Process, Ethics, and Justice: An Inauspicious Note Regarding the Politics of Rape Culture

Still dodging.

What faction? And still dodging.

They can shut down clinics, delay or deny permits for clinics to open, etc.

I mean, it's not rocket science EF.

Oh gee, I don't know EF. How do you think shutting down or not allowing an essential service to women's health in the zone or State or town or city harm women?

I mean, people might as well vote for a Republican, since they hold the same ideology. In other words, they would be getting the same deal.

Except if you are a woman in those counties or States, in which case, the issue remains the same for them.

For you? No. For women, it's still a loss of their fundamental human rights either way.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Or does this level of stupidity come naturally?

How do you think women could be damaged if they are unable to access essential healthcare, EF? I mean, I know it's asking a lot from you, but just try to think about it a bit.

Universal healthcare and higher taxes on the rich will mean diddly squat if they are unable to access essential reproductive health services, which affects them economically. At what point are you and your little buddies here going to start to understand that access to reproductive health services is an economics issue for women?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/opinion/why-abortion-is-an-progressive-economic-issue.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/en...an-economic-issue_us_58f8d11be4b018a9ce58dd4f
https://theconversation.com/how-lim...control-and-abortions-hurts-the-economy-57546

I think most people with even 2 functioning brain cells are able to understand and define sexual harassment and sexual assault, EF. Why can't you?

I have linked it multiple times. You keep demanding it again and again. Frankly, this is trolling and if you do it again, I will treat you like a troll.

Seriously? How many times do we have to go through this?

Stop trolling.

Because instead of running pro-choice candidates that can guarantee and ensure essential access to reproductive health care on a State and local level, then the Democrats are selling out women by running pro-life candidates. It is that simple.

This is a human rights issue. And those "few pro-life Democrats" would continue to endanger the lives of women and girls as much as the Republicans are and would. If the Democrats can't even run candidates that will ensure the fundamental human rights of half the population on a local level, then really, why should women vote for them? Because the rich would get tax? Okay! Woopdie doo! Too bad the Democrats like you still fail to understand that access to reproductive health services is also a deeply economic issue for women and the greater community. Yay, the rich get taxed! Too bad those women can't access essential health care services because the Democrats have chosen to run pro-life candidates locally just to win. It's all about bums in seats for you and screw everyone else, particularly women and their human rights.

Strawman. Trolling.

Yo, troll..

Want to know what happens when pro-life shut down clinics and deny reproductive healthcare?

The rate of Texas women who died from complications related to pregnancy doubled from 2010 to 2014, a new study has found, for an estimated maternal mortality rate that is unmatched in any other state and the rest of the developed world.

The finding comes from a report, appearing in the September issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, that the maternal mortality rate in the United States increased between 2000 and 2014, even while the rest of the world succeeded in reducing its rate. Excluding California, where maternal mortality declined, and Texas, where it surged, the estimated number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births rose to 23.8 in 2014 from 18.8 in 2000 – or about 27%.

But the report singled out Texas for special concern, saying the doubling of mortality rates in a two-year period was hard to explain “in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval”.

From 2000 to the end of 2010, Texas’s estimated maternal mortality rate hovered between 17.7 and 18.6 per 100,000 births. But after 2010, that rate had leaped to 33 deaths per 100,000, and in 2014 it was 35.8. Between 2010 and 2014, more than 600 women died for reasons related to their pregnancies.

No other state saw a comparable increase.

In the wake of the report, reproductive health advocates are blaming the increase on Republican-led budget cuts that decimated the ranks of Texas’s reproductive healthcare clinics. In 2011, just as the spike began, the Texas state legislature cut $73.6 m from the state’s family planning budget of $111.5m. The two-thirds cut forced more than 80 family planning clinics to shut down across the state. The remaining clinics managed to provide services – such as low-cost or free birth control, cancer screenings and well-woman exams – to only half as many women as before.

At the same time, Texas eliminated all Planned Parenthood clinics – whether or not they provided abortion services – from the state program that provides poor women with preventive healthcare. Previously, Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas offered cancer screenings and contraception to more than 130,000 women.

[..]

Texas is one of several southern states where health officials say there is a risk of a local outbreak. But about half the state lacks ready access to OB-GYN care, making it difficult for women to obtain contraception or for pregnant women to confirm the health of their babies. Just this month, Texas’s health department drewfire for allocating $1.6m of the $18m the state budgets for low-income women’s family planning to an anti-abortion group that does not provide basic health services.​

How is that for "buzzwords and highlight reels"?

I see you are still flicking that trolleycart switch on women's rights, Kitta..

 

There are abortion clinics in Nebraska and in Omaha. Now imagine what would happen if the Democrats endorsed pro-life candidates who then shut down those clinics?

And you still fail to recognise how abortion is a very important issue for a large portion of voters?

You think 'pro-lifer' is just a tiny part of the Republican Party policy? Heh!

Access to reproductive healthcare is a vital part of "healthcare" for women, EF. When those clinics close, so do cancer screening, access to affordable contraception, for example. If you still don't understand how access to reproductive healthcare is a deeply economic issue for women, then really, it comes down to you simply refusing to acknowledge it.

How can you promise that? You can't know that. We know how pro-life politicians affect healthcare access for women. You are essentially making an empty promise at this point, with nothing to back it up.

Access to reproductive healthcare should not be ummed and aahhed by the Democrats. This should be an absolute baseline policy that is not shifted from for the sake of politics. The same goes for education, healthcare, civil rights, equal rights, the environment, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, for example. These are not things that the Party should be leaving open to ambiguity and misinterpretation or even contemplating running candidates that are counter to these core values. These should be absolute and not up for debate.

And yet, we find that women's rights, at least, is up for debate for Democrats and this isn't just locally. But nationally as well.

Imagine if Democrats, sick and tired of losing white votes in Mississippi, decided to nominate a segregationist for governor. Imagine if they found that LGBTQ rights turn off voters in Tennessee, so they ran one of those anti-same-sex-marriage Christian bakers. Imagine if they found that plenty of Oklahoma voters didn’t believe in climate change, so they ran a denialist. After all, why get hung up on one item in the long list of good things we all support when the important thing is getting back into power? Everyone has to take one for the team sometimes, right?

Don’t worry, Nation readers. These scenarios aren’t about to happen. Only women are expected to let history roll backwards over them. Only women’s rights to contraception and abortion are perpetually debatable, postponable, side-trackable, while those who insist on upholding the party platform—and the Constitution—are dismissed as rigid ideologues with a “litmus test.” Party leaders can’t come right out and say so—in fact, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez has issued a statementdeclaring that abortion rights are non-negotiable. But if you pay attention, you can feel the waters are being tested. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi told The Washington Post, “This is not a rubber-stamp party.” Why else would Perez meet with Democrats for Life? And why did so many pay such close attention to Heath Mello, a former state legislator in Nebraska with a long record of anti-abortion votes, who ran for mayor of Omaha with the approval of both Bernie Sanders, and, initially, Perez? Maybe they hadn’t done their due diligence and didn’t know, or maybe it was a test: Can we win in red states if we run anti-abortion candidates?

After Mello lost, some blamed meddling out-of-state pro-choicers and the national media for making his many anti-abortion votes in the State Legislature a high-profile issue, despite the fact that his opponent was a reasonably popular Republican incumbent. So then why did the takeaway become “Ooh, look at those mean pro-choicers messing with our candidate” and not “Well, I guess being anti-choice isn’t such a vote-getter after all, and the price in nationwide opposition is too high to pay”? See above: because the issue concerns women’s rights. Amazingly, it is still an open question whether a woman is a person or a human bassinet.

Now comes Joshua Svaty, who is running in Kansas’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Svaty, who served most recently as the state secretary of agriculture and EPA adviser, has a long anti-choice record from his years in the State Legislature (2003–9). He voted for no less than 11 anti-abortion bills, including one that declares the “unborn child” a person from the moment of conception, and a rather confusingly worded measure, vetoed by then-Governor Kathleen Sebelius, that would have allowed a woman’s husband, parent, or guardian to sue the clinic to prevent her from getting an abortion or receive damages if one had been performed. Never mind what the woman wanted; her pregnancy belongs to her family.

[..]

What tends to get forgotten by those who push for the Democratic Party to run anti-abortion candidates is that the party base is pro-choice. That is who votes in primaries, and that is who knocks on doors and makes phone calls and gets out the vote on Election Day. An anti-abortion Dem might steal some votes from the Republican candidate, but at the cost of losing the most ardent Democrats—who happen to be women. “If you’re a Dem or unaffiliated pro-choice voter, you’re going to sit on your hands on Election Day,” says Julie Burkhart, the founder and CEO of Trust Women Foundation, a reproductive rights organization that owns and operates clinics in Wichita and Oklahoma City. “People are Democrats for a reason.” There’s a pro-choicer running in the primary, Carl Brewer, former mayor of Wichita. Sounds like he knows that.
​

What the hell? Why are Democrats running these candidates? How can they? How and why are women's rights again being debated for the sake of politics?

This is not a winning strategy.

Nor is it an acceptable one.

And yet, they do win in those districts.

The conventional wisdom is that you need to be anti-choice to win in Kansas, where the “pro-life” movement has long been extremely militant. But is that true? According to a 2016 poll, 30 percent of Kansans want to ban abortion completely, which is much higher than the national average; 30 percent want it to be legal; and 38 percent said they wouldn’t choose abortion for themselves but that the government shouldn’t prevent women from making their own decision. Over half said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who wanted to defund Planned Parenthood, which Brownback tried to do before being blocked by the courts; 32 percent said they would be more likely to vote for such a candidate. Indeed, in 2016, even as Trump carried the state by 56.2 percent, Kansas Democrats elected 17 new members to the State Legislature, most of them pro-choice.

Remember, too, that Sebelius was a popular pro-choice governor until 2009, not so long ago. Her predecessor, Bill Graves, a Republican, was pro-choice as well. True, back in the 1990s, Democratic Governor Joan Finney was anti-choice, but Finney pretty much left abortion alone. Svaty is different. Like Mello, he was a hard-core extremist during his time as a legislator. ​

Stop the willingness to gamble away women's lives for the sake of politics.

 

Really, you missed the part about how lack of access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion, is dangerous to women's health?

Your pro-life candidates have a history of voting for denying women their fundamental human rights.

I mean, I get why you think that the fundamental human rights of women is a "narrow minded ideology", but if this keeps up, then you will be no better than the GOP. Your base, the majority of whom are women, will simply not vote for you.

You need to start remembering that you can't win without women. And until you recognise that access to reproductive healthcare is a fundamental human rights issue, as well as an economic issue and a healthcare issue and also affects access to things like education and housing, not to mention employment, you will lose those core Democratic voters. And if you start to embrace running pro-life hardliners like you have started to do in the last year since the last election, you can kiss any chance of controlling any house of Government goodbye, because your voting base will stay home.

No, they aren't hive minds. But if you want to risk losing your core Democratic voters, your actual base, for the sake of trying to win back a few Republican voters, then you will continue to lose.

You have no way of guaranteeing that if the party itself is leaving itself open on a national level. And the last year has seen a shift on a national level.

Those "few pro-life Democrats" have the capacity to vote against women's rights on a national level, EF. These Democrats are voting to defund Planned Parenthood in Congress. Now imagine if the Democrats manage to win back Congress with a minutely small margin. Those pro-life Democrats have a history of voting against women's rights. Now imagine what happens when they vote against the party (they have in the past on abortion issues and access to reproductive healthcare), or they vote with Republicans who push legislation to defund PP or implement an abortion ban (they have already voted for these in the past).

You don't think it will happen? It's already happening now. You have at least 3 US Democratic senators who have voted against party policy in regards to women's access to reproductive healthcare. And at least 3 in the House of Representatives.

Now imagine if you hold a lead of 2-3 seats in the Senate. Or in the House of Representatives. Or worse, imagine if the Democrats continue to put forward candidates who are pro-life (which they have been, because apparently the party is a "big tent"). Women's fundamental human rights should not be up for debate. And the more the Democrats start swinging right on this, the more likely you will alienate your base.

The chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Ben Ray Luján, said in an interview this week that his party intended to support candidates who can win, regardless of their position on abortion rights.

There will be no abortion "litmus test" in the Democrats' drive to win back the House, he said. His comments echoed earlier ones from Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer and Bernie Sanders.

That's not just an insult to the women (and men) who make up the Democrats' base. It's a fool's errand.

Much of the left has learned all the wrong lessons from Hillary Clinton's defeat. They could focus on increasing turnout among their base -- women and African-Americans -- but Democrats have instead taken a rhetorical page from both Donald Trump's sexism and Bernie Sanders's populism by trying to appeal to disaffected white guys.
This pivot to the right on women's health is particularly insidious, reflecting an anti-feminist backlash across the political spectrum.

Democrats may say they are trying to field the most competitive team of candidates they can to win a majority in Congress, and in some districts that candidate might be anti-abortion. But this treads a dangerous path: ceding to demands that the entire political system cater to the perceived values of a group that largely stopped voting for Democrats in the 1960s, when the party pushed the Civil Rights Act and equal rights for women.

[..]

It's not just "economic anxiety" the party is trying to transform into votes. Funding candidates who oppose legal abortion contradicts any claim that Democrats are the party of the masses, let alone the ignored and underserved.

Women are more than half the population, and one in three of us will have an abortion in her lifetime, according to a 2011 study from the Guttmacher Institute. Nearly every American will have a friend, lover, colleague, girlfriend, sister, boss, wife or mother who has had an abortion, even if they never know it.

[..]

Supporting laws that give the state the power to compel women to continue pregnancies is misogynist and illiberal. Expecting Democratic politicians to stake out clear ground on abortion rights is not a "purity test" or a difference in opinion on policy or efficacy, like divergent views on the best ways to reduce inequality or suggesting we should repair the ACA before promoting a single-payer system.

It's a basic question of human rights: Are women sovereign citizens in our own bodies? If your answer is no, the Democratic Party shouldn't fund your campaign.

It's disturbing to see the United States' ostensibly progressive party so quickly abandon both its own most loyal voters and progressive ideals, all in a frenzied grab for the same Trump supporters who have dominated sympathetic media coverage of the election. It's also a losing strategy.

[..]

What is obvious, though, is that abortion rights are an animating issue for the Democratic Party base, and support for abortion rights gets a whole lot of women marching, donating money, and volunteering for Democrats.

The party has a lot to lose by alienating them in a dodgy gamble to scoop up Trump voters, where a "win" apparently means building the ranks of the party by adding more people who are hostile to women's rights. Clearly, we have enough of those guys already.​

 

Exactly. One of the articles I linked above touches on this.

What tends to get forgotten by those who push for the Democratic Party to run anti-abortion candidates is that the party base is pro-choice. That is who votes in primaries, and that is who knocks on doors and makes phone calls and gets out the vote on Election Day. An anti-abortion Dem might steal some votes from the Republican candidate, but at the cost of losing the most ardent Democrats—who happen to be women. “If you’re a Dem or unaffiliated pro-choice voter, you’re going to sit on your hands on Election Day,” says Julie Burkhart, the founder and CEO of Trust Women Foundation, a reproductive rights organization that owns and operates clinics in Wichita and Oklahoma City. ​

When you have progressives on the national stage, umming and ahhing about access to reproductive healthcare, they do so at the risk of losing their base, who will stay home and "sit on their hands"..