Keep your Bullshit out of my Uterus!

The things that happen on Twitter…

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals handed anti-choice advocates a major victory yesterday, upholding a provision of a South Dakota law that mandates doctors tell women seeking abortions that the procedure will cause an increased risk of suicide.

The decision marks a turning point in a battle over a bill that started in 2005. Planned Parenthood Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota challenged the law arguing that it violates free speech rights by forcing doctors to tell women information that is not based on reliable research. A district judge blocked the law that year and that decision was affirmed on appeal in 2006. The law was appealed again and this time the panel of judges ruled that that “the suicide advisory presents neither an undue burden on abortion rights nor a violation of physicians’ free speech rights.”

[…]

There is no medically-accepted link that abortion causes an increased risk in suicide, but thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Carhart v. Gonzales, there doesn’t need to be. According to Justice Kennedy, when there’s a dispute in the science legislators are free to pick the science they agree with and legislate based on that. And as we see in South Dakota, that can have devastating consequences.

As I said on Twitter, it’s like the 8th circuit said to the 5th circuit, “We see your extremism and we raise you one.” And Jessica Pieklo, author of this post, wrote me back to say, “now we just get to wait for the 4th circuit and 6th circuit to feel jealous and chime in. Because they will.”

LOLSOB

Please sign and signal boost!

[It does not matter whether you live in TX. This part of a performance of protest. The more signatures delivered at once, the better.]

These new requirements are intended to make abortion more difficult to provide and harder to access for the Texas doctors who have a legal right to provide the procedure and Texans who have a legal right to undergo it.

The new proposed rules are Department of State Health Services and HHSC’s attempts at putting into statute that which Rep. Bill Zedler’s proposed legislation could not put into law with his proposed, but failed, HB 1602 (82nd Legislature) and HB 1131 (80th Legislature), as well as the unattached Zedler amendment to SB7 in 2011.

Throughout the public comment period that opened on this matter in April, DSHS has as yet been unable or unwilling to identify any existing problems that these new requirements solve, or give any reasoning for their inception beyond admitting that they are a direct response to Bill Zedler’s personal desire to see his own anti-woman, anti-choice beliefs put into legal statute by any means necessary.

HHSC, if it adopts these new abortion reporting requirements, is subverting Texas’ critical democratic process by bending to the wishes of one individual legislator.

(sometime in September, HHSC will open up a 30-day comment period regarding the new reporting requirements, during which we will present this petition)

[As always, more people than just cis women need and want access to abortion care]

(h/t Steph Herold)

Just so you know, by clicking on that link you will see blood. I don’t think the images warrant more of a warning than that.

From the site:

My intention in documenting and sharing my abortion is to demystify the sensationalist images propagated by the religious and political right on this matter. The perverse use of lifeless fetus photographs are a propaganda tool in the prolife/prochoice debate in which women and their bodies are used as pawns to push a cultural, political, and religious agenda in the United States.

At 6 weeks of pregnancy, my abortion looked very different than the images I saw when I entered the clinic that day.

This is my abortion.

[NB: More people than just cis women need and want access to abortion care.]

Anyone who listens to/reads a story like this and thinks the problem is the “abortion” part and not the “forced” part….no words.

Fuck the fucking fuck.

Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina, one of the state’s two Planned Parenthood providers, estimates that it will lose $200,000 as a result of the new budget. Because no state money is used for abortion services, the funding cuts will affect the clinic’s ability to provide affordable birth control, cancer screenings, pap smears and other services for low-income women in the state.