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While discussing the rush in various states to impose the most arbitrary and draconian restrictions on abortion they can imagine (where, looking at some of the testimony offered “imagine” really is the right word) Echidne of the Snakes says

Reading about forced birth laws does make me see how very apt that term I prefer: “forced birth” is. Note that a woman’s mental health will be screened for abortion but not for going on with the pregnancy. She might be out of her mind but nobody cares about that as long as there is no abortion.

She said it here.

Calling it “forced birth” isn’t original to Echidne but something about the way she introduced it in this post really hit home for me. Specifically she said it after quoting from objectively bizarre testimony by unqualified men asked to testify before a legislature that was interested only in justifying its decisions.

I think it was that tacit introduction of a noun that made it resonate for me. So I’d like to propose that moving forward we start calling it what it is: government-forced birth. And using headlines and blog-post titles like “Nebraska Targets Mentally Ill for Government-Forced Birth“ or “Oklahoma Legislature Expands Government-Forced Birth Policy.”

Say it because they’ll hate it. Say it because it’s the truth.

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And trust me, when a medical “expert” hops up to testify that a) birth should be government-forced because at 20 weeks a fetus can feel pain but in the same hearing also volunteers that b) appears indifferent to the fate of a 20-week old fetus when he recommends pregnant women be subjected to electroshock therapy sufficient to cause grand-mal seizures that medical “expert” isn’t “pro-life.” He pretty clearly doesn’t give a shit about fetuses. Instead he’s only pro government-forced pregnancy.

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus, who works in a municipal (I think) legal justice system and volunteers to help pregnant minors obtain parental-notification exemptions for abortions has the rundown on just how her state’s (and very likely most states’) rape-victim exemptions work. Or rather don’t.

I’m not saying that there aren’t some stone cold stupid obnoxious young boys out there who are getting their counterparts pregnant. I know there are. When girls who were knocked up by age-appropriate boyfriends come in, the boyfriends come with them (and make out in court). Girls who come in alone, I assume, didn’t have a boyfriend; they had an abuser. Now, technically, there’s a rape exception in the notification law. If you have been raped, you do not have to go through the judicial bypass — you get a bonus abortion, no paternalism attached! But because, lord knows, women are big fat liars about rape, and because women will resort to desperate measures to acquire medical care that we all know they don’t really need (what they need is a baby), a girl can’t just say she was raped and get a free bypass. She has to report her rape to the police. And since the police are going to tell your parents anyway, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

I can’t conceive of any possible scenario where a girl reports her rape to the police, but hides her pregnancy and subsequent abortion from her parents, the police, the investigators, the judge, the jury, and the attorneys. I suppose it is possible, but is it probable? Is it reasonable? We don’t trust these girls with the decision to have or not have children, but we think they should be capable of maintaining an intense secret after a horrific trauma and during police and attorney interrogation?

So the exception for the bypass law is, in this case, completely self-defeating. For a girl to meet the criteria for the exception, she will no longer need the bypass. Which again shows you the intent of the law, and the exception: neither were ever instituted with the intention that they be used. Additionally, knowing that the rape exception was only added after intense public pressure illustrates its function quite clearly: the rape exception is to make politicians look like something less than paternalistic monsters, while preserving the paternalistically monstrous power to deny all young women (including rape victims) the right to access desperately needed medical care.

She said it here.

When I was a teen peer counselor back in the days before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade my home state had a variety of too-clever-by-half laws that defined things like 10-month review processes for pregnancy terminations. It was part of the insult legislators routinely added to add calculated insult to often very-real injury.

This sort of unusable rape “exception” suggests only that they’re more sophisticated, not that they’re any less clever-by-half, nor any less interested in insulting and injuring.

It’s still not ok.

Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones asks how birth control came to be left out of most healthcare legislation.

Sharon Lerner at DoubleX ponders how birth control came to be a politically toxic issue.

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On the one hand, I can understand why birth control wasn’t included in the minimum benefits package. When you’re making a big change, and not including birth control simply leaves the status quo (rather than actively making the status quo worse), it’s easy to run from the least whiff of controversy, just to keep your bill intact. On the other hand, it’s discouraging that birth control, of all things, which practically everyone uses, should be controversial.

Read the quote in context here.

Actually I can say exactly how contraception became toxic in Congress so long ago. It’s actually the issue that first inspired me to start a website back when I thought I could become a regular political web-logger back in the days before actual blogging tools. That old website is now so long-gone I can’t even find the (hand-coded) source files.

Anyway, while I evidently no longer even have notes for my sources I learned the answer in an old print-based Washington Monthly from back in what must have been the early 1990s. What they said was that beginning in the 1970s pressure politics was such that no conservative Republican Senators would allow any legislation referencing birth control to move forward if it included support for abortion. No liberal Democratic Senator would support anything that didn’t include support for abortion. And no matter who brought it up or how reasonable the proposal was it always turned into a fight that would often spill over into other bills, with pro-choice attachments showing up here and anti-choice attachments showing up there and, since passions ran quite high, no possibility of resolution.

The result was a cordial agreement on both sides not to even bring it up. By the time the Monthly published the story the agreement was already nearly 20 years old. It would have been more than 30 years ago now.

What was particularly disgraceful was that at the time contraception itself wasn’t particularly controversial. Not for liberals, obviously, but also not for non-Catholic, pre-Reagan-revolution conservatives. And so absent the abortion issue what little legislation that did make it through tended to pass by overwhelming majorities in both parties.

Warn’t them the days though? Bipartisanship sure was great back then.

Heartwarming followup to yesterday’s post on “crisis” pregnancy centers. Guess where proceeds from Florida’s “Choose Life” license plate program wind up.

Choose Life, Inc. is an IRC 501©(3) organization and donations are tax deductible. Contributions and profits from the sale of promotional items are used to help Choose Life, Inc. promote the sale of the real Choose Life License Plate which raises funds to support adoption efforts of Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Maternity Homes and not-for-profit adoption agencies. Please consider supporting us. Everyone is a volunteer; no salaries are paid to anyone.

Source: Choose Life, Inc.

The website’s tagline says it all “Everything you need to know about the Choose Life License Tag.”

Once again there’s no, zero, none interest making it easier for women with unplanned pregnancies to have and raise their own children. Not easier medically. Not easier psychologically. Not easier logistically. Not easier economically. Not easier socially.

Because, after all, to do that you’d have to give up the notion that pregnancy out of wedlock is wrong and that women who become pregnant out of wedlock are bad. You’d have to give up the idea that the “precious gift of life” is a life-ruining “crisis.” And you’d especially have to give up the smug sense of superiority that lets proponents tell women who’ve “relinquished” the newborns they were first persuaded not to abort “You’re the one who spread your legs and got pregnant out of wedlock. You have no right to grieve for this baby.

That “pro-life” and “a baby belongs with his or her parents” zealots can’t comprehend this simple extension of the idea of choice and self-determination shouldn’t be tolerated.

Which, incidentally, is an oppositional approach I happen to think they’re not at all prepared to defend themselves against.

(Via Jezebel’s Anna N.)