I have developed a habit of taking the time to transcribe entire segments of The Rachel Maddow Show to share with the readers of DailyKos because Rachel Maddow does such on outstanding job of explaining the issues. I know there are members of this community who don't have cable access to the show, or who can't watch videos online, so I do it because I think it's important to share the information with as many people as possible. I know that many of you also share the diaries I've written too, expanding the coverage. Thank you.
Yesterday, I took a page out of the Rachel Maddow playbook. I read a diary about a Hugh Hefner editorial, You may not be a fan of Playboy, but you gotta love what Hugh Hefner has written, which inspired me to go searching for more background information about something mentioned in Hefner's editorial, much the way Rachel Maddow provides a background story at the beginning of her segments. The result was my diary, The 1965 Charles Cotner Case Hefner Referenced And Why It Matters Now. In responding to a comment in that diary, I was reminded of something I saw on a The Rachel Maddow Show that I had not transcribed. It's all Rachel's fault because Wednesday night she had such an outstanding show that night, there was more than one segment worthy of transcription, and I chose to transcribe the first segment, Rachel Maddow challenges national reporters to do their jobs as well as local reporters.
Now I realize that the Objects In Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear segment was just as important, and so I have transcribed it too. The entire video and transcript appears below the fleur-de-orange. But the portion of the segment I want to draw your attention to is this part, and I will tell you why below the transcript and short video clip.
You probably heard the term back-alley abortions. When abortion was legal in the United States; excuse me, when abortion was illegal in the United States, in the years before the Roe v. Wade decision, abortions were obviously still sought by American women, and they were still provided to American women, but by and large, they had to be performed secretly. It was illegal. Here's a photo from that era. The caption provided by the Associated Press reads Still dazed, the client of an abortion doctor is being carried out of the raided apartment for the hospital. Detectives surprised the doctor in the midst of an illegal operation being performed on a kitchen table [See Abortion Client Being Taken Out of Raided Apartment, Corbis Images, 1944]. This is what illegal abortion was in this country. If you were lucky, it was an actual doctor with real training and equipment operating on you even if it was, say, on a kitchen table before the police rescued you and dragged you to the hospital.
But there is a reason that the coat hanger is the symbol of the era of illegal abortion in this country because a lot of abortions happening at that time were not even as safe as the kitchen table operation. In 1930, illegal abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 American women, 7 women a day, about a fifth of the overall maternal death rate in this country in that year [See Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?, Guttmacher Institute, March 2003]. In the days of back-alley coat hanger abortions, thousands of women died. Thousands of American women died because they did not have access to safe abortion. It was illegal but that did not stop it. And now, and now, the new coat hanger can be pharmaceutical. A drug you have to get in another country with no doctor's advice, with rumor and good luck providing your advice on your dosage.
The last time this country passed a constitutional amendment to legislate morality was almost a century ago. The 18th Amendment, also known as Prohibition, was ratified on January 16, 1919 and took effect on January 17, 1920. It banned the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol in the United States. It was repealed on December 5, 1933, in ratification of the 21st Amendment. Last year PBS aired Prohibition a five-and-a-half-hour documentary in three parts that was narrated by Peter Coyote, and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. I watched all three episodes and if you didn't see it, you can watch it online.
Prohibition started with the temperance movement, rooted in America's Protestant churches. First they encouraged moderation, then they encouraged drinkers to help each other similar to Alcoholics Anonymous, and finally they demanded the outright prohibition of alcohol by local, state, and national governments, and they got it. What they also got were unintended consequences. During the 13 years it was the law of the land, there were serious economic consequences to Prohibition. Restaurants failed without liquor profits. "The closing of breweries, distilleries and saloons led to the elimination of thousands of jobs, and in turn thousands more jobs were eliminated for barrel makers, truckers, waiters, and other related trades." The federal and state governments immediately lost billions in revenue no longer being collected from taxing liquor, and turned to income taxes to fund their budgets. A black market to sell liquor arose creating large criminal organizations, including the modern American Mafia. The law also created widespread corruption among politicians and police forces. The legal system was unable to keep up with overflowing court rooms and jails. And finally, about 1,000 Americans died each year from drinking tainted liquor.
The one lesson this country should have learned from Prohibition, is that you can't legislate choices in personal conduct or private family matters. During prohibition, people consumed alcohol anyway. If you criminalize abortion, women who are not prepared financially or for whatever personal reason they have, are going to seek abortions anyway.
We don't have to guess at what one unintended consequence would be if a national amendment passed to make abortion illegal in this country. It was largely illegal in every state before the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court in 1973. As Rachel pointed out in the clip above, the fact that it was illegal didn't stop people from seeking abortions. Quoting Rachel, "In 1930, illegal abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 American women, 7 women a day, about a fifth of the overall maternal death rate in this country in that year."
The population of the United States in 1930 was 122,775,046. Our population has grown to 314,235,000 in 2012. It doesn't take a math genius to figure out that if congressmen like Todd Akin or Paul Ryan were ever to succeed in pushing legislation through that they have attempted to pass on several occasions, that this would easily result in the unnecessary deaths of over 5,000 women a year. When I made this point as a comment in the Cotner diary, and asked how pro-lifers defended this consequence, the response I received was
they're a-ok with that
To them, the women who die (or are mutilated—let's not overlook that) are sinners and it serves them right. The coat hanger argument won't change their minds. But it may go some way to waking the silent majority.
by subtropolis on Sun Aug 26, 2012 at 02:08:11 AM EDT
I'm not surprised because I've seen the video clip of a lawmaker in Mississippi responding to the coat hanger argument against abortion:
And of course, there you have the other side. They're like, 'Well, the poor pitiful women that can't afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger.' That's what we've heard over and over and over.
But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we've decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.
Mississippi lawmaker: Coat hanger abortions might come back. 'But hey...'
But hey, you have to have moral values? Where did this man get his moral values that he thinks it is okay for over 5,000 women in this country to die unnecessarily each year because he only sees things in black and white? That may be a man's reaction, but what will the women described in this piece do the next time they are faced with the same dilemma once they succeed in criminalizing abortion?
Abortion is a highly personal decision that many women are sure they'll never have to think about until they're suddenly faced with an unexpected pregnancy. But this can happen to anyone, including women who are strongly anti-choice. So what does an anti-choice woman do when she experiences an unwanted pregnancy herself? Often, she will grin and bear it, so to speak, but frequently, she opts for the solution she would deny to other women -- abortion.
In the spring of 2000, I collected the following anecdotes directly from abortion doctors and other clinic staff in North America, Australia, and Europe. The stories are presented in the providers' own words, with minor editing for grammar, clarity, and brevity. Names have been omitted to protect privacy.
"The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion"
Wednesday was a big night for me watching MSNBC. Every segement of The Rachel Maddow Show was informative, but earlier in the evening I had seen Howard Fineman on Hardball with Chris Matthews say "I'm not making a value judgment when I say this, but the Republican Party has become a faith based party." After I transcribed the first Maddow segment, I was tired but I couldn't let it rest and so I wrote a second diary where I went on a major rant based on what Howard Fineman had said. The first comment in that diary said it all:
Amazing it took them so long
to see this. And for a [political] party to be faith based is at odds with one of the core tenets of the Constitution that there is no religious test to hold office.
Talk about a fundamental threat to democracy, it is the GOP [in it's] current form.
When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.
An axoim from Dune, but it holds true.
by Texdude50 on Thu Aug 23, 2012 at 07:16:19 AM EDT
Last week when Todd Akin made his comment about
forcible rape, he did this country a huge favor by exposing the true agenda of the Republican Party, which has become a faith based Party. Make no mistake, even though
on average only 20% of the citizens in this country agree that abortion should be illegal even in the cases of rape, incest and the risk to the mother, Republicans are unwavering in their determination to make it the law for the entire country.
In 2010 Republicans around the country took control of governorships and statehouses campaigning on the platform of "jobs, jobs, jobs." It didn't take long for them to set their true agenda ("abortion, abortion, abortion") in motion. They immediately went to work pushing through legislation that imposes restrictions on abortions. In the federal government where they had succeeded in taking over the House of Representatives, Republicans, including Todd Akin and Paul Ryan, attempted to push through federal legislation, which passed in the House but failed in the senate. Some of these restrictions included an assault on Planned Parenthood (as Rachel explained happened in Texas in the full segment below the fleur-de-orange), taking away funding for the organization that provides needed preventative care services to low income women around the country, even though only "three percent of all Planned Parenthood health services are abortion services."
But in reality, it's not just those abortion services that Republicans are trying to prevent. "Planned Parenthood services help prevent more than 584,000 unintended pregnancies each year." The "personhood" bills Republicans are pushing around the country and in Congress would also outlaw most hormonal contraception. They don't care that they are depriving these women of much needed preventative care like breast exams and pap tests because hey, you have to have moral values, right? And they not only think that it is morally wrong to end a pregnancy, they think it is morally wrong to prevent pregnancy from happening in the first place. Why else would they want to criminalize the use of contraception? If women die from breast cancer or cervical cancer because they were denied an opportunity to catch it early at Planned Parenthood, that's just another unintended consequence of those moral values. Republicans will see this as a success because more unwanted pregnancies were created by slowing the distribution of contraception through Planned Parenthood by taking away their funding.
What are the other unintended consequences? What about the already overburdened legal systems around the country? How man cases will crowd the dockets of courthouses and fill the jails with defendants waiting for trial? What would it also do to our already overburdened prison systems? If Republicans succeed in criminalizing abortion in this country, what will the penalties be? How long would prison terms be and who would go to jail? The doctors who perform the abortions? The women who seek the abortions? Or is this something the Republicans want? More inmates for prisons. Because there are privately owned prisons in this country, like Corrections Corporation of America that supported the Arizona immigration law to put undocumented women and children into their prisons. Maybe Republicans see criminalizing abortion as a way to fill their prisons with women who sought an abortion or doctors who performed them. This could be another money-making opportunity for Republican donors. The U.S. is already Number 1 in the world for the percentage of it's population incarcerated. There's a record Republicans must want to hold on to.
There is no way to calculation the damage Republicans have already done since they were elected to state and national offices in the 2010 wave. I hope this diary provides you with enough facts and links to enough information to arm you with the information you need to talk to your friends, family, coworkers and neighbors about the imperative in the 2012 election to not only reelect President Obama, but to also elect Democrats to governorships, statehouses and Congress. Republicans are determined to continue their war on women. We have to be even more determined to stop them.
Objects In Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear
Big news from the vice presidential campaign trail today. Big, big policy news from Congressman and presumptive vice presidential nominee, Paul Ryan.
Video of Paul Ryan: Nobody is proposing to deny birth control to anybody.
That is a new position for Congressman Ryan. And frankly, it's a new position for the Republican Party. Until this week, until they got saddled with Mr. Legitimate Rape and have tried to make a big show of rejecting him, the Republican Party in general and Paul Ryan specifically had been quite open in their efforts to roll back access to birth control. They did not used to deny that this was what they were doing. Back in February, Paul Ryan was among the chorus of Republicans inveighing against the new health insurance rules that required insurance to cover contraception. Rules like that in state law had been a practical part of American women's access to contraception in 28 states. The new federal rule essentially made it national.
When Mr. Ryan was asked at the time on Meet the Press if he thought his own party, Republicans, were maybe focusing too much on birth control and opposing this new rule that would make birth control more accessible, his answer was No. Republicans in the Senate tried and failed to overturn the birth control insurance rule [See Blunt amendment defeated in Senate, Politco.com, March 1, 2012]. House Republicans were also planning to do that until they got cold feet on the issue [See House G.O.P. Hesitates on Birth Control Fight, The New York Times, March 16, 2012]. House Republicans, including Paul Ryan, did of course vote to repeal the entire health reform law, birth control access and all. They did that twice for good measure. Along with more than 30 separate votes to repeal, defund, or knock out portions of the law [See House votes to repeal 'Obamacare' — again, Politco.com, July 11, 2012].
Paul Ryan has also voted multiple times to defund Planned Parenthood, one of the largest providers of contraception services in the country and his Paul Ryan budget would eliminate funding for all Title X family planning programs all together. Not just Planned Parenthood, everything. But Paul Ryan has not just spent his time in Congress trying to roll back access to birth control. He also sponsored a bill that would declare all fertilized eggs in the United States to be people, which would have the effect of banning the most popular forms of birth control that American women use [See Bill Text, 112th Congress (2011-2012), H.R.212.IH].
Video of Paul Ryan: Nobody is proposing to deny birth control to anybody.
Except you, Paul Ryan and almost all of the rest of the Republicans in Congress right now. Except for all of the things you have proposed and sponsored and voted for that would restrict access to birth control, or just plain criminalize it. Except for all of that, yeah, nobody is proposing to deny birth control to anybody. I have a follow-up question (raises hand)?
Now that he is trying to become vice president, Paul Ryan does not want you to remember his record on birth control or on abortion. And honestly, I don't think that either party wanted this to be the center of the fight this year. But Republicans put these issues at the center of their policy agenda in the states, and in Congress for the last two years. And then they picked a guy to be their vice presidential nominee who is one of the party's true hard liners on these issues. And so, well I don't think Democrats particularly wanted to run on abortion rights and defending access to contraception. I mean, I don’t think this administration is afraid of it. I think they've been better on it than most Democrats have been, but you can see when they're out on the campaign trail, they would rather be talking about the economy. Same thing with the Republicans, they would rather be talking about the economy or welfare or whatever. But none of them expected to be campaigning on abortion and birth control the week before the conventions. But this is not going away. This is a political fight that now can't be avoided because it is an actually radical thing that has been dragged right up to the top and right into the center of what is supposed to be mainstream politics. It's not a theoretical thing. The Republican vice presidential nominee really did sponsor a bill designed to ban hormonal birth control and he did it just last year.
And Republicans in the states really have in the last two years enacted more restrictions on abortion rights then at any time since Roe v. Wade became law, and it is having a real impact in real people's lives. It's not just a talking point that Republicans wanted to shut down the federal government rather than funding Planned Parenthood. That is an actual thing that happened [See Government Shutdown Threatened By Republicans Over Planned Parenthood, The Huffington Post, April 8, 2011]. And last year, Republicans in eight states moved to disqualify at least some family planning providers from state funding. Three states have done it this year [See Laws Affecting Reproductive Health and Rights: State Trends at Midyear, 2012, Guttmacher Institute]. And it's just not something to make political points about. It's really happening, and it's having a real, and in some cases devastating on the ground effect on real American lives.
Earlier this month, The Texas Tribune published a stomach churning story about American women leaving the country. American women crossing the border to go to pharmacies in Mexico to buy a drug they hope will end their unwanted pregnancies. The pharmacies they visit are largely unregulated. You're not talking to a licensed pharmacist. You're just talking to the guy who works at the counter. And so without a doctor's supervision and without qualified medical advice, women are often not getting proper instructions on how to use the drug that they're buying there; a drug that requires a prescription in the United States, and that is not prescribed here on its own for abortions. One Texas clinic director telling The Texas Tribune that her clinic's patients have often ingested the drug in varying amounts - some would take an entire bottle within days - based on what friends and family had told them. One Mexican pharmacist who's unlicensed and untrained but who is still allowed to sell the drug over the counter said he had heard of girls hemorrhaging after using the pills. Quote, I try my best to explain the consequences, but there's only so much i can do. Another person who works at a pharmacy saying quote, It sells. That's the problem. But I won't tell them how to take it. I just say 'You might have problems later.' [See Looking to Mexico for Alternative to Abortion Clinics, The Texas Tribune, August 12, 2012.]
You probably heard the term back-alley abortions. When abortion was legal in the United States; excuse me, when abortion was illegal in the United States, in the years before the Roe v. Wade decision, abortions were obviously still sought by American women, and they were still provided to American women, but by and large, they had to be performed secretly. It was illegal. Here's a photo from that era. The caption provided by the Associated Press reads Still dazed, the client of an abortion doctor is being carried out of the raided apartment for the hospital. Detectives surprised the doctor in the midst of an illegal operation being performed on a kitchen table [See Abortion Client Being Taken Out of Raided Apartment, Corbis Images, 1944]. This is what illegal abortion was in this country. If you were lucky, it was an actual doctor with real training and equipment operating on you even if it was, say, on a kitchen table before the police rescued you and dragged you to the hospital.
But there is a reason that the coat hanger is the symbol of the era of illegal abortion in this country because a lot of abortions happening at that time were not even as safe as the kitchen table operation. In 1930, illegal abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 American women, 7 women a day, about a fifth of the overall maternal death rate in this country in that year [See Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?, Guttmacher Institute, March 2003]. In the days of back-alley coat hanger abortions, thousands of women died. Thousands of American women died because they did not have access to safe abortion. It was illegal but that did not stop it. And now, and now, the new coat hanger can be pharmaceutical. A drug you have to get in another country with no doctor's advice, with rumor and good luck providing your advice on your dosage.
The new back-alley is across the border, where Texas women are resorting to unregulated pharmacies in Mexico to do what Americans technically have the legal right to get here from an actual doctor. That's what the climate is like in Texas right now. The story about women crossing the border and risking their lives and their health in unregulated pharmacies was reported in The Texas Tribune a week and a half ago [See Looking to Mexico for Alternative to Abortion Clinics, The Texas Tribune, August 12, 2012].
Texas deeply cut family planning programs last year for low income women [See Day 15: Texas Family Planning Funding Slashed, The Texas Tribune, August 15, 2011]. And, of course, they instituted forced ultrasounds, where not only does the state government force any woman who wants to have an abortion to have a medically unnecessarily ultrasound against her will. The government also forces her to do that a day in advance of when she's going to get an abortion [See Texas sonogram law goes into effect today, The Houston Chronicle, February 6, 2012]. So, if you can't handle that, then maybe Mexico? Take your chances.
On top of those existing restrictions and what we already know about their impact in Texas, just in the last 24 hours, a federal appeals court has now okayed the state of Texas' plan to cut all state funding from Planned Parenthood clinics. This had been blocked by an injunction. It's now been cleared. Clinics that provide health and family planning services to nearly half of the 130,000 patients enrolled in a program to provide health and family planning services for low income women [See Court: Texas can cut off Planned Parenthood funds, Associated Press, August 22, 2012]. This is a state where access to reproductive healthcare is already so dire that women are seeking abortions from off-label drugs they're getting from unlicensed, unregulated pharmacies in Mexico. And now tens of thousands of women who still did have access to birth control and family planning services are getting cut off from those services, in the last 24 hours.
Joining us now for the interview is Thanh Tan. She is a reporter for The Texas Tribune. She has been reporting on women going to Mexico to purchase medicine for medical abortions. Thank you very much for joining us tonight. I have obviously been following your reporting closely. It's great to have you here.
TT: Thank you, Rachel.
RM Let me ask you if I got anything wrong in trying to summarize your reporting correctly there. Did I get any major factual things wrong?
TT: I'm not sure if I want to correct you. I don't think there's need for that. But you know I will clarify, though, that right now that Planned Parenthood clinics that are part of the women's health program are still in the program. The state is currently trying to figure out a way with the attorney general to figure out a date for when they can cut off Planned Parenthood, so there are tens of thousands of women who may be confused right now, but Planned Parenthood is still officially part of the program until the state excludes them officially. And we're waiting to find out more information about that.
RM: Thank you for clarifying that. And in terms of the legal fight over that, obviously the state has its own process for what's going to happen with that funding and then how it's going to roll down to those clinics and those clinic's patients, but do you know anything about what may happen next in the legal fight over this? This happened at a relatively high level of court today. Do we know if there's going to be further appeals?
TT: Well, we know that there are two court cases that were going on. Planned Parenthood had filed a lawsuit last Spring after Governor Perry announced that the state was going to go it alone, forego federal funding in order to enforce the state's rules which have long excluded abortion providers and abortion affiliates. Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit last Spring to try to stay in the program, and they were able to get an injunction from a district judge here. The state went to the federal court and was able to get another injunction which was lifting basically the lower court's order, and that has been in place and Planned Parenthood has been able to stay in the program over the last couple months. Now a lot of people were wondering when the appeals court was going to weigh in on this, and yesterday they did. And they have told the state that, you know, you can legally ban Planned Parenthood from this program while we wait for a district court to provide or to hold a hearing on this matter sometime in the Fall, probably in October.
RM: When you did the reporting that led to the story that I summarized in detail here about women crossing the border from Texas into Mexico and accessing these unregulated pharmacies; When you talked to healthcare providers in south Texas about seeing women who had done that, seeing them in the aftermath of them having essentially self-medicated to try and give themselves medical abortions, were healthcare providers in Texas describing that as something that there has an uptick in? Are they seeing more of that? Is it something they've always seen?
TT: Well, it's hard to track the numbers on this just because not everybody reports when they have tried to use these pills. The health providers that I talked to said that anecdotally, they have noticed in the last year or so, that more women seem to be using alternate means of trying to have an abortion, whether that is taking herbal pills, or whether that is, in one case a doctor told me last week that a woman chugged a six-pack of hot beer thinking that it would make her throw up. Or, as I reported in the story, there are women who are either crossing the border, or they're having their friends or family members get this Cytotec or this misoprostol for them so that they can try it at home and try to self-induce an abortion in the privacy of their own home. And the thing is that we only hear about the reports, the public reports here, because the abortion providers have told us that they're seeing this in their clinics. We don't know how much this may be happening you know out there in the real world. But we do know that there has been extensive research that has been done on the issue of misoprostol use and a few studies have shown that it's very common. It's commonly used in countries where abortion is not legal or is not widely available, and it's used in Latin America often, as well. So, because of that proximity to Mexico, you have a lot of people here in Texas, especially down along the border area, who are perhaps resorting to this method.
RM: Thanh Tan, reporter for The Texas Tribune, thank you so much for joining us tonight and for your reporting on this. I have not seen other reporting of this type on this phenomena in the country, but I have a feeling that what you have done is going to spark other people to look into seeing if this is happening in other places. So, congratulations on the work, and thanks for joining us.
TT: Thank you.