It’s no new insight that recent legislation in Idaho and Georgia is slashing women’s reproductive rights and sending them back to the days of back street butchers for abortions. This is abominable in 2019. It’s positively medieval. And so is this: South Carolina State Rep. Nancy Mace made a speech a few weeks ago, in which she identified herself as a rape victim. The purpose of her speech was to support exceptions for rape and incest, in conjunction with the proposed 6-week fetal heartbeat bill. Then a Republican colleague sent her a card, which is the image you see at the top of this post. Charlotte Observer:
State Rep. Nancy Mace, R-Berkeley, gave the speech two weeks ago, successfully persuading the House to allow exceptions for rape and incest in a proposed 6-week “fetal heartbeat” abortion ban. On Tuesday, she returned to her desk to find a card left there by Magnuson.
“It is a twisted logic that would kill the unborn child for the misdeed of the parent,” read the card, produced by Personhood SC, a group fighting for an outright abortion ban with no exceptions in South Carolina.
Mace took the message personally, since it came two weeks after her speech, and House Democrats were outraged. She blasted the card on Facebook for its use of “misdeed” to describe rape and “parent” to describe “rapist.”
In response, Magnuson on Wednesday distributed to House members a letter from a member of Personhood SC stating: “The problem of some is not the ‘poor wording’ of this sentence, but that these people just simply want abortion in cases of rape and incest.”
“Calling rape a misdeed is ignorant, disgraceful and degrading toward women,” the second-term lawmaker ]Mace] said in an interview with The State Friday. “I didn’t get sent to Columbia to put up with bullshit like that.”
Mace had kept the rape story secret for 25 years. It took a lot of courage for her to come forward. But that’s not how her Republican colleague perceived it. In his mind, any woman is just a breeding machine and should bear any man’s child, no matter how the conception occurred — or so I must conclude. There is no way a rapist can be construed as a “parent” doing a “misdeed.” And to expect a woman to bear a rapist’s child is so over the top that I’m amazed this conversation is even taking place in 2019.
Republicans want to control women’s reproductive rights, totally, because that will allow them to control women economically. It’s as simple as that.
How do these people keep getting voted for?
Abortion is legal in Catholic Ireland, if that puts things in perspective.
That says it ALL! Once you have heard that, you don’t need to hear a thing more. And they have an openly gay Prime Minister. And none of this is a big deal to them, they don’t think of themselves as screaming liberals. They’re just being sane.
I’m of Irish descent and so of course I think the Irish are cool, anyhow. Whether that’s true or not, you can’t deny that these attitudes in a nation are very admirable. I find this evidence of sane thinking.
I am also catholic…it is a woman’s right to choose
Motherhood is not something to be entered into lightly and it sure as hell is nothing that a woman should be coerced into, under fear of legal prosecution. Jesus, I can’t believe we’re even having this discussion in 2019.
This is so heartbreakingly awful, and morally repugnant, that it is scarcely believable that “people of faith,” conservative Catholics and Protestants alike, can even think of promoting such measures. I wonder how they can possibly sit in church and not have their hearts touched by God’s love, and feel the compassion that God surely feels for any woman with an unwanted or unhealthy pregnancy, let alone a woman who has been raped. I have gone to church for most of my life, and I can’t even imagine what gets preached and taught in theirs, other than some tragically mistaken theology. The Bible says absolutely nothing about abortion, and it existed then. And how can they dismiss a woman’s agency to determine whose child she will bear? I wonder if their God will forgive them for their breathtaking overreach and for the suffering they so willingly- gleefully!- inflict?
There is no question, on any common sense or moral level, or sane level, for that matter, that it is irrelevant how a child is conceived. Yes, a child conceived in love, in a marriage bed, is the ideal. No argument. But a child conceived in rape, or incest (which is mentioned in this bill) is something else altogether. That is not a healthy union. It may be a union that results in pregnancy, because biology is biology, but there can’t be an argument that that kind of forced pregnancy is the same as a pregnancy conceived in matrimony? Consensual sex, anyone?
And the idea that a woman shouldn’t decide whose child she will have is insane. The mother absolutely has to have a choice about a child conceived in rape. Best case scenario, she has an absolute right to decide, period. But conceived in rape — no, there is no way that to continue that pregnancy is a healthy choice. I cannot see it.
Ursula….agree
I am sick reading this!!!! No man has the right to control a woman…!!!! Where in hell do these people come from??? They are all misinformed and very disturbed people!!! I need a break from Georgia and their bullying laws!!!?
Be of good cheer, Linda. Check out the piece I just posted, which is about how Georgia is now being boycotted by Hollywood production companies because of this draconian law.
Good! These people are crazy…so darn sick of their belief system…what is wrong with them???? Culture???
It’s all about patriarchy and controlling women. That’s the underlying premise. The screen on top of it, is caring about poor helpless babies, omg, the babies. That’s all emotional hype. None of these people give a damn about the babies. The babies are pawns in a chess game to control the mothers. That’s my take on it.
When you look at the stats on maternal and infant death rates in America as compared to other nations, you see the cruel truth of how much these ‘people’ care about the babies. We’ve always known they care nothing about the women who bear them or care for them. They only care about fetuses. Once you’re out of the womb, you are on your own.
Oh, totally. The GOP is on your side when you’re in the womb — or so they would have you believe. The minute you come out and need the support of society, a social safety net, any of that — get screwed. The GOP has its, you go get yours. You know about cancellation of SNAP benefits, I take it? And all the screwing around with Medicaid? That wouldn’t be happening if innocent children were the high priority that the GOP would have you believe.
I’ve long held that the Republican mantra is: I’ve got mine, f*** you. Greed and power is what they are all about. They were hiding behind the door when God gave out compassion, empathy, sensitivity, you know, Christian values, that they like to push only when it makes them look good. Cretins.
No one can argue with the morality of defending the unborn, because they are the voiceless, who cannot defend themselves. So, that’s where they join the conversation — and then they pervert the entire issue so that at the end of the day, it’s not about the unborn, it’s about enforcing a patriarchal system where women are chattel.