So it was without great joy that american women received the news that Bush and the Supreme Court had made a medical decision for them. The Supreme Court's decision that a ban on intact dilation and extraction -- misnamed by opponents and a compliant media 'partial birth abortion' -- is constitutional means that, male or female, you no longer have the right to be healthy. It's not protected by the Constitution.
Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America:
"The Court has disregarded the medical opinion of leading doctors who oppose the ban. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists -- which represents 90 percent of the OB GYNs in this country -- says the ban is harmful to women's health and interferes with medical decision making.
"This case is about more than abortion. This decision means the Court is willing to partner with the Bush administration and uphold laws that interfere with personal decisions that should be left up to a woman and her family.
"Indeed, this is a setback for all Americans who believe politicians should not make private, personal medical decisions for the rest of us. Many pro-choice lawmakers, including presidential candidates, opposed the Bush Federal Abortion Ban. These leaders are right to remind the public that President Bush's appointees to the Court are taking women's reproductive rights in a dangerous direction."
The law bans the procedure, even in the event that pregnancy would affect the woman's health. Bush, Congress, and the Supreme Court have determined that the procedure is never medically necessary, despite the fact that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say that it is. Nothing, not even the freakin' facts, will stand in the way of the anti-choice ideology. The people who think that evolution is a bunch of crap and God made you out of dust get to make medical decisions for you from now on. Bring on the witch doctors and faith healers.
But that's not what's eating at me most. It's the smug arrogance, the bald faced hypocrisy of those who cheer on a pointless slaughter in Iraq with one side of their mouth and cry about their damned 'culture of life' with the other. "I applaud the court for its ruling today, and my hope is that it sets the stage for further progress in the fight to ensure our nation's laws respect the sanctity of unborn human life," said Minority Leader John Boehner on receiving the news that the Supreme Court had finally gone back to believing that women were too retarded to make their own decisions.
And Bush's response was infuriating. "The Supreme Court's decision is an affirmation of the progress we have made over the past six years in protecting human dignity and upholding the sanctity of life," he said in a statement. "We will continue to work for the day when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law."
Unless, of course, that child happens to be iraqi -- then we'll blow it all to hell. The idea of Bush lecturing me on the 'sanctity of life' is galling. This bloodsoaked bastard doesn't have a moral leg to stand on and he's putting himself up as the standard of morality. If Bush is the moral yardstick by which we're to measure ourselves, then we're completely screwed.
And the man who thinks that torturing people at Guantanamo until they confess to crimes they may or may not have committed gets to talk to me about 'protecting human dignity?' The man who sent all those troops off to die for his lies gets to tell me that he's the protector of human dignity and life? In what bass ackward world?
I went looking for photos to accompany this post and I found hellish ones. Babies split open like bananas, with only portions of faces. Mothers holding the bodies of children who's limbs are only connected by thin strings of shredded meat and ligament. A living child who's just a head and torso wrapped in bandages. I could've shown you images that would've made your breakfast a waste of money. But I came up with the one above. The bent SOBs who stand outside of abortion clinics with their photos can use images to sicken us -- but the only reason they do it is because they don't have much of an argument.
Bush can babble on and on about how he respects life, but no one's forgetting his and Alberto Gonzales's roles in making Texas the top executing state in the nation. He can talk about human dignity, but the photos from Abu Ghraib will follow his legacy forever. He can cry over the poor fetus, while he destroys entire schools.
He can do it, but that doesn't make it right. And it's not going to make people forget who he is and what he's done. Monsters don't get to lecture us on morality -- not without posts like this following the lecture.
--Wisco
Technorati tags: politics; propaganda; religious right; civil rights; SCOTUS; Hey Bush, if abortion is murder, then what the hell do you call the war in Iraq?
2 comments:
Well said Wisco. I only hope we can undo the damage of the past six years. Sadly, I am a "glass half-empty" person in that regard.
Great essay. Just one minor quibble: the term is "shoo-in", not "shoe-in" - as in, shooing a horse into the stall.
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