Dispatches from the Culture Wars - Fools and money edition
Portside
Republicans can continue their desperate move to convince Americans that being anti-choice is actually pro-woman. But we are not stupid, and they are not fooling anyone. The more anti-choice politicians, pundits and activists underestimate women by continuing with their rhetorical sleight-of-hand, the more they reveal themselves. The anti-choice movement cannot erase us from our own lives by insisting that abortion isn't necessary.
This is a movement, not a moment...Moral Mondays have really caught fire. It took several months last spring and early summer for the Moral Monday protests to reach a crescendo. While early statehouse rallies in North Carolina started by attracting about 50 protesters, by July thousands of people from around the state were swarming the state capitol. After three consecutive months of action, there had been around 920 arrests for civil disobedience at the weekly rallies.
After Tiller explores third-trimester abortions in the wake of the 2009 assassination of practitioner Dr. George Tiller. The procedure is now performed by only four doctors in the United States, who risk their lives in the name of commitment to their patients.
Women’s-health clinics have been under assault for years. Abortions make up just 3 percent of the services Planned Parenthood performs. Planned Parenthood estimates that 130,000 women in Texas go without preventive health care, like breast-cancer screenings, due to Texas' anti-abortion cuts to women’s-health-care funding, and a lot of those women will die as a result.
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