Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Last Call

The Washington Post's Sarah Kliff has a very sobering (if not outright depressing) piece about access to abortion in 2013. Here's a hint:  Seven out of eight women live in counties where there are no doctors providing abortion services.  That number is expected to get significantly worse.

It’s been almost 40 years since since the Supreme Court legalized abortion on Jan. 22, 1973, galvanizing people on both sides. Abortion clinics sprang up across the country. The National Right to Life Committee was founded. Opponents and proponents girded for an epic conflict.

But today, the battle is a slog of legislative fights and piecemeal regulations. Here, in a city where the battle over abortion was frequently and sometimes violently joined, combatants on both sides agree: They are dead-tired of the struggle over this clinic’s existence.

Claire Keyes, the longtime director of the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center, recalls thinking that the Supreme Court had settled the abortion argument, once and for all. “When I came into the clinic for the first time, the feeling that we had was this sense of giddiness,” she said. “Women had gained the right to control their own destiny.”

That was then.  This is now.

As the 40th anniversary of Roe approaches, Keyes is fearful about the future of abortion rights — and the clinic.

“It’s never been this frightening before,” she said. “I don’t know if we’re going to make it.”

A Pennsylvania law passed in 2011 requires surgical abortion clinics to become certified as ambulatory surgical centers and meet other rules.

Eight of Pennsylvania’s 22 surgical abortion providers failed to gain approval under the new law.
They can offer medical abortions, using a prescription drug, but not perform surgical procedures. To comply with the regulations, abortion clinics will need to install hospital-grade elevators and have a set number of parking spaces.

“Sometimes I think the regulations are what will actually get us, more than what we saw in the early years,” said Thompson, one of the clinic’s three doctors. He’s in his late 60s and isn’t sure who will take his place when he retires.

Pennsylvania had 50 providers of abortion care in 2008, an 11 percent decrease since 2005, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

With other clinics closing and the facility she spent three decades directing in jeopardy, Keyes now finds it difficult to find the optimism she has held for decades.

And at every turn, states are making abortion increasingly impossible for women to get, and increasingly impossible to provide.  Nobody seems to care much, frankly.  Republicans are passing rafts of abortion measures in state after state.

But frankly, the vast majority of women don't have access to abortions, not without an increasingly crazy maze of social shaming, expensive multiple trips, and assumption of mental incompetence that they are unable to make decisions about their own body.  The same "small government" types have no problem using the full power of the state to legislate morality.

Funny how that works.


And It Continues In Earnest

Obama Derangement Day continues as here in Kentucky, Jackson County Sheriff Denny Peyman says as Regent of the Known Universe, he simply won't enforce any gun ordinances the black guy wants to order.

Sheriff Peyman, 59, held a news conference Saturday afternoon at a restaurant in McKee to talk about his position on gun control. He said in a phone interview that it attracted more than 100 people.

Peyman, an Idaho native who came to Kentucky 15 years ago to work with high-risk children, said he is concerned that new gun control laws could lead to bans and even the confiscation of guns.

"American citizens already have given up too much power over guns," he said.

Peyman said citizens in his county need guns for defense.

"I'm for people defending themselves," he said. "There are some places in this county that takes me 45 minutes to get to. If they have a gun, they could do a better job of defending themselves than waiting for me."

Peyman acknowledged that the Kentucky State Police also patrols Jackson County, "but it often takes them a long time, too, to get to places here."

Asked what he thinks about doing away with AK-47s, Peyman said, "If they pull them off the market, what will they pull off next?"

Peyman is of course being considered a patriot for standing up to the tyranny of a Democrat, no Republican president would ever issue gun control regulations by executive...wait a minute.

The [George W.] Bush Administration declared a permanent ban today on almost all foreign-made semiautomatic assault rifles. Imports of the weapons have been suspended since spring.

The permanent ban affects all but 7 of the 50 models included in the spring suspension. It does not affect the far larger number of virtually identical weapons manufactured domestically, nor does it affect foreign-made semiautomatic weapons already in the United States.

Poppy Bush did that in 1989.  I'm sure this assault weapons ban by executive order caused a near civil war in the US.  Oh it didn't?

In the Presidential campaign last year Mr. Bush, a hunter and longtime member of the N.R.A., opposed to any bans on assault weapons. But a public outcry after a drifter armed with an AK-47 killed five schoolchildren in Stockton, Calif., in January helped convince others in the Administration that some limits were needed.

Huh.  Sounds familiar somehow.  And then the Assault Weapons ban lapsed and more schoolkids were gunned down, only this time, since we have a black President, we've got jagoff white Kentucky sheriffs acting like they know better.

I'm betting the FBI says you don't, son.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2013/01/14/2475649/kentucky-sheriff-says-he-wont.html#storylink=cpy

And It Begins In Earnest

Even before the President announces the steps he plans to take to tighten up gun regulations through authority Congress has already given the executive branch to use, at least one Republican in Congress is threatening immediate impeachment proceedings should the President try.

Please proceed, Rep. Stockman.

The conservative discord in the wake of the Newtown, Conn. massacre went up another octave on Monday when Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) threatened to file articles of impeachment if President Obama uses an executive order to try to reduce gun violence.

“The White House’s recent announcement they will use executive orders and executive actions to infringe on our constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms is an unconstitutional and unconscionable attack on the very founding principles of this republic,” Stockman said in a statement. “I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment."

Go for it, skippy.  Shut down the government.  Defund the implementation for the entire executive branch while you're at it.  Turn your absolute derangement against President Obama into something that lays off tens of thousands of people, shuts down national parks, and delays tax refunds and government checks.  You do that.

Then watch what happens to you.  You want to open the Clinton Payback Playbook?  By all means, that worked out so well for you in the 90's, guys.

StupdINews!