According to Hawaii Now News:
Republican Sen. Sam Slom tried and failed to amend the bill to allow hospitals to claim a religious exemption instead of distributing the morning-after pill. Slom told lawmakers the bill is an example of the state trampling on religious rights. Sen. Josh Green urged lawmakers to reject Slom’s amendment. The Democrat says the issue isn’t about religious freedom but rather about providing quality care. The state attorney general says there were 353 reported rapes in Hawaii in 2011. Slom’s amendment was easily defeated by the overwhelmingly Democratic state Senate.
Many states are doing the opposite of Hawaii. Conservatives in red states are waging a war on contraception, even emergency contraception that would prevent rape victims from getting pregnant. It’s almost as if conservatives want rapists to have the right to impregnate their victims.
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Again with the religious people claiming that their religious freedom means trampling the rights of others.
Shit like what our conservative pal in Hawaii here tried to pull is a slap in the face to rape victims.
As the article states, it is almost as if conservatives/right wingers want rapists to have the “right” to impregnate their victims. As hyperbolic as it sounds, that is exactly what “religious exemptions” like this do. You can argue religious freedom all you want but the end result is exactly as stated.
It forces victims of rape to carry their rapist’s child, when you advocate these types of “exemptions” that is what you are advocating.
The teen pregnancy rate in New York Citydropped by 27 percent over the last decade, a statistic that city officials credit to teens’ expanded access to contraception.
The city’s health commissioner, Tom Farley,told the New York Daily News that the data shows two concurrent trends: more adolescents are choosing to use birth control, and more of them are also delaying sexual intercourse. That’s partly because New York is one of the 21 states that allows all minors to have access to contraceptive services — and two years ago, the public school system began a pilot program to provide Plan B to public school students in districts with high rates of unintended pregnancy:
The city has worked to make it easier for kids to get birth control —giving out condoms at schools and making birth control and the morning-after pill available in some school clinics, a sometimes controversial move.
Farley saidthe numbers show that strategy is working.
“It shows that when you make condoms and contraception available to teens, they don’t increase their likelihood of being sexually active. But they get the message that sex is risky,” he said. […]
Teen pregnancy in the city is still higher than it is nationwide, but it has fallen at a sharper rate, officials said.
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In other news, life jackets help keep you from drowning, seat belts prevent injury in car crashes, and shoes help keep gravel from hurting your feet.
The current law states that birth control is covered under health insurance plans for women in Arizona for contraceptive purposes as well as health concerns. However, the new birth control bill, House Bill 2625, states that women who want their birth control pill to be covered by their insurance plans must verify its purpose to be solely for medical reasons and not to prevent pregnancy. The bill would grant employers to deny female employees the right to be covered based on religious beliefs.
The new bill was passed by Arizona’s House of Representatives in early March and was endorsed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday with a 6-2 vote. According to Arizona House Bill 2625, employers can refuse coverage for birth control for contraceptive, abortifacient, abortion or sterilization purposes, forcing women to submit a claim to prove medical conditions which require treatment for birth control.
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Funny that the bill doesn’t require men on Viagra to prove that they have a wife of childbearing age, or to prove they they are only using it for procreation.
This tells me that the bill isn’t about religion at all and is about controlling women’s sex lives and personal decisions.
Of all the speeches at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, few offended conservative listeners more than the speech by Sandra Fluke.
There are plenty of good reasons to be annoyed. From the conservative point of view, Fluke is on the wrong side of a battle over religious freedom. Back in March, she testified in favor of a proposed Obama administration rule that would require Catholic institutions, like her own Georgetown University law school, to reject the teaching of their church and cover contraception in their university health plans — plans not funded by taxpayers, by the way, but by tuition and other university revenues.
Now here Fluke was again, on the national stage, warning that a vote for the Republican ticket in 2012 was a vote for “an America in which you have a new vice president who co-sponsored a bill that would allow pregnant women to die preventable deaths in our emergency rooms. An America in which states humiliate women by forcing us to endure invasive ultrasounds we don’t want and our doctors say we don’t need.
“An America in which access to birth control is controlled by people who will never use it; in which politicians redefine rape so survivors are victimized all over again; in which someone decides which domestic violence victims deserve help, and which don’t.”
Shortly before Fluke spoke, conservative commentator Ann Coulter had tweeted: “Bill Clinton just impregnated Sandra Fluke backstage.”
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These people seem to get awfully pissed when the “women folk” speak up for themselves don’t they?
Not only that, but I’m really sick of the distortion of facts related to fluke. She’s not talking about free birth control from the government (which personally, I wouldn’t think would be a bad thing, anyway) she’s talking about having birth control being covered by her insurance.
This week, among other over-the-top comments, Justice Antonin Scalia expressed his belief that women do not have a right to birth control. His arrogance and lack of regard for the rights of women should be causing every single woman in this country to loudly protest, but of course, a fair number of conservative women will continue to grovel and let their male leaders dictate their destinies. Given that a court in Colorado ruled against the birth control mandate recently, there is a reasonable chance this issue could end up before our highly conservative Supreme Court.
[…]
What of the notion that sects who oppose birth control would be forced to pay for it (especially under the Obama compromise), thus violating the clause of Congress not prohibiting the free exercise of religion? For this, we need to break down whether there is actually any additional expense to religious employers for this coverage. Under the ACA, the rampant discrimination against women that allowed insurers to charge them more than men is eliminated. Employers would actually not be charged any more to cover women’s birth control than they would be if they were not covering it. The ACA will be requiring health insurers who are providing coverage to include this in the package. It isn’t an additional expense to the insured. To remove the birth control from the array of covered services then becomes an affirmative move by these religious organizations. They are actively taking something away from employees that they would otherwise have a right to. They are inserting themselves into the employee’s sanctioned benefits.
Employees are given health insurance as a benefit. Like their pay, it should be considered theirs. They earned it. And just like their pay, they should have the right to do whatever they choose with it. Would it similarly be justified for these religious organizations to dictate what an employee did with his or her pay? A survey of Catholics found that a slight majority support religiously affiliated organizations including birth control in their health insurance. One wonders if they were pointedly asked about whether a woman of a different faith working at a Catholic hospital, for example, had the same right to have her employer-based health insurance cover her birth control the way that women are covered at every other type of job, what they would say.
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Great article, well worth the read, and it blows all kinds of holes in using “religious freedom” being used to limit access to birth control.
klondikebar123:
snaps4hollywood:
I can’t remember the last time I heard that and thought someone was actually fighting for me. This is a completely non-religious issue that I’m talking about. We can leave Catholicism out. When it comes to contraception, or abortion, or many other issues, all that’s said is “this will empower women” and still the only thing I see is men, and even other women, manipulating women.
Because in contraception and abortion, it’s all our fault. The pay gap is our fault. Gender bias is our fault.
Contraception and abortion is essentially having the right to destroy your natural body…what makes you a woman.
Yeah. I feel real empowered. Sorry my uterus offends you so much, you can’t use me for sex without wanting some insurance.
Hi, yeah. You don’t get it.
You don’t want to take birth control or have an abortion? Great. We in the pro-choice and feminism communities feel you should be allowed to make that decision.
I had an abortion two and a half years ago, and would like to have affordable birth control until my boyfriend’s job keeps him in one place longer than a year and I have graduated college? Great. The people in the pro-choice and feminism communities think I should be allowed to make that decision.
THAT is how we empower you, by telling you that whichever decision YOU make about YOUR body and about bearing or not bearing children is valid because it’s YOURS.
I’m sorry that I think marriage is basically just a piece of paper, that I love and adore my boyfriend, have sex with him whenever I feel like it, and don’t want kids before we can’t afford to take care of them. I’m sorry that I have been made aware that those sorts of decisions shouldn’t rest in some ancient biology where my body might be ready for a pregnancy but everything else in my life isn’t.
You want to talk empowerment?
I am empowered by my birth control. I am empowered by my abortion. I am empowered by my ability to choose my own clothes every day. I am empowered that I was able to make the decision to go to college. I am empowered that no man owns me, and I make my own decisions.
I am empowered because although I adore children and cannot wait to have some, I know I don’t want to be that mom who worries about money, who wonders “is there gonna be enough food this week?”, that has to use WIC or food stamps because I have no other choice, that has to work 40 hour work week and can never see my kids because I need the money.
I want to be the mom that can go to the store and buy the expensive healthy food. I want to be the mom that can afford to send my kids to a private school if the public school in the area is not providing a good enough education. I want to be the mom that, while still working, can afford to stop any time I think my kids need me. I want to be the mom that can afford, now and then, to give my kids a decent Christmas.
So yeah, I’m fucking EMPOWERED by MY choice to have an abortion and be on birth control.
BOOM
(Source: thynameisfrancis)
lagoble:
indigenousfeminist:
“Men’s indifference to learning about contraception and to taking any responsibility for it is a theme that emerges from many reports of projects that have attempted, and failed, to reach and educate men. One of the most successful programs of contraception education for men, a Planned Parenthood project in Chicago, abandoned its attempts to reach men over the age of twenty-five when it was found that these men simply would not participate, even when offered beer, sandwiches, free condoms—and “stag” movies. Instead, the project targeted a younger group, and as part of its research the project conducted a survey of over a thousand men aged fifteen to nineteen:
• These young men were asked whether they agreed with the statement “It’s okay to tell a girl you love her so that you can have sex with her.” Seven out of ten agreed that it’s okay.
• They were asked whether they agreed with the statement “A guy should use birth control whenever possible.” Eight out of ten disagreed and said a guy should not.
• And when asked, “If I got a girl pregnant, I would want her to have an abortion,” nearly nine out of ten said no, they would not want her to have an abortion. These teenage men agreed: Deception to obtain coital access is okay; male irresponsibility in contraception is okay; but abortion is not okay—“because it’s wrong.”
Largely because of attitudes such as these, one million teenage women—one tenth of all teenage women—become pregnant each year, and two thirds of their pregnancies are not wanted.”
—John Stoltenberg, Refusing to be a Man
just… uggh
This is an example of male privilege.
I drill it into my sons’ heads over and over that they better damn well use protection or they don’t know what being in trouble is.
(via glittertitties-deactivated20130)
A bill that allows pharmacists and doctors to deny women access to contraception has been signed into law by Kansas Governor Sam Brownback. This new law is just one of many bills that the Republican governor has signed since he came into office. He has recently signed legislation that pressures abortion clinics with new regulations, legislation that imposes long waiting times to get an abortion, and legislation that bans insurance companies from covering abortion procedures.
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But there is no war on women and both sides are exactly the same. /s
