As part of an effort to deny publicly subsidized abortions for rape victims, the House GOP is attmpting to narrow the definition of "rape to include only what they call “forcible rape.”
Their new definition of rape would not include statutory rape (so a 12 year old can’t get an abortion paid for if she’s impregnated by a 30 year old), but it gets worse than that:
According to the House GOP, roofying a woman isn’t rape, raping a mentally retarded woman isn’t rape and date rape isn’t rape. What the fuck?
Aside from your insistence on evil motives, there’re very good reasons for this and it’s long past. I hope it is a first step in seprating chintzy, so-called “Sex criminals” from actual threats. Of course, I’d like to see a source more reliable than Motherfucking Jones.
I, of course, consider any money being used for abortions to be utterly disgusting, so pardon me if I don’t share your outrage.
So 12 year olds should be left to carry the fetus of their rapist? How about someone of legal age who became pregnant as a result of someone drugging them? How about someone who was forced down, forcibly penetrated and left crying in a pool of their own blood?
How can you reconcile this with a right to sovereignty over one’s body? Or do you believe there’s no such thing and woman are to be slaves of their rapists for 9 months?
gravitycrash, I don’t understand your point. Should a “mentally challenged girl” who has been impregnated without her full understanding (even if she “consented” at some level to sex) be forced to carry the pregnancy to term, or not?
First off, whether or not you have a right to “sovereignty” over your body (you don’t legally, under a great many circumstances), it isn’t my problem, nor is it a problem of the nation, and has no business being handled on the federal level. It is properly a state matter, start to finish. However, you really don’t have such sovereignty and I know of no nation which ever allowed it, and in any case it would be far more accurate to say your body has sovereignty over you.
Second, Abortion is hardly better than rape itself, in the same way that murder is a Very Bad Thing. The murder of innocent human life is always bad, though if one must choose between them (as is sometimes the case) then I have no problem with that choice being the mother. I’m happy with the babies being given up for adoption, but to pretend that they deserve death, or that they have no interest in the matter, is nonsense. Human life is human life, whether it’s Profoundly Retarded, or not yet born. We neither do ourselves credit nor make the world better by “making the problem go away.”
Evil is evil, whether it’s the rapist or the “elimination” in a clean medical setting. But then the human race has a long, long history of allowing very bad things to occur so long as they didn’t have to face them, or could distant themselves by allowing a professional to do it.
I’m confused. Are the many, many, many people who conceive without implantation or end up having a spontaneous abortion distancing themselves from the problem? Did I distance myself from the problem when I scratched my balls a moment ago, damaging epithelial ball-skin-cells and callously snuffing uncounted cellular human lives?
Or, less snarkily, abortion isn’t like murder any more than hamburgers are. Cows aren’t people, and neither are zygotes.
That’s all the Republicans have at the moment. And that’s all the anti-abortion movement has ever had. The Republicans are woman hating sadists, and the anti-abortion movement is about hurting and humiliating women.
Of course not, since in both cases your motives are the same; to hurt women.
They are evil. And that’s what they want, or for the girl to die giving birth.
Could you do me a solid and tell me exactly how close they are?
Let’s say on a scale of 1 to 10.
1 being California stop (rolling up to a stop sign, but never actually stopping while while checking for cars) and 10 being Rape, where does abortion fall?
Uhmmmm, I don’t know. You article quotes an “expert” who first says the new language isn’t clear, and then goes on to tell us what the new language means. But the thing is, when you have the government paying for health care, you’re going to get “the people” withholding funds from things they disapprove of.
My suggestion is that this is something better left up to the states anyway. The feds shouldn’t be defining something that is a matter of state law.
But I’ll give you the statutory rape thing, and this may be what the crux of the legislation is about. If we say that minors can’t give their consent to sex, then any sex is forced. If we’re going to put men in jail for having sex with minors, then the minors should be considered rape victims. Period.
On the incest thing, I don’t see any problem with removing federal funding for adults who engage in incest (that isn’t rape).
No, this is a civil rights issue; protecting the civil rights of people is an important function of the federal government. Women have the right not to be drugged into sex and forced into childbirth regardless of what the state legislature thinks of them.
No, it’s not a civil rights issue. According to Roe, you have the right to an abortion, but you don’t have a right to have it paid for with federal funds. Or was there another SCOTUS decision that I missed…?
This bill doesn’t say anything about women “drugged into sex”.
The vast majority of the Federal funds which might otherwise be spent on abortions come from Medicaid. Pretty sure that cat escaped the bag years ago.
The bill also bars the use of FSA or HSA funds for abortion- that is, people’s own money, set aside for healthcare-related expenses, via legislation enacted by the Republicans with much ado about how people would be able to keep more of their own money to pay for healthcare.
No, it doesn’t. So unless you think “drugged into sex” is going to fall under the definition of “forcible rape” - a term obviously chosen to exclude some number of rapes - it doesn’t matter whether it mentions them.