The Liberal in Donald Trump is making himself known again. Once a Democrat, the newly crowned Republican presidential candidate answered a question on “The Dr. Oz Show,” with an answer that is sure to upset many Abortion-hating Republicans.
According to the Republicans’ nominee for president, women seeking abortions should get the procedure with ease, not jumping through hoops like having to get a prescription from their doctors.
“I would say it should not be prescription,” he told the audience, adding that many women “just aren’t in a position to go get a prescription.”
The GOP’s 2016 platform says it opposes the FDA’s “endorsement of over-the-counter sales of powerful contraceptives without a physician’s recommendation.”
The comment comes days after Trump unveiled a plan aimed at making childcare more affordable for women and as he works to boost his poll numbers with women. Polls show women favoring Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, though Trump does better than her with men.
Trump has sometimes stumbled when it comes to reproductive health issues.
During the Republican primary, he was criticized for saying that, if it the abortion were to be outlawed, women should be punished for having them. He later said that providers, not women, should be the ones who face penalties.
Stephanie Chatfield, the wife of anti-abortion Michigan state Rep. Lee Chatfield (R), is speaking out about her own experience with the procedure after receiving threats from people warning they’d expose her.
“Your desire to see this story go public emboldened me to do something that I should have done years ago,” Chatfield wrote in a Facebook post published last Friday. “And no matter the intentions of anybody wishing to see this story go public, this I am certain of: God meant it for good and will glorify Himself through this.”
The post was titled “Be Pro-Life—But offer help to women in need.”
Chatfield recounted her experience of being “taken advantage of” while intoxicated at a high school party and deciding to get an abortion after learning she was pregnant three weeks later. She called her choice “the worst of my life.”
“To tell you the truth, I desperately wish that I had the courage as a teenage girl to accept and welcome my child into this world,” Chatfield wrote. “I wish that I had the same amount of courage that it’s taking me to share my story now. But I didn’t, and I made a decision that I’ve thought about and regretted nearly every day since. It’s haunted me. It’s made me weep. It’s made it difficult to look in the mirror at times. I knew that what I did was wrong at the time, but I never imagined the weight and guilt that I would carry as a consequence.”
Chatfield’s husband, who is currently up for re-election, is a stalwart opponent of abortion who voted to defund Planned Parenthood for providing the procedure. In introducing his wife’s remarks, which were posted on his public Facebook page, Lee Chatfield said he was “extremely proud” of his wife for “her courage.”
Former RNC Chairman, Michael Steele went on MSNBC today and was interviewed by Joy Reid on the ridiculous comments Republican leader, Donald Trump made earlier in the week, where he said women seeking abortion services should be punished.
Asked to speak about Trump’s comment and the fact that others in the Republican party want women punished for seeking abortions, Michael Steele tried to sidestep the issue, falsely stating that no one in the Republican party is advocating punishing women.
“That has not been the policy of this country to prosecute women who had an abortion, either back in the 50’s or today,” Steele said. He then went on to call the issue a “red herring,” then reiterated his stance that no one in the Republican party is pushing laws to punish women.
But Reid already had multiple headlines cued up, showing that women were already being punished, even jailed for having an abortion.
Assemblywoman Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield, was one of several Republicans calling for lawmakers to reject a measure to overhaul California's enterprise zone program, during the Assembly session at the Capitol Thursday, June 27, 2013, in Sacramento, Calif. The measure AB93 by Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield, D-Woodland Hills, and supported by Gov. Jerry Brown, failed to pass on the two initial attempts, but was passed on the third vote. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Assemblywoman Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield, (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
And you thought you had heard it all.
While speaking at the California ProLife Legislative Banquet last week, California Assemblywoman Shannon Grove (R) suggested a theory that the state’s worst drought in 1,200 years may be divine retribution for California providing women with access to abortions, RH Reality Check reported.
“Texas was in a long period of drought until Governor Perry signed the fetal pain bill,” she told the audience. “It rained that night. Now God has his hold on California.”
Grove was likely referring to House Bill 2, RH Reality Check noted, a Texas abortion bill banning abortions 20 weeks after fertilization, four weeks earlier than the standard set by Roe v. Wade.
Grove did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation that she made the statement at the event, but she elaborated on her theory in a Facebook comment.
“I believe –and most Americans believe –that God’s hand is in the affairs of man, and certainly was in the formation of this country,” she wrote. “Is this drought caused by God? Nobody knows. But biblical history shows a consequence to man’s actions.”
Taking away a woman’s right to choose. This is their priority. We saw it already on the state level where Republicans are in control and now that they control Congress, Republicans are making this war on women’s rights their number one priority.
Reps. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) on Monday reintroduced a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which the GOP-controlled House already passed once in 2013. And Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) introduced four bills on Wednesday that would bar Planned Parenthood from receiving federal family planning funds, require all abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a local hospital, ban abortions performed on the basis of gender, and allow hospitals, doctors and nurses to refuse to provide or participate in abortion care for women, even in cases of emergency.
Planned Parenthood Action Fund President Cecile Richards condemned the onslaught of anti-abortion bills on Thursday and the attack on her own organization.
“The public wants Congress to protect women’s health, not interfere in women’s personal medical decisions,” she said in a statement, “which means making sure all forms of birth control are affordable, women can get preventive care at Planned Parenthood and other trusted providers, and abortion remains safe and legal.”
While the 20-week abortion ban never received a vote in the Senate after passing the House, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised anti-abortion activists that he will bring the bill to the floor. It would ban abortions two to four weeks earlier than the fetus would be viable outside the womb, violating the precedent set by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. (In that case, the court ruled that women have a constitutional right to legal abortion up until the fetus would be viable outside the womb.)
The “small government” Republicans in the great state of Texas are not going to take this one laying down. They have already indicated they are going to fight this decision and are prepared to take their fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
A federal judge late Friday struck down two provisions of a Texas law that has already forced the closure of half the state’s abortion clinics, granting at least a temporary reprieve to nearly a dozen more facilities that would have otherwise gone out of business Monday.
U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel, in a 21-page decision, concluded that when the two provisions in question “are considered together, they create a scheme that effects the closing of almost all abortion clinics in Texas that were operating legally in the fall of 2013.”
As a result, Yeakel said, “the overall effect of the provisions is to create an impermissible obstacle as applied to all women” seeking an abortion. If the provisions were allowed to stand, women in Texas would shoulder an “unconstitutional undue burden,” he wrote, because the Texas law restricts access to previously available legal facilities.
These “small government” Republicans who believe that “government should stay out of our lives,” need to be in charge of the most personal, private decision a woman can make over her own body.
People are upset, MAD I tells ya! This Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court has people up in arms and they’re looking for a way to vent. So what better place to vent your displeasure than to attack @SCOTUSblog?
Well, I would attack too, except, @SCOTUSblog is not the blog for the Supreme Court. It is in no way affiliated with the United States Supreme Court Justices. @SCOTUSblog is just a blogsite dedicated to reporting on The Supreme Court’s decisions. The site is in no way responsible for the court, its failed justices or the court’s decision.
But don’t tell that to these angry Twitter users. They found the @SCOTUSblog twitter handle and they’re letting them know how disappointed and angry they are with the Hobby Lobby decision. And @SCOTUSblog is having some fun with it!
Now let’s watch you try MT @noahtron watching @SCOTUSblog spin trying to cover their asses after today’s ruling is unrepentant visible smarm
Thurs. No, wait—Fri MT @Closetrighty: @SCOTUSblog can you at least tell me when your agents will confiscating my gf’s birth control. — SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) July 1, 2014
Or when bloggers decide the law? MT @alyssaanton: @SCOTUSblog proves democracy cannot work when leaders are appointed instead of elected.
We prefer them as our editor & manager. RT @Allout1 I guess @SCOTUSblog wants women barefoot, pregnant and cooking dinner. — SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 30, 2014
A two-fer wrapped up with a bow in one single package. MT @CharlaneBrady: @SCOTUSblog You are an embarrassment and threat to human rights.
The Tea Party and most social conservatives can sleep easily throughout the summer now. The two Supreme Court decisions rendered on Monday should delight the right and make the inaction across the street in the Capitol seems like a mere distraction. Like a fly buzzing around the collective government heads. The conservative revolution has been won, and all it took was five justices and very little money.
In the Hobby Lobby case, the court affirmed that not only are corporations people, they also have religious rights that can be exercised on health care issues. Yes, Justice Samuel Alito did say that he didn’t expect the floodgates to open on religious issues, but just look at what the Court’s decision on marriage equality did to even conservative states. Lower courts have run riot over anti-gay marriage laws to the tune of 17 states, many of which are in the most conservative areas of the country. Does Justice Alito really think that lower courts will demure when it comes to challenges on religious grounds? I don’t.
But just as this Court has affirmed the highest aspirations of the conservative movement, and, I’m sure, cemented the idea that Madison, Adams, Jay and Hamilton would have agreed with them, they are just doing what the liberal courts did in the 1950s through 1970s. Remember that the court found a right to privacy in the 1968 Griswold case, and used that right, which appears nowhere in the Constitution, to decide Roe v. Wade. The Warren court did the same with Brown, basing it on previous, smaller cases that affirmed what the justices believed to be correct decisions.
Alito, clearly the more articulate conservative compared to Antonin Scalia, who just wants to rant, also wrote the majority opinion in Harris v. Quinn, the day’s other liberal-bashing case. Here, he and the conservative majority said that some public employees do not have to pay union fees even if they don’t want to actually join the union that represents their field. For example, in New Jersey, public school teachers who don’t join the teacher’s association still have to pay 85% of the association fees because the association represents and negotiates for these teachers. Alito created a new category of worker, a partial public employee who works for both the government and a private person who hired them, and said that this type of employee was exempt from representation fees.
This decision is not major in the sense that it covered a great deal of people, but it does open up the gates to further challenges to unions and laws that require people to pay a representation fee. The next case could give the conservatives an opening to expand the definition to part-timers or support staff or, to be honest, any other public worker. Alito doesn’t like unions. It’s not just the law; it’s personal.
While President Obama and the right wing Republicans duke it out over language and politics, the Supreme Court is moving full steam ahead to craft a country that looks more like 1814 than 2014. The biggest problem, though, is that the former generation had Chielf Justice John Marshall to guide it. We get Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas.
In 1857, the US Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that slavery was legal and that slaves were property. Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, in debates with challenger Abraham Lincoln in 1858, was a supporter of popular sovereignty on slavery, That is, he wanted to let the people of a territory decide if it was to be legally free or slave. This, obviously, wouldn’t be possible given the Court’s decision because the justices said that slavery could not be banned. So Douglas came up with a dance that came to be called The Freeport Doctrine. This doctrine would allow slavery, but would encourage territories to enact high legal boundaries to its implementation, rendering it moot in practice.
Despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973, anti-abortion groups have stopped at nothing–not even the law–to enact high legal hurdles that inhibit the right of every women to control their reproductive lives and health choices. In one of the presidential debates in 2004, George W. Bush even invoked Dred Scott as a guiding principle for his judicial choices. Abortion equals slavery. Welcome to the Abortion Freeport Doctrine.
This is an emotional issue and the debate over abortion does not yield any middle ground. But we can find a way to make abortions less likely, provide contraception and sex education, and allow women and their doctors to make decisions that are in the best interests of the patient. That’s called freedom of choice and it’s something I hear a great deal about from those on the political right who want the government out of our lives, except in the bedroom. Or kitchen. Or back seat. Or…you get the point.
My solace comes from the belief that the conservative tide has crested and that we’re seeing the worst of the restrictions now. Many will stay in the most conservative states, but the idea that a women’s body is her own is pretty much a settled social idea that the court overturns at the country’s peril. It’s worth remembering that the Freeport Doctrine went nowhere. It’s also worth remembering that it took another hundred years for African-Americans to gain their full legal rights. I hope we’re not still debating the choice issue 60 years from now.
Recently, there was a report detailing how the abortion rate under President Obama is at its lowest level in three decades. By itself, that is very impressive. But when you look at the rate of decline under both Democratic and Republican presidents, you have no choice but to come to the following conclusion – Republicans just talk the talk. It takes a Democrat to actually deliver.
This chart shows the rate of decline in abortions since the Reagan administration. Republicans would come with their dumb talking points about Mr. Obama, and if you listen or believe them, they would even tell you that the President’s wish is for the entire country to head to the clinic tomorrow and abort… something. But when you’re dealing with facts, there’s no argument.
Notice the rate of decline under both Reagan and Bush Sr. There was hardly any decline at -0.01%. Then there was a huge drop under Clinton at -16%. Bush W saw a moderate -8% in his eight years, and in the five years of the Obama administration, there is already a -14% decline. Combined, for the 18 years Republicans had the White House, there was a measly 8.01% reduction in Abortions. For the Democrats on the other hand, there is already a 30% decline, in only 13 years!
The report did not say conclusively that the lowest abortion rate in over 30 years is due to the growing use of contraceptives, but come on. If you prevent the pregnancy in the first place, you obviously have no use for abortions in the future, right? It’s that simple. The report however, is trying to be politically correct. They’re not trying to anger the Republicans who, as you know, are against contraception.
Here’s a Republican talking point you’ve probably already heard – that Obama’s policies encourages abortions. Well if that’s the case, what happened here?
The abortion rate among American women declined to its lowest level in more than three decades in 2011, according to a new report released Monday that is widely considered the country’s most definitive examination of abortion trends.
The 1.1 million abortions reported in 2011 represented a rate of 16.9 per thousand women of childbearing age, down from 2008, when a similar study estimated that 1.21 million abortions were performed at a rate of 19.4 per thousand women.
Resuming a long-term downward trend that stalled in the middle of the last decade, the 2011 rate was far below the peak, in 1981, of 29.3 per thousand, according to the report from the Guttmacher Institute, a private research group that supports abortion rights.
The decline in abortions from 2008 to 2011 was mirrored by a decline in pregnancy rates. The report did not include a detailed analysis of the reasons for these trends, which pose complicated research issues.
But the decline in abortions, the researchers said, appears in part to reflect the growing use, especially among younger women, of nearly foolproof long-term contraceptives like intrauterine devices. It may also reflect the impact of the recession and economic uncertainty, which can lead to fewer pregnancies, births and abortions, according to the authors, Rachel K. Jones and Jenna Jerman.
I cannot figure out why this blowhard would thrust himself even more into the spotlight when he knows his closet is filled with skeletons.
Yes, I could be talking about any Republican official in this post. Go ahead, name one of them and I will tell you about their particular closet. This post however, is dedicated to none other than blowhard Mike Huckabee.
We all remember about a week ago when Huckabee felt the need, no, the urge to make a speech about the Republicans’ war on women, including his explanation of “Uncle Sugar”, women’s libido and of course, contraception? His entire speech was quite controversial, I’m sure you remembered it. Well as fate would have it, this same Huckabee guy – an outspoken opponent of women’s health especially where providing contraception is concerned – provided mandatory contraception to the women of Arkansas when he was governor.
Huffington Post described Huckabee’s change in position as an “epic flip-flop,” noting that Huckabee defended his view at the time, saying that “Religious employers are not required to comply with this policy. My position is, and always has been, that religious entities shouldn’t be forced to pay for contraception.”
Abortifacients were exempted in the Arkansas legislation, the Arkansas Times noted, but the law appears even more comprehensive than the ACA, mandating coverage under health policies issued by institutions with religious affiliations if they don’t exist primarily for that purpose and don’t primarily employ people of that religion, a standard most religiously-affiliated hospitals and schools do not meet.
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