One of the great intangibles of the 2012 election is going to be whether women show up at the polls in November. We’ve seen a great movement birthed through various social media projects, from jarringly serious to hilariously satirical, and we’ve seen it in protests around the country standing up to the GOP’s attempts to clamp down on women’s reproductive rights and contraception.
A lot of women who fought this fight before, have been on the front lines again, while younger women, who may have assumed these rights were set in stone, have found their own activist voices, and the anger over the Republican’s attempt to slam women back into the jail cell of the Dark Ages has been palpable.
There isn’t anything that displays this anger more than videos like this one, from This is My Body.
WATCH (story continues below):
But where the rubber will meet the road is on Election Day, November 6, 2012, ladies. So, if you’re sick of the war on women, if you’re tired of Republican men trying to dictate to you what you can and can’t do with your own body, if you’ve reached your breaking point in the hateful rhetoric used by politicians and religious jerks alike to make women out to be nothing less than evil, while being completely unable to answer the simplest of questions, then you have a responsibility to show up and make your voices heard in the voting booth, because if you don’t, you have no one to blame but yourself for what follows, while the rest of us will also be left to suffer the consequences for your lack of interest and/or conviction.
This fact cannot be emphasized enough!
About Beth
Speak it girl! However, your right to your own body and to do with it what you want should not infringe on the right of the child to have a body at all. Thanks for killing our young!
David, like it or not, a woman DOES have the right to terminate a pregnancy if she so chooses, and it’s been legal for nearly 40 years under Roe v. Wade. And for you to flippantly characterize it as “killing our young” ignores the greater issues of women’s reproductive care, access to contraception and her basic right to privacy to be able to make her own reproductive decisions without her body being legislated as an object. It also ignores the issue of invasive, violating, and medically unnecessary procedures meant to shame women who are merely seeking a legal medical procedure: abortion.
David where the hell do you get the privilege saying “our young. You must have missed the fact that the US abloished slavery.”
David, if you are so dead set against abortions, maybe you ought to stop having sex. After all, I do believe a penis has a part in this business of creating “our young”. I don’t think I’ve ever invited your penis into my vagina, ergo, you have no rights about what I do with it. So shove up and stop having sex.
David: You are legally entitled to have and express your opinions. This much is clear, however: You are NOT entitled to make your opinion the basis of ANY law; not Federal law, not State law, not municipal law. Especially, legislation cannot even be proposed, much less a law passed , unless there is a compelling reason to do so. Your religious opinions don’t constitute a compelling reason.
Let me help you clear up your misconceptions. Consider this: There have been many, many grossly misled attempts to make abortion a crime in spite of the law rendered in Roe v. Wade. First of all, in any court of law, decisions must be made based on a preponderance of scientific evidence, that is, evidence that is concrete, objective and verifiable. See, there is absolutely NO concrete, objective, verifiable evidence EVER brought into this issue that proves scientifically when human life begins. Is it at conception? Is it at the first stage of fertilization? Is it at Cleavage? Is it at Compaction? Is it at Differentiation? Cavitation? Zona Hatching? Implantation? Cell mass differentiation? When quickening begins? (My thanks to Wikipedia.)
But, perhaps, more to the point, who gets to make the decision of what constitutes a human life (and why him/her/them?) and what criteria could be used that isn’t a huge religious/partisan political time bomb? Perhaps now you can see the legal problem. Perhaps not. In a nutshell, Roe v. Wade says that there is 1) no legal evidence of what constitutes human life, never mind when it begins. 2) Thusly, there can be no preponderance of legal evidence of any kind that there is a compelling reason to create law criminalizing abortion, especially not on the basis of it being a homicide. Note: Roe v. Wade doesn’t say anything about the constitutionality of abortion, just that there is no evidence to determine whether it is or is not a criminal activity.
That being the case, Roe v. Wade does NOT, as some infer, make abortion legal. It does conclude that the Constitution of the United States (and all the states subject to this Constitution) is in no way legally applicable to the decision to end a pregnancy and, therefore, the decision to have or not to have an abortion rests squarely with the individual as per the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
A more simplified example in regard to whether a zygote is a human life might be more helpful in this case: Imagine me holding up an egg and asking you what is this? Can you say it’s a chicken with any certain proof? No. Without prompting, you will most certainly say it’s an egg. Not a chicken? NO! Because indeed they are TOTALLY (yes, I said totally) different things.
I hope this clears things up for you.
If a man could pop a fetus out of his penis; this would NOT be a debate.
Ouch!