This pro-abortion rant from the San Antonio Current is really reaching:
Frank Corte is a pro-life legislator who wants to control Texas’s women and health professionals. With HB 21, he wants to deny women the ability to review abortion warnings privately on video, and instead force them to hear it directly from the doctor; with HB 23, he’d force pharmacists who handle emergency contraception to post “If you believe that life begins at fertilization ...” warnings.
The SA Current is spinning their commentary on the 80th Legislature as though it's a review of TV shows during sweeps week. The Current is a free/throwaway rag, found in lobbies and vestibules of businesses all over town. They advertise themselves as
The Current strives to capture the times in which San Antonians live. We attempt to challenge our readers, by being provocative, irreverent, skeptical, funny, vibrant, and imaginative. We earn our readers' trust by being devoted to fact and dedicated to artful storytelling.
Make that an emphasis on "provocative, irreverent and skeptical."
Texas has a great "Woman's Right to Know Law," designed to fully inform the older - usually surviving - victims of abortion of the nature and consequences of abortion. There's a companion document that lists resources that provide help to pregnant women and young families, which is intended to enable women to chose not to kill their children.
The abortionists hate this booklet and the information that they are required by State law to give the woman, as well as the informed consent process that the State mandates. They've worked out all sorts of ways to avoid the booklet and having the doctor provide the consent, from showing the girls and women the book and telling them they have the option of reading it (or not), to placing stickers on front that state that the information is inacurate. The main tactic is to set up "informed consent" procedures so that the doctor (herself or himself) does not actually have to tell a girl or a woman what he or she is going to do and what will happen.
However, since this "choice" is "between the woman and her doctor," shouldn't the consent process be between the "woman and her doctor?" (Forget for a moment that in real life, the great majority of abortionists never meet their patients before the day of the procedure, unless they do follow the letter of the Texas Womans Right To Know law.)
The irreverence continues in the Current's discription of the legislators who would introduce bills to make the punishment for sexual abuse of children more severe. I hate the death penalty and extremely strict, mandatory prison terms, but recognize that they are sometimes appropriate. (A few years ago, we had a prison break, and the 7 escapees ended up killing a policeman before they were caught.) Child sexual predators are known to be prone to recidivism. This article tells us that these men usually molest 80 to 120 children before they are caught, and tells the stories of Jacob,Jessica, Megan, and Ashley.)
Here's how that Current article views these stories:
Having campaigned successfully for reelection on a kill-all-repeat-child-rapists platform, Dewhurst is now Senate President and determined to pass Jessica’s Law, a Bill O’Reilly-endorsed, sex-offender-punishment proposal that includes a mandatory 25-year sentence for repeat child molesters. Dewhurst can’t introduce legislation on his own, but he’s got a team of senators under his command. They include: “2005 Crimefighter of the Year” Bob Deuell, who’s sponsoring SB 68 to make a second child-rape charge a capital offense; hard-nosed Democrat Rodney Ellis, whose SB 97 would remove the statute of limitations for certain sex offenses; and Florence Shapiro, who ushered through a series of “Ashley’s Law” sex-offender bills in previous sessions.
5 comments:
Pro-life campaigners do have a reputation, and I believe a well-earned one, for using shock-tactic materials and dubious facts - the images that come immediately to mind are protesters holding posters showing dismembered fetuses, and campaigners distributing leaflets showing the same. Its also very common to see campaigners screaming that 'abortion causes breast cancer,' refering to a now-discredited study some years ago, or warning women that an abortion might kill them - which, while true, neglects to say that continued pregnency may kill them too, and usually with a higher risk.
Because of these people, whenever there is any attempt by even the more sensible of pro-lifers to introduce new material, there is an assumption that it will be used for the purpose of emotional blackmail or be filled with misinformation and scare-stories.
The organised pro-life movement has been taken over by extremist fanatics now. They give the entire movement a bad reputation, which taints even the moderates.
If abortion is supposed to be "between a woman and her doctor," doesn't that logically mean that a doctor should be involved in some phase of the decision-making process?
The whole "woman and her doctor" thing is proven bull**** by the fact that abortion advocates specifically do not want a woman to have a consultation with a doctor prior to the abortion. She might learn something that will lead her to choose not to abort, and God knows we can't have that happening! "Choice" is only "choice" if the "choice" is abortion. If she chooses birth, she'd been denied "choice."
So, SR, the fact that some prolifers use "shock tactics" is a valid reason to withhold information from women considering abortion? Because that sure sounds like what you're saying. "Because some right-to-lifers present this information in a shocking way, it should be withheld from the women entirely." Sounds like the goal is to spite the prolifers rather than to provide the woman with informed consent.
Granny grump, I'm convinced that "they" don't want the doctor to think about what he's doing and they sure don't want the woman to consider what she's doing as a "choice." They'd rather the doc came in, did not read the literature provided by the State or on PubMed, and definitely never saw the patient clothed and as a human being.
The woman or girl should - in the abortionists' view - remain convinced that she is trapped between losing her way of life and killing her child. The WRTK info includes resources available - many of them provided by pro-life activists before and after birth as well as by the State.
The overwhelming evidence is that abortion hurts women, as well as our children. (There is more than one study to support the increased risk of breast cancer, btw.)
Nevertheless, women deserve informed consent from the doctor. We fought in the '70's for respect and to meet with doctors before we took our clothes off for routine exams. These women and girls deserve no less.
In the long run, all women will benefit from each of these women who decide against abortion. I think of abortion as the widening concentric circles in a pond of water after a rain drop hits. Every abortion results in more advocates of abortion, justifying what they've done. Each abortion avoided decreases the overall advocacy, guilt and justification.
Granny: Not exactly, though you are close. I mean that a 'right to know' law is always under suspicion for potential abuse, either by those who propose it or those who write the material. Due to the reputation created for pro-lifers by some of their more vocal members, its very hard to trust them to provide suitable information to women to allow them to make an informed decision - there is instead a high probability they will recieve essentially propaganda, scare tactices, false information and emotional blackmail that have been very common in pro-life literature.
There is nothing wrong with a right to know law in general, its just that there is noone who could write the material who will be accepted by all sides. Pro-life has too much of a history of scaremongering (The Mifepristone scare for example) to be allowed, pro-choice is unable to even comprehend the arguements of pro-life and so cannot be neutral, and the doctors are too variable and inconsistant, and very likely to present, not an informed choice, but a view from their own personal convictions or those of the organisation they work for (A catholic hospital, for example, is religiously obliged never to present women with any advice that could lead to an abortion, and thus cannot give them an informed choice - only one side of the issue could be presented).
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