Discussion: House Eyes Vote On 20-Week Abortion Ban As GOP Women Defect

Discussion for article #232303

“We need to be smart”. That can only mean don’t tell the voters what we want to do because they will hate it. Nice. Repub women are the worst. They are traitors to their gender. History will be most unkind to them Repub women in the past never were like this. They were smart business women who supported women’s rights. Sad that they have become traitors.

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Nice that a former nurse is more worried about the optics than the consequences of the bill.

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So Rep. Ellmers objects to the measure as a political strategist, not as a woman (or even a human)?

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Republicans are going to keep idiotically trying to appeal to the most conservative voters, a group they’ve already won handily and need not worry about losing. In doing so, they’re going to give Obama numerous opportunities to appeal to Democrats and moderate voters while he gleefully vetoes their nutbag legislation.

It’s interesting, one of the biggest challenges this administration has faced is finding credible advocates and surrogates to go on the airwaves and sell their policies. Maybe that will actually begin to work in the administration’s favor as the president gets to be the happy warrior using his veto to stamp to protect the country from the GOP.

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The outreach efforts by the Republican base are a damned laugh riot!

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“… language that requires women to report a sexual assault to authorities in order to legally terminate a pregnancy resulting from rape”

…But hey, at least they didn’t require a permission slip from the rapist! That’s called compromise, GOP-style.

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that is the problem with rape and incest exceptions…by the time you prove them in court its too late so they have to take the woman’s word for it so why have restrictions?

And how many jobs will this bill create?

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First, because the wingnuts are all about punishing women for having (the wrong kind of) sex. Second, because if these kinds of evil restrictions were active law, taking a woman’s word for it would not be what happened. We’d have organized efforts to take doctors’ licenses away based on claims that they agreed to perform abortions on women who hadn’t actually been raped. We’d have more of the police departments who arrest women who report rapes if an investigation doesn’t confirm every detail of their stories…

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How human is it to force a woman that has been brutally raped to keep the child and carry it for 9 months? How human is it to force a woman whose child is dead to continue to carry that child for 9 months? How human is it to force a woman who has to choose her life over the child’s to be forced to have to carry that child and die?

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Agreed. This bill would doubly victimize and traumatize women by forcing them through the criminal justice system. It’s of a piece with the “legitimate rape” nonsense we heard in 2012.

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I’m curious about these defections. I haven’t followed the history of this bill, but these defections imply that the requirement to report a rape to police was not in the original bill.
Is that correct? Anyone here know?

At lease Alabama’s anti-abortion bill ensured the employment of more conservative lawyers.

I don’t. But it is worth a look to see

The aggressive vetoing of extremely liberal legislation by Gerald Ford helped set the narrative that the Democratic Congress was out of control.

In a similar vein, I think it would be a big mistake for the Senate Dems to filibuster a lot of these whack job bills - give thePresident the bully pulpit to do the job.

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Yay small government!

Very smart. And the president should make a show of explaining exactly what was in the bill and why he thought it necessary to veto it. For instance, “This bill would’ve put an unnecessary burden on rape victims who, after experiencing a tremendous violation, would have to jump through additional hoops in order to avoid carrying their rapists baby. In some cases, that could potentially put the victim at even greater risk of being further harmed.”
Statements like that would probably make the evening news.

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So here’s another fascinating quandry for the GOP. Their proposed bill would:

…require women to report a sexual assault to authorities in order to legally terminate a pregnancy resulting from rape.

Meanwhile here in PA, the Legislature last year passed a law which now allows the NRA to sue any city in the state which has laws requiring gun owners to tell police when a weapon they own has been lost or stolen…and they are starting to do so, with many municipalities caving because they haven’t got the resources for a protracted legal battle.

Just so we have our priorities clear!!!

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“I have urged leadership to reconsider bringing it up next week. … We got into trouble last year, and I think we need to be careful again; we need to be smart about how we’re moving forward,”

Of course they need to be smart about how they move forward. They need to quietly slip it as a rider to must pass financial bill intended to keep the government open.

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