The War on Women never ended.

While the rest of Americans are watching the Republican primary, wringing their hands over what to do about Donald Trump, Republicans in states across the country are still hacking away at a woman’s right to choose a safe, legal abortion.

In Utah, the governor just signed a bill forcing women seeking an abortion at the 20-week mark of their pregnancy to receive anesthesia. This is part of a new tactic conservatives have been using in states like Texas to try and force the courts to treat abortion clinics like full-blown hospitals. That way if it’s too expensive or there aren’t any clinics in their town that can meet the stringent requirements, women just won’t get to have their own sexual autonomy.

Of course, there are such a huge number of abortions taking place after 20 weeks in Utah and this had to be done…

The law will not affect a large number of women, the Tribune reported, with 17 women in Utah receiving abortions at 20 weeks of pregnancy or later in 2014, it said. (source)

Whoopsie. Well, you know, sycophants gotta sycophant.

Florida’s governor Rick Scott (R) has also signed a harsh anti-abortion bill. Florida’s new law cuts off funding to health clinics that offer abortion as part of their services — because apparently sick women don’t deserve healthcare if someone else is at the same clinic having an abortion — and would mirror other states’ laws that require doctors performing abortions to have admittance privileges at a nearby hospital. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of how an abortion actually works — so you know, not conservatives — knows what an utter crock that requirement is.

Clearly, when it comes to women controlling their own reproductive decisions, conservatives are terrified. But why? Easy answer — religion.





A lot of conservatives will swear up and down their beliefs about abortion aren’t rooted in religion. And if they’re an atheist, maybe that’s true, but as a former conservative I can say with utter confidence that the overwhelming majority of people who oppose abortion on the right-wing are doing so because they believe their God commanded them to protect every fetus, zygote and blastocyst.

These people are certainly entitled to their opinions, but it seems pretty obvious their religious dogma is keeping them from dealing in a world of reality.

What religious people tend to just completely ignore is the scientific fact that every single, solitary pregnancy is a threat to a woman’s health. I remember when my wife was pregnant with our first son, and finding out just how many more hundreds of calories she’d have to ingest so that our precious little dude wouldn’t literally drain the life out of my wife. Every “normal” pregnancy carries a health risk to a woman, but conservatives pretend childbirth and pregnancy are some magical event that defies biological science.

That utter ridiculousness is only matched by conservatives’ deeply held belief that a woman can simply choose not to have sex and stay without child. This is of course completely true, but it’s also completely naive and stupid. People have sex, and it’s an unavoidable reality that sometimes they don’t use birth control. Other times they do, and it fails. If that happens, the conservative answer is to just suck it up and take responsibility for your actions…

…and an abortion is exactly that.





An abortion is a safe and humane way to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. We know for a fact that survival before 20 weeks is a scientific impossibility, and even at 21 or 22 weeks it’s a major coin-toss. The overwhelming majority of abortions take place before the developing life form inside the woman’s womb has progressed to the point that we could call it a life form worthy of supplanting or even matching its host in terms of constitutional protections.

Abortion is actually taking responsibility and not asking the taxpayers to care for the unwanted child, but what about the sanctity of life argument?

Also bullshit.

War and the death penalty. Ask most conservatives and they’ll tell you we need a strong military and capital punishment. We need to assure peace through war and maintain the moral high ground over murderers by committing homicide ourselves. The minute a conservative comes out in favor of war without diplomacy or the death penalty, they lose their argument against abortion, period.

Abortion may not be a very comfortable subject, but it’s a necessary medical procedure for both population control and human rights. No woman should be forced by law to carry her rapists’ baby. Abortion critics say that rape pregnancies are so rare it shouldn’t matter, further proving that if it doesn’t happen to them, in conservative minds it’s not worth even caring about. And they wonder why they get labeled cruel and heartless.

Abortion restrictions are about control.

Ironically, it’s the people who claim government can do nothing right who are begging us to let government make moral judgments on desperate women. Hell, even if they aren’t desperate, don’t women deserve the exact same sexual autonomy and liberty that men do? Of course they do, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a religious sycophant or a confused conservative who doesn’t get what “freedom” actually looks like…or both.

Let’s not get so distracted by the bewigged, bloviating shit head currently leading the GOP primary that we forget the party is plenty misogynistic without Donald Trump, and that shows no sign of changing, no matter much they might not like him.