Five Months Left, Time To Show The Women Who’s Boss
Posted on August 22, 2008 by andrew
The Bush administration is trying to quietly redefine birth control as abortion and limit access to both with a few seemingly small and innocuous regulatory changes before they run out of time in office. Don’t let them do it.
Sphere: Related Content» Filed Under Bush administration, abortion, reproductive rights
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This was a terrible cause a month ago, and remains a terrible cause. Please explain the negative impact of this law, and explain why people who are anti-abortion should be able to be fired for their position. Note that the only “harm” ever proposed is that a governmentally supported center might not be able to fire a person who refuses to do their job. So is the fear that this law will be the first step in a long and brilliant plan of right-wingers becoming Planned Parenthood sleeper agents, getting hired there, and then refusing to conduct abortions? Brilliant!
The issue is how these regulations define birth control and abortion. The administration is attempting to conflate one with the other. That is the harm, not some ridiculous sleeper agent straw man.
I already know you don’t think doctors and pharmacists should be required to prescribe and dispense birth control, so you might not see this as a harm. I do, and anyone who wants to protect the rights of women to have plentiful access to birth control should, as well.
Actually, I think that the whole pharmacist thing (which is similar and which I am still right about) is clouding everyone’s judgment on this issue. They are similar but NOT THE SAME. This in no way limits a woman’s access to birth control, which the pharmacist thing clearly does.
The “conflation” here is necessary. Why protect an employee’s right to be anti-abortion, but not anti- birth control? It’s not saying that they are the same thing, just that they are both beliefs are worthy of protection.
Seriously, I have no idea in what kind of scenario this regulation would limit access to birth control. The people who work for these centers pick the center they work for based on their beliefs. Pro-abortion people pick Planned Parenthood and the vast majority of centers. Anti-abortion/birth control advocates pick the abstinence/adoption/catholic centers. Neither set of employees should be fired for their beliefs. This law doesn’t require PP to hire anti-abortion advocates, or anti-abortion centers to hire abortion advocates.
It’s a silly regulation because it protects people from what they need not fear, not because it’s somehow evilly redefining the issue.
[...] to our legislators and governors and other Official People and Powers That Be. But otherwise? Raise some holy hell, because this thing cannot come to pass. Unless, of course, you like having your [...]
I’ve tried to explain this to you (SKates) before, and I really don’t see why it’s too hard for you to understand. In some places there are no Planned Parenthood clinics, or anything comparable, for women to visit. They don’t have a choice. So, they can’t pick between “the abstinence/adoption/catholic centers” and a place that provides the services they actually need. Hence, if a place wants to be licensed as a medical facility geared towards reproductive health and operate as such, it needs to provide any medical services a patient could reasonably expect from a medical facility geared towards reproductive health. Otherwise, it shouldn’t be in that business in the first place.
Bullshit libertarian theories don’t work in a real world where choice is limited.
That doesn’t make a lick of sense. You are saying that currently there are places without Planned Parenthoods. True. Those places have only anti-abortion (for the most part) places. True. Then it all falls apart.
Those places don’t have to provide all the services that you think they should. More importantly, they DON’T currently provide those services. Government money goes to all sorts of clinics, including places that already refuse to provide these services. Whether it should or should be allowed to do this is probably a decent debate (and in fact, the same debate I said above that I think everyone thinks this is).
This law has NOTHING to do with that. This law governs what employees can and cannot be fired for in publicly funded businesses. It protects employees FROM businesses, not businesses from moral/ethical/legal/whatever requirements. It’s not just a semantic issue, and it’s a terribly Republican (with the capital “R” I used) scare tactic propagated during election and donation season. Notice how every blog firsts suggests donating money to Planned Parenthood so they can fight the fight, instead of encouraging public outrage or explaining coherently why it matters. Never once is there an impactful argument (let alone an example) of how this law would decrease the ability of a woman to receive whatever everyone thinks she deserves. With or without this law, woman X in the south still can’t get anything.
So then, just so we’re clear, the law has no practical effect whatsoever, according to you?
If that’s true, what purpose could the administration have other than to conflate abortion with birth control and thereby slowly build the pieces necessary to limit access to the latter?
Pretty much…I made it very clear in my second post that I think it’s a silly regulation. It basically just says “So, that federal law that applies to all business…yeah, it applies here too.” I have few doubts that the regulation has some political motive (probably a bone tossed to the right-wingers), but it does nothing substantive. Fighting hackery with even worse and more irrational hackery is inexcusable, especially for a party operating on some sort of “better than the past” platform. If you want to rail against it for being political maneuvering, then fine, it’s a ginormous waste of time, but fine. But if you want to convince me that feminists and progressives should feel threatened and open their pocketbooks to an organization who very well knows this in no way effects them, then I’m calling shenanigans.
Also, I didn’t comment before, but that wasn’t a straw man “sleeper cell” argument before. That was Feministe’s original argument against the regulation: that people would now apply for jobs they didn’t want to do morally, but they also didn’t want other people to do. Hilarious upshot of this “argument:” It assumes that conservative whackjobs with nothing better to do with their time than block abortions for others are more qualified and more likely to get hired for the same job as true believers in women’s rights.
As to that last bit, I think it’s worth noting that if anti-abortion nuts are willing to kill doctors for their cause, some of them also might be willing to work at a clinic just to fuck with it.
It’s a stretch, but it’s not entirely implausible.
It’s too bad that Sean both hates women and uses the “word” “impactful” when he means “convincing.”
Unfortunately for Carol, the Baltimore Sun does not get to decide what is and is not a word (http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2007/02/oh_the_impact.html). “Impactful” is used as a word, and as such, IS a word. It’s generally intended meaning is NOT “convincing,” but rather what I intended in my post: having an impact, resulting in an end. No arguments are made that this regulation will have an actual impact; thus there is no impactful argument. Alternative phrasing might have been that there are no “impacting” arguments.
Also unfortunately for Carol, she is a woman. That is all.