion to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound. Republicans, who accuse President Barack Obama of putting government bureaucrats between doctors and their patients, were trying to mandate a medically unnecessary procedure that required the insertion of a wand into a woman’s vagina.
The provision was widely ridiculed, and may have been one of the reasons Governor McDonnell himself was not standing next to Romney as his running mate. Yet Ryan, who was, co-sponsored a similar bill, the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act. It contains a bizarre provision that states nothing in the law will “prevent a pregnant woman from turning her eyes away from the ultrasound images”.
What we cannot do is turn our eyes away from just how radical Paul Ryan’s plans are for more than half of the US population: women and girls. Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist famously called for a government small enough to “drown in the bathtub”. Representative Nita Lowey (Democrat, New York) told online news website Buzzfeed:
“House Republicans – of which Paul Ryan is a leader – would shrink government so small it can only fit under the door of a woman’s doctor’s office.”
Paul Ryan and the Republican problem with women
Are nuns’ objections to his social agenda an indicator?
August 15, 2012
Susan Reimer
The Baltimore Sun
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-08-15/news/bs-ed-reimer-ryan-women-20120815_1_poor-women-women-voters-paul-ryan
Excerpt:
Well, I’m pretty sure Mitt Romney’s VP pick cost him the nun vote.
Fourteen women religious embarked on a nine-state bus tour this summer to protest Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget proposal — which he successfully pushed through the House before it was beaten back in the Senate — because of the drastic, some say catastrophic, cuts it would make to programs that benefit the poor, the sick and the hungry.
Pretty much a nun’s constituency.
The nuns stopped the bus in Mr. Ryan’s home town of Janesville, Wis., but he wasn’t available to meet with them, although he has jousted with Jesuit priests at Georgetown University, who also criticized him, and the Catholic bishops, who did, too. Dissing nuns doesn’t do much for the Republicans’ problem with women.
The thinking is, in Democratic circles anyway, that the nuns’ objections to Mr. Ryan’s economic principles are a bellwether for what other women voters may think of this man once they get to know him. Women, especially women with families and children, generally find the deprivation of other families and their children to be untenable.
Add to that, Mr. Ryan’s uncompromising beliefs about abortion: Not even in the case of rape or incest. He also co-sponsored a bill that would grant “personhood” to a fertilized egg, making abortion and some forms of birth control the statutory equivalent of murder. (It didn’t get any further in Congress that it did in Mississippi, whose voters defeated a similar law.)
He supports a constitutional amendment that would ban same sex marriage and voted against the lifting of the ban on gays and lesbians in the military. Mr. Ryan may be a libertarian in matters of government spending, but not, apparently, on the role of government in social issues.
But it will probably be his proposal to shift Medicare to a voucher-to-buy-insurance system that will set off the most alarms among women. After all, women represent 56 percent of the Medicare recipients (we generally outlive our spouses), and it is the women, the daughters, who are most likely to step in to care for their aging parents. Mr. Ryan would move Medicaid to a block grant to states, too, and while Medicaid was designed for the poorest among us, it is now often used to pay for the nursing home care of the formerly middle-class.
You know. Our parents. Probably our mothers.
Elaine,
You can’t beat Monty Python!
shano,
I love Monty Python!
Let’s see if I can post that video.
Yes, why not try this? It sounds much less expensive than havin’ to train surgeons, build hospitals, fund medical schools, etc.
Less work too, except for the grave diggers and the carts rolling through the streets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs
shano,
Maybe we don’t need health insurance, doctors, medicine, vaccinations, hospitals, etc. All we need to do is trust in God.
oh for gods sake. A woman with a medical emergency should “trust God” instead of her doctor/ This is why religion is losing customers!
Jim,
Are you suggesting that anyone whose life is in danger for medical reasons should trust in God and not be treated by a doctor? Or would trusting in God apply only to pregnant women?
Jim, but God also told us to be ‘stewards’ of the Earth. When overpopulation is causing havoc, poverty, disease, starvation and other calamities, not having a child is a godly.
No, the Church has always tried to control people though sex. They never sanction sex outside of procreation. it is another really stupid stance the religious make. of course, humans throughout time have had sex for other reasons than procreation. It is written in our genes to do so.
The Church would like to control that. People are saying “no more” And they are right. The religious have no business telling others what kind of legal non exploitive sex they should have.
The Catholics built a huge cult to protect pedophiles, to enable truly immoral sex acts by adults on children, so they no longer have any authority on this matter whatsoever.
Your beliefs are your own. The transgression is when you try to force them into law for all the rest of us.
Many of us will never agree with the church about sexual matters- orabably the majority! We agree with criminal law that some acts are abhorrent, but the church goes too far away from the sexual nature of real humans to be of any real use in society or in law..
Elaine M.
No, God would want them to trust him and not the doctor. The reason women won’t do that is because they know God would not approve of their abortion.
Jim,
Do you suppose God would want a woman whose life was in danger due to her pregnancy to be turned away from a hospital emergency room and not to be treated by a doctor who might be able to save her life? Do you think God would want that woman to die?
leejcaroll
God did not tell Adam and Eve to have abortions. He said be fruitful and multiply.
Ah okay. somehow I dont think G-d made people to be sexual beings but they should abstain, G-d gave us intelligence, intelligence gave us, among other things, doctors, and procedures therefore G-d gave us the ability to have and perform abortions.
lottakatz,,
“Is this where women are headed in 21st century America?”
Possibly.
leejcaroll
Abstain from sex is 100% or be gay.
Excellent posting Elaine, again, as always. 🙂
The reproductive policy Ryan champions is misnamed, it should be called the “Reproductive Freedom For Rapists and Incestuous Pedophiles” policy.
I’ve started a couple of postings to this thread but erased them, what can I say that isn’t said more cogently up-thread? I do though recall that a few years ago I started seeing dedicated, home-made web pages that published scans of medical textbooks on how to perform an abortion and lists of herbal abortifacients and herbal contraceptive properties. They were for ‘in case’ the need arose to go back to the bad old pre-Roe days due to the assault on women’s health/choice.
Wikipedia has lists of such useful herbs. Apparently a herb (possibly the Giant Fennel) so valuable as an abortifacient that it was gathered to extinction was said by the Romans to be worth its weight in Dinars (silver).
There is even a book list on Amazon. (Amazon! How lowest common denominator is that?):
http://www.amazon.com/Herbal-Abortion/lm/3HF72ORQ4LT0R
“The Woman’s Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486” and “Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance” sounds interesting and very professionally done, by physicians and researchers.
Reading the reviews of various books on this list, there are what sounds like a lot of code words and phrases, ‘one chapter on menstrual tardiness’, ‘a chapter on folk remedies that don’t work as well as thought, and those that do’, etc. etc.
Is this where women are headed in 21st century America?
Mike Spindell 1, August 18, 2012 at 7:09 pm
Elaine,
Another blog in your continuing to expose the war
on women, well done.
Dredd,
Your comment on Rand’s adoration of Hickman points to the fact that she loves sociopaths and we can then correctly assume her to be one herself. We also might make that assuption about Ryan since conflating Rand’s beliefs with those of the religious right is a lesson in hypocritical denial.
======================================
Monbiot said this of Rand:
(Ayn Rand: Patron Saint of The Plutocracy). None other than Psychology Today said this of her:
(Ayn Rand: Patron Saint of The Plutocracy – 2). A republican staffer Mike Lofgren, in his new book, indicates that the republican party has gone nuts:
(The Party Is Over, Viking Penguin, Penguin Books).
Jim, nothing forces a man to be responsible, he can cause a pregnancy then just p and walk away, regardless of the circumjstances, consenting or not. And I guess you never heard that no contraception method is 100% sure.
Ah and I guess a jobs bill is not worth talking about because the repubs never brought one to the floor.
Jim,
If the Republicans retain the House and win the Senate and Presidency, things could change. Besides, I would never vote for a politician who cosponsors the kind of anti-woman legislative that Ryan has. A candidate’s plans and positions on the issues are always worth discussing.
shano
No, women need to be accountable to their actions just like men do.