The Republican Primary Reproductive Rights Bonanza

 Three news segments this week: Mitt Romney and the confusing story of banning the birth control pill, Rick Santorum is not confused about his hatred of contraception, and Herman Cain doesn't know what to think about abortion rights.

 Three news segments this week: Mitt Romney and the confusing story of banning the birth control pill, Rick Santorum is not confused about his hatred of contraception, and Herman Cain doesn’t know what to think about abortion rights.

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Links in this episode:

The Bro Code

Romney asked about contraception

Maddow tries to explain birth control

Rick Santorum has opinions

Herman Cain is pro- and anti-choice

Cain doubles down

Eric Bolling calls OWS “sex-addicted”

This week’s episode of the podcast will have a slightly different format. I usually do a segment, then an interview, and then a segment, but this week I went to the extra effort to do three segments and no interviews. The Republican primary is heating up, and I want to thoroughly cover the various issues at hand.

But first, from the blog Bitch Flicks, I found a trailer for a documentary that sounds interesting called The Bro Code: How Contemporary Culture Creates Sexist Men. Here’s a bit of the trailer.

  • bro code *

The trailer addresses rape jokes, the way pop culture objectifies women, and the pressure to be a bro. The one thing I wish is that documentaries like this would address the role the religious right plays in this. It may not seem immediately obvious, but anti-choice nuts are part of this same culture. Just as bro culture says because women are capable of sexual intercourse, they should take all comers, anti-choicers say because women are capable of giving birth at all, they never have a right to say no to it. Both are forms of objectification.

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Last week, I  reported on how Mitt Romney supported a personhood amendment while on Mike Huckabee’s show. The choice to do so raised a number of questions, the most important being whether or not Romney agrees with the personhood people that the birth control pill should be banned. The whole thing is ridiculously complicated, because personhood supporters falsely claim the pill works by killing fertilized eggs, when in fact it works by preventing ovulation, and it’s an objective fact that using it means losing fewer fertilized eggs than using no contraception at all. Which of course means it’s entirely possible for someone who understands the science but not the politics of the personhood amendment to support it without realizing it’s intended to ban the birth control pill. It appears that Romney stepped into that trap. And he was confronted with it at a public event, by a woman who unfortunately had bad scientific information.

  • Romney 1 *

What’s frustrating about this is that Romney is right on the science. Contraception, including the pill, prevents an egg from fertilizing. If you really do believe life begins at conception—which I think is a Trojan horse story, but for the sake argument, let’s assume people do—if you assume this, than the pill shouldn’t be a matter of concern, since it prevents conception. Of course, what Romney is pretending not to understand here is that anti-choicers are falsely claiming that the pill works by killing fertilized eggs, which again, is not true. And that they hope they can enshrine that lie into the public imagination and into law, which would make the pill abortion in their minds, and would therefore make it eligible for abortion restrictions. All they need, and I’m sure Romney gets this, is a judge who is willing to let quacks guide the decision. Bad science gets written into law all the time with judge’s approval.

Unfortunately, I’m seeing a lot of feminists play right into anti-choice hands by repeating the misinformation about how the pill works. For instance, this woman asking the question.

  • Romney 2 *

He stares at her with condescending indulgence, which is irritating, but the fact of the matter is she’s simply wrong. That is not how the birth control pill works. Some doctors have theorized that it might make the uterine lining more hostile to an egg that might be fertilized, but what scientific research there is on this provides no evidence for that theory and in fact suggests it’s probably false. But I don’t blame this woman for being confused.  Many, many liberal sources are repeating this non-evidenced speculation about how the pill works, including Rachel Maddow.

  • Romney 3 *

Problem is that the only confirmed method that the pill works is by preventing ovulation. There’s some evidence for the cervical mucus, but I could find no evidence for the uterine lining theory. It’s speculation.

Look, I get why pro-choicers are repeating this speculative theory about a theoretical but unlikely way the pill might work on the rare occasion an egg fertilizes for a woman on the pill. It’s the simplest way to get the message across that personhood amendments are intended to ban the pill. It’s much harder to say, “Well, anti-choicers spread misinformation about how the pill works and hope that by doing so, they can get it banned,” because complex concepts are a really hard sell in politics. But we need to make the effort. The reason is that if we continue to claim, falsely, that the pill kills fertilized eggs, that will be reason enough to get it reclassified legally, if not medically, as abortion. Which means no more public funding of the pill, and a likely ban on insurance funding of it, as well as putting women through the usual abortion restrictions. I can easily see a day, if we continue down this path, where women have to endure ultrasounds and 24 hour waiting periods to get birth control pills. That’s why it’s so critical not to play footsie with anti-choice misinformation, even if it seems like it will be useful in the short term, politically speaking.

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Mitt Romney may be unwilling to go on the record opposing the use of contraception, but Rick Santorum, who continues to claim to be running for President, has no such qualms. While sitting down for a 45 minute interview with Caffeinated Thoughts dot com, Santorum pledged not only to cut off the already non-existent tax-funded abortions, but also to ban any other stream of abortion funding. I’m surprised they haven’t come up with a plan to prevent women from paying for it out of pocket, honestly. But then he added that he was not only going to cut off tax and insurance funding of abortion, but also contraception.

  • santorum 1 *

In one sense, this view he expresses is mainstream in the Republican party now. After all, House Republicans did try to shut down the entire federal government in order to defund contraception subsidies at Planned Parenthood, and state Republicans are attacking contraception funding from all sorts of angles. But there’s often an abortion excuse, no matter how thin. If you’ll recall, there was some strained claim that subsidizing contraception at Planned Parenthood somehow subsidized abortion, even though all available evidence shows that contraception use actually reduces the abortion rate. But if you break apart the defunding on the state level, it becomes clear that it was never about abortion at all, but about sex and contraception. For instance, in Tennessee, they’re just straight taking contraception funding and giving it to anti-contraception propaganda centers called “crisis pregnancy centers”. Despite all this, there’s a tendency amongst anti-choice politicians to talk around the issue, never admitting outright that they think contraception is wrong and that women shouldn’t be allowed to have it. Except Rick Santorum, who has a refreshingly blunt hateful attitude about people who have sex for pleasure.

  • santorum 2 *

I know what you’re thinking, because I’m thinking it, too. Whenever you hear someone say that sex should literally only happen for procreation, and that men and women literally cannot bond unless they are making a baby, your mind goes to that evil place. That place where you wonder if Santorum is really living up to the standards he’s holding everyone else to, where about 99.9% of sexual activity, even 99.9% of heterosexual sexual activity, even 99.9% of married sexual activity, should be disallowed. Only Santorum and his wife know for sure. I do know this. Even if Santorum and his wife got separate and godly bedrooms after their last child was born in 2008, and even if they took a long break from sex in the years 2001 to 2008, where they weren’t having children. The irony here is that a lot of these anti-contraception guys want big families to show off their supposed virility, but these big gaps between pregnancies have the opposite of the intended effect.

Of course, what Santorum is churning out is pure religious dogma, and it certainly has no relationship to reason-based decision-making. Which he appears not to grasp.

  • santorum 3 *

Actually, you might as well be running for pastor, because you think the position of President is about using the force of the law to put your religious dogma on those who don’t share your faith. Which is, may I remind you, forbidden by the Constitution.  Of course, later he tries to walk back from that a little, by claiming that a ban on abortion and contraception would lower the STD and unplanned pregnancy rate, which is similar to saying that a ban on seatbelts would lower the traffic fatality rate. Which is to say, it’s the opposite of true. To be fair, however, I think Santorum is also implying that a President has the power to ban sex for pleasure. After all, he refers to himself as merely one of many “presidents”, even though he’s never been President, so it’s clear that he gets confused pretty easily.

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Now Herman Cain is having what I suspect will be a temporary surge in the Republican primary polling, That means that journalists are starting to ask him questions about stuff that isn’t pizza, and that means questions about dum dum dum…..abortion rights. And Cain doesn’t sound like a politician when it comes to abortion rights. Most politicians know that when it comes to abortion rights, you have to pick a side. You have to be pro-choice or anti-choice, at least in the moment. You can, like Mitt Romney, switch sides routinely for political advantage, but when asked directly, you have to say whether or not you’d force unwilling women to give birth or not. Cain, however, doesn’t seem ready to give an answer to this, the most straightforward of political questions.  While being interviewed on Fox News in front of a live audience, Cain straight up tried to have it both ways.

  • cain 1 *

And he kept going back and forth on this. No, he doesn’t think abortion should be legal. But he also doesn’t think government should ban it. That these things are directly contradicting each other doesn’t seem to bother him. In the same breath and with equal conviction, Herman Cain is both for and against banning abortion.

I spent enough time talking to conservatives that I can actually see how this line of thinking works, though. Which is to say, it’s not thinking. It’s just pressing wingnut buttons: abortion is bad, government is bad. Anti-choicers are really a bundle of confusion on this point. Those who actually want the government to ban abortion often don’t think of it as a government ban, because that would run in the face of their claims that liberty is about being anti-government.  Then there are those who really don’t want the government to ban abortion, but they don’t want to say they’re pro-choice, because doing so would mark them as a orgy-loving butt-rogering pervert in their social circles, so they say they’re pro-life while pretending that has no relationship to forced birth. Gallup polling reflects this. More than three-quarters of Americans believe abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances, but half of Americans call themselves “pro-life”. That means roughly half of so-called “pro-life” people are actually pro-choice to some extent. Even the ones who support stringent restrictions tend to imagine if they or their loved ones wanted an abortion, they would be able to get one. So Cain’s incoherent views actually have a wide audience.

But the mainstream media really thinks this is black and white, because logically, it is. So they kept pressing Cain about this, and he kept refusing to be logical. Piers Morgan interviewed him and this is how it went:

  • cain 2 *

In a sense, this wasn’t that big a contradiction. It could be that Cain is saying he personally is against abortion, but that it should be left up to the woman. That’s a common pro-choice stance, though it’s admittedly easier to hold that opinion if you’re without a uterus and know you’ll never be faced with that choice. But it gets weird.

  • cain 3 *

Straight pro-choice talk, right? In fact, he really gets into it.

  • cain 4 *

Cain didn’t get the memo that the “limited government” thing is just a fig leaf to make right wing nuttery more palatable, and that it was certainly not meant to apply to a woman’s reproductive choices. But seriously, he says stuff like this and then continues to hammer at the “I’m pro-life” nonsense. Yes, he’s trying to have it both ways. But I also think he, like a lot of anti-choicers, hasn’t actually thought the issue through and realized that if you want it to be a private choice for women and their families, it has to be legal and accessible. Abortions don’t just materialize out of thin air when you need them, as if you’re Peter Pan and abortions are Tinkerbell.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the Occupy Wall St. edition. I’m sure it comes as no surprised to discover that Occupy Wall St. is upsetting the right. And, considering the right wing obsession with sex, it probably comes as no surprise that calling the protesters perverts is a favorite line of attack. Eric Bolling on Fox News went there.

  • bolling *

I suspect if you’ve ever had sex even once, that puts you in the “sex-addicted” category for Bolling. After all, you probably liked it, you filthy Nazi communist slut.