Writing at the St. Louis Tea Party site, PlasticEyes, implies that liberals are racists:
But even though we should celebrate [the Stupak amendment] victory, we must remain vigilant, visible, and vocal because the pro-death Democrats will not give up. They are in thrall to Planned Parenthood, which wants to include abortion in socialized healthcare so they can finally achieve Margaret Sanger’s goal of eliminating “undesirables” before they are born. It’s not hard to imagine a government health care counselor withholding prenatal care from a poor black woman but offering her a free abortion.
The implied empathy of tea partiers for poor black women is touching.
To sum up, we’re accused of trying to prevent the birth of black babies by offering abortions instead of birth control. What can I say? When you’re right, you’re right, PlasticEyes. We do want to prevent the birth of “undesirables”–i.e. babies not desired by the mothers. That final phrase, though, offers kind of an important distinction between what you say we want and what we do want.
Republicans, on the other hand, want neither birth control nor abortions. It was the Missouri Republican House that passed HB 1010 in 2006 banning county health clinics from providing family planning services. Fired Up! observed:
So the GOP has finally come clean that they are opposed to contraception. They used to argue that they opposed family planning because Planned Parenthood played a role. But now the GOP has targeted family planning provided by the county health clinics. Their action is a direct attack on women’s access to traditional family planning services.
The amendment, offered by Rep. Susan Phillips (R-Kansas City) removed “voluntary choice of contraception, including natural family planning” as one of the permissible services that county health clinics could provide with state funding.
All that empathy for poor black women that PlasticEyes evinced rings hollow when you consider that many patients at county health clinics are poor women–and in urban districts, they’re poor black women.
During the spring of ’06, Ed Martin was garnering press by opposing another form of birth control, Plan B, and pretending to do so because it was a form of abortion. Oh, horsehockey. It prevents a fertilized egg from being implanted. That’s not the same as an abortion. But denying it to women does bring on unwanted pregnancies, and, guess what … abortions. Kaiser Family Foundation (via Fired Up!) says:
Researchers estimate that widespread use of EC (emergency contraception) could potentially prevent up to half of the approximately 3 million unintended pregnancies that occur annually in the U.S., and one study has suggested that broader use could help prevent as many as 700,000 pregnancies that now result in abortion.
So now I’m confused. Do Republicans actually oppose abortion? Because they fought damned hard to ensure that hundreds of thousands of unnecessary abortions would occur each year.
Or do they just oppose poor women (aka sluts) enjoying sex without paying a penalty? Okay, not fair. Maybe Rep. Susan Phillips thinks they’re sluts, but PlasticEyes would favor handing them condoms. Whatever. All I know is that tea partiers are not long on logic.