Patriarchy? What patriarchy?
by digby
Sixteen House Republicans delivered impassion floor speeches Wednesday evening promoting a bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy – a number that included only one woman.
GOP leadership originally scheduled the vote to coincide with the annual March for Life on Thursday, when thousands of anti-abortion demonstrators will descend upon the National Mall. But after facing a high number of defections from GOP women and centrists, the House will instead vote on legislation prohibiting the use of taxpayer funds for abortions, which largely codifies current law.
At issue among Republicans in the original bill was language only allowing exceptions for rape if the victim reported it to police. The Justice Department estimates that nearly 70 percent of rapes go unreported.
Despite the swirling controversy, the series of floor speeches about the initial measure after the last votes of the day overwhelmingly featured white men. Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) was the only woman to join her 15 other colleagues on the House floor Wednesday evening for what are known as “special order” speeches.
Wagner recalled first participating in the March for Life in 1990, when she was 28 years old and 12 weeks pregnant with her son.
“While killing an unborn child is unconscionable at any time, it is especially abhorrent at the 20-week mark, when a child is able to feel the pain of an abortion,” Wagner said.
That is, of course, a lie. But whatever.
The good news is that the compassionate conservative Lindsay Graham is trying to find a middle ground:
Sen. Lindsey Graham, chief Senate sponsor of the GOP’s effort to undermine Roe by banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, spoke this morning to the Family Research Council’s “ProLifeCon,” about the House GOP’s decision to cancel a vote on its version of the bill that had been planned for today. The House leadership pulled the plug on the vote in response to protests from some Republican women who objected to a provision that exempted rape survivors from the ban only if they report the rape to police. Some anti-choice groups have objected to including a rape exception in the bill at all, a last-minute addition after the bill’s previous House sponsor, Trent Franks, implied that women who are raped rarely get pregnant.
Graham acknowledged that opponents of rape exceptions are being “intellectually consistent and honest about ‘the baby is the baby’” but argued that banning rape survivors from accessing abortion is a political impossibility: “Some of us who have these exceptions do so in a democratic society believing that there are some places we will not go.”
“I’m going to need your help to find a way out of this definitional problem with rape,” he told the audience.
“The rape exception will be part of the bill … We just need to find a way definitionally to not get us in a spot where we’re debating about what a legitimate rape is, that’s not the cause that we’re in,” he said.
The problem is they’re in a “definitionally” tough spot what with the beyotches bringing up the rape exceptions all the time and it coming into conflict with the belief that said beyotches are murderers and all, which is, after all, even worse than rape. It’s a problem.
But look, this is is a feature not a bug. When we’re arguing about whether or not there should be a rape exception for an abortion ban at 20 weeks, we’ve lost ground. A lot of it. This is yet another moving of the goal post. So, basically I agree with Huckleberry. Arguing over the rape exception misses the point. But then so does he.
First they came for the women with horrible third trimester complications and called it “partial birth abortion” and we did nothing …