Democrats are in full cry against what they call a “war on women” waged by Republicans. At first blush, it comes across as gross exaggeration, Democrats pulling out all the stops in a highly charged election year.

Of course, the GOP is aware that women vote. And the fact is there are women voters who oppose abortion and health insurance coverage of contraception. These women would gouge their own eyes than give a dime to Planned Parenthood of America. And the GOP will do anything to get these women to the polls come November. Even if it means ratcheting up the rhetoric on the campaign trail.

But here’s the frightening thing: There’s genuine substance behind the rhetoric. Federal laws have accommodated religious beliefs of doctors and nurses at the expense of individual legal rights to abortion, for example. And while that may be understandable in a society that respects religious differences, state legislatures have acted as if this were a matter of an official state religion, too.

Suddenly, it’s not just about abortion. A woman’s ability to obtain birth control pills, breast cancer screenings and pap smears is at risk. Barefoot and pregnant? That’s not even the half of it. There are women who will die in this war.

It’s a nationwide phenomenon: States are proposing and passing laws that make ideological points at the expense of women’s health. Republicans — including Gov. Chris Christie — are riding the wave of anti-women sentiment. And that $7.5 million Christie cut from family planning, ostensibly for budget purposes, will likely boost his presidential résumé with conservatives down the road.

Texas is ground zero for this war. Gov. Rick Perry may have looked like a buffoon on the presidential campaign trail, but his policies are no laughing matter for hundreds of thousands of women. A recent column by the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof described the humiliating vaginal ultrasound probe and lecture by a doctor to which a woman must submit before the abortion can proceed — after she waits 24 hours. The Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan health think tank, estimates 430 abortion restrictions have been introduced by state legislatures this year.

Dozens of clinics also have closed in Texas, because Perry and his Republican-controlled Legislature killed state funding for them. They’ve also turned down millions in federal funding for women’s health, to keep it out of Planned Parenthood’s coffers.

The barrage of artillery coming from the right is hitting its mark and changing the way we talk about women’s health issues. Who would have thought that, in 2012, a women’s right to contraception would be up for discussion? Or that a woman expressing her views on the topic would be taunted as a “prostitute” and “slut”?

In Georgia last week, female legislators, all Democrats, walked out of their chamber after the Republican majority voted to prohibit state employees from using state health benefits to pay for abortions and to deny employees of private religious institutions the right to demand insurance policies pay for contraceptives.

“They never had a problem with it, but here come the right-wing shock troops, marching, marching, marching,” Nan Orrock, one of the Georgia lawmakers who walked out, told her local TV station. “And women are on the bull’s-eye target.”

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