Law Students for Reproductive Justice confront Fordham University on contraception access. Mitt Romney tells a story on his views on abortion, and personhood amendments aren’t going away any time soon.

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Colbert on the Siri controversy

Personhood in Virginia?

Personhood back in Colorado

Heartbeat bill in Ohio

Romney’s evolution on abortion

Grasping

On this episode of Reality Cast, two students from the law school at Fordham University detail their struggles with the larger university’s policies on birth control. Personhood amendments are rearing their ugly head again, and Romney’s evolution on abortion rights smells fishy.

If you were online and vaguely feminist last week, you probably saw the story about how Siri, the iPhone’s voice activation software, didn’t know how to find abortion clinics or birth control, but could find you prostitutes and Viagra. Naturally, Stephen Colbert had to weigh in.

• Colbert *

Apple’s surprised response suggests that they are working on this and will fix it.

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The defeat of an abortion ban two elections in a row in South Dakota and the defeat of the personhood amendment in Mississippi should send a strong message to anti-choicers, which is that while they can get people to identify as “pro-life” and pull faces of disapproval when it comes to the idea of other people having sex, when it comes to their own right to have abortions and use contraception, the voters aren’t on their side. But for some reason, they’re not giving up. Or actually, there is a reason, which I’ll examine in a bit. But let’s be clear: there are many states in the country where extremist anti-choice legislation is percolating through the system and must be opposed.

• personhood 1 *

They really should just name it the Men Make Babies Dammit bill, because, at the end of the day, that’s what’s really driving this. Men like Bob Marshall can’t stand the idea that women can do something men can’t do, such as make babies, so they redefine biology and claim that the only action that really “counts” towards making a new life is not the 9 months of pregnancy, but the 10 seconds of ejaculation. Unfortunately, nature doesn’t really agree with the notion that men are the creators of babies and women are just passive storage devices for babies men make. At least half of fertilized eggs slough off on their own, for one thing. But more importantly, the process of turning a single cell into an actual baby takes more than a dude busting a nut. It takes months of physical effort on behalf of a pregnant woman’s body. Most sources I found suggested that pregnant women expend at least 300 calories a day on baby-making, which is the equivalent of running about 3 miles a day. On the biological facts alone, the view of women as sedentary storage devices for babies makes no sense. Additionally, it’s an overt attack on women’s basic rights.

Personhood wasn’t just voted down in Mississippi. In 2008, an attempt to pass it in Colorado failed miserably, with 73% of voters voting against it. Nonetheless, anti-choice extremists are reviving it in Colorado.

• personhood 2 *

I have to point out that the phrasing of that news report was 100% wrong. Personhood amendments would not, in fact, put a stop to all abortion. No abortion ban, even one that the Supreme Court signed off on, puts a stop to all abortion. As has been documented by mounds of evidence collected worldwide, when abortion is illegal, women simply get illegal abortions, many of which are unsafe. Being pregnant against your will is something many women simply cannot countenance, and will do anything, including using dangerous at-home methods, to abort. What a personhood bill will do is making abortion illegal, and the hope of anti-choicers is also that it can be used to make contraception illegal.

Which leads me to why anti-choice activists keep after this personhood thing. Not to sound like a broken record on this, but they win rhetorical points every time they lose at the ballot box with this thing. Every time this is on a ballot, a number of media outlets and even feminists repeat the anti-choice misinformation that the pill works by killing fertilized eggs, when in fact it works by preventing ovulation. I suspect the end game is getting enough Americans to believe the lie that the pill is abortion so as to subject it to funding and access restrictions that currently govern abortion. If that happened, it would basically become impossible to get it for the vast majority of pill users, including myself, since you’re not going to subject yourself to an overly high co-pay plus a 24 hour waiting period plus an ultrasound to get birth control pills.

Personhood amendments fail at the ballot, but they also succeed in making other anti-choice fanaticism seem more moderate in comparison. For instance, the Ohio heartbeat bill has been lost in the shuffle over the fight over fertilized eggs and basic science. 

• personhood 3 *

I’m not surprised that polling data shows that. Banning abortion under these circumstances probably seems downright moderate compared to the people who believe a fertilized single celled egg is the same as a 5-year-old. Plus, I suspect most people don’t know how early in a pregnancy something resembling a heartbeat can be detected. Nor do they know that the enforcement of this would require uncomfortable, invasive sonograms performed on top of the usual one to detect gestational age. Nor do they realize that documenting that there was or wasn’t a heartbeat is something that anti-choicers will challenge at every turn, in hopes of banning all abortion. My concern is that in the melee over personhood, we’re not going to have the energy to fight this as well. That, I suspect, has been the anti-choice plan all along.

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insert interview

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This show  has already done a segment on Romney’s shifting position on abortion rights, so I was pleased to see NPR finally catching up. And I wondered if they, with their giant ass budget, researchers, and production team would be able to add more to the story than my lone podcasting self could. The answer is a qualified yes. They covered mostly the same ground, which is to say that they report that Romney was pro-choice and now he’s anti-choice, and they toss in a completely pointless comment from an anti-choice activist. Unsurprisingly, they’re supportive, since they are disingenuous political creatures to the core and don’t care about someone’s deeply felt beliefs at all. But one aspect I found really interesting, which is the B.S. story Romney came up with to explain his “conversion”.

• Romney 1 *

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s just really hard to believe. The timing is too perfect. He had a sudden revelation about embryos right as he was trying to expand past pro-choice Massachusetts and become a national figure? He’s really trying to pretend his main motivation in switching sides wasn’t that he wanted to get into the good graces of anti-choicers who control the Republican party on a national level? Sorry, I’m skeptical. And you should be, too, because his story is based on a highly contested version of events.

• Romney 2 *

 That whole story should be a red flag, because that’s just not the sort of language that researchers use. Not because they secretly believe they’re killing people when they do research on embryos, of course, but because the word “killing” implies you’re taking an active part in killing embryos for the hell of it. Which frankly implies they’re sturdier than they are. I realize that a lot of anti-choicers have moved towards convincing themselves that embryos and fetuses are quite literally babies that can survive without constant support. I had one screeching in comments on some blog post recently about how I can’t accept that fetuses are separate from the mother, which caused me to wonder why then they have such a problem with women removing these supposedly separate beings from their bodies. But it’s not the biology. And a researcher working on embryos understands that. They don’t take embryos out for target-shooting. They use them for research. So the word “killing” is unlikely to come up. It doesn’t really have a relationship to what’s really going on, and implies that there’s a individuated being there to kill, when anyone can see there really is not.

All of this makes the lady from the offensively named Susan B. Anthony List sound like even more of a fool. Of course, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Their very name is a lie; they’re trying to wear the mantle of feminism while opposing it. So anything that comes out of her mouth should not be viewed as honest expressions of true belief, but political posturing.

• Romney 3 *

 If you read the pledge, it has—surprise surprise—anti-contraception stuff in it disguised as anti-abortion stuff. Specifically, it demands a “pro-life” head of the NIH and the HHS, which we learned during the Bush administration means people that will try to block contraception as well as abortion. So, for instance, such a person would probably repeal the regulation requiring insurance companies to cover contraception as preventive care. Sure, that would raise the abortion rate, but they never actually cared about fetuses in the first place. This pledge also asks for a massive defunding of Planned Parenthood and other family planning clinics. Again, cutting off subsidies for contraception would raise the abortion rate, but they don’t care about that per se. They just want you to be punished for being sexual. Romney is trying to cling to the actual stance of being simply anti-abortion, but actual anti-choice activists don’t want that. They want someone who is more boldly anti-sex. So there’s tension there, regardless of his shifting opinions on abortion.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, outrageous paranoia edition. Liberty Counsel has a program called “Faith and Freedom”, where ranting about gays is a big deal, and on it they said this:

• say what *

I guarantee not a single gay man is gay because someone told him that it was okay to have sex with his best friend when he was 8 years old. Not one. In fact, the sheer number of gay people that come from homophobic families will basically settle the question of whether or not one is gay because someone gave you “permission”. Nope! Of course, at this point, they aren’t even pretending that it’s about not being gay. They’re just openly demanding people live in the closet.