Proposed Forced Ultrasound Legislation Withdrawn in Tennessee

Forced Ultrasound and Post-Ultrasound Waiting Period for Abortion Proposed in Tennessee – My analysis of the bill from last month.

Jim Tracy Withdraws His Ultrasound Bill – includes discussion and speculation on SJR127, the proposed state constitutional amendment that would allow more restrictions after passage and allow a total ban in the unlikely event that Roe were overturned. SJR127 going to a vote by Tennesseans in 2014, so that’s not likely to turn out well for reproductive justice in this state.

The sponsor of the forced ultrasound bill made a statement like they were withdrawing this bill in order to “focus all of our efforts on promoting its [SJR127's] passage on the 2014 ballot.” One, we expect SJR 127 to pass. Two, they probably didn’t want to distract the voting public with actual debate on a real example of how egregious the restrictions they want to use SJR 127 to enact actually are (hey, like forced medical tests!). Three, even if passed, the forced ultrasound bill might have been unconstitutional as is – until SJR 127 passes. Ugh.

Abortion Ultrasound Bill Shelved by Sponsors – let me just highlight the quote from Rep. Rick Womick:

“Given the fact that most abortion clinics in Tennessee already administer an ultrasound before performing an abortion, it only makes sense that we as legislators should be allowed to ensure that the pregnant mother is given the opportunity to see the video and hear the heartbeat,” added Representative Womick.

That is such utter bullshit. There’s a tremendous gap between “a medical provider might use their judgment that an ultrasound is needed and a woman might consent to that” and forcing all women to have them regardless as a hoop to jump through to obtain a legal medical procedure. Providers who do conduct ultrasounds right now could already offer women the chance to see/hear, whereas the forced ultrasound bill would have required them to either see it or listen to a description even if they didn’t want to – even if they were rape or incest victims, or pregnant with a desperately wanted child they were unable to carry to term. Also, somehow I doubt that when Womick refers to “the pregnant mother” he’s talking about the two thirds of women who are already mothers when they have abortions – he’s simply framing women in terms of who he thinks they should be, what they can produce, and how he’d like to legally require that production.

Sponsors of Tennessee Forced Ultrasound Bill Turn to Constitutional Amendment Instead – This is SJR 127 getting some attention from national-level coverage at a repro rights info depot. So we’ll be waiting for all y’all from away to help us defeat that next year, okay?

Sunday News Round-Up, Awesome Afghan Edition

I just read through the CDC’s first ever report on interpersonal and sexual violence by sexual orientation, and it’s depressing as hell. I should have more info up at Our Bodies Our Blog this week.

Also at OBOS, I point to the Selling Sickness conference I would have liked to have attended, and we have a guest item on new coverage may spur younger women to use long acting contraceptives.

More forced ultrasound for abortion, this time in Indiana, for medication abortion.

A list of pro-choice films – I’ve seen If These Walls Could Talk and The Education of Shelby Knox, how about you?

More in things we already know – Morning-After Pills Don’t Cause Abortion, Studies Say.

NARAL Pro Choice Wisconsin Reacts to closure of Planned Parenthood Clinics

Further evidence that you don’t actually have to know anything about women’s bodies or reproduction while you’re trying to regulate them (if you’re in government):

The Alabama House of Representatives is expected to vote Tuesday on a bill that would place heavy restrictions on abortion in the state because, according to the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin (R), “when a physician removes a child from a woman, that’s the largest organ in a body.”

I just…no. Buy a book. Hell, buy “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” Seriously.

Hysterical Women: A Visual History of the Vibrator at Nerve (found via Feministe)

A nice guide to women’s preventive services under the Affordable Care Act, via the National Women’s Law Center.

Racialicious has Suggestions For The Future: Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition (on cultural appropriation). Womanist Musings also looks at the issue.

Tiger Beatdown covers that gross Audi Super Bowl commercial.

This week’s title comes from the awesome afghan Aunt B of Tiny Cat Pants made for me.

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape – More Proof That Conservatives Should Avoid Rape Talk

I honestly don’t understand what makes some conservatives believe that they can talk about rape without royally screwing it up, because we saw another example today that they can’t.

The use of the hashtag #LiberalTips2AvoidRape has been honestly one of the most ignorant, vile, women-hating, and victim-blaming things I’ve ever seen in such a concentrated way on Twitter.

Colorado State Rep Joe Salazar, a Democrat, in expressing support of banning concealed guns on college campuses, made an inelegant statement about women not needing guns to prevent attacks because of the availability of call boxes and whistles and the like, and the possibility of introducing accidental shootings into the campus mix.

He didn’t make the most intelligent statement in the world. But now, conservatives who love guns and gun rights – and who are promote the idea that more guns on campus would prevent rapes – have taken to twitter with the #LiberalTips2AvoidRape hashtag in a way that is insulting to rape victims and really trivializes the issue of rape. Big surprise from anti-women conservative types, right? *eyeroll*

Some examples accompanying the hashtag, and it’s not like I spent a lot of time combing Twitter for horrific examples – this was about 2 minutes of not really trying:

• Close your eyes and think of Colorado Democrats
• Pray that the wicked witch of the left comes in time (with picture of Nancy Pelosi as the witch)
• don’t get raped
• give them what they want then suggest sensitivity training
• Pour acid on your face leaving you too ugly to be raped.
• most liberal women have a square head, no neck, hairy armpits, and hair on their tongue. You want some of this?
• U leftist F*CKTURDS force Selfish-Sandra-C*nt-Fluke on us & then you have the GALL to lecture us about rape?!? F.U.
• First off, who would want to rape a Liberal?
• tell him without makeup you look like Hillary Clinton

Yeah, there’s obviously a lot of love and support for women and rape victims being expressed. I can feel how much you all really give a shit about women and rape.

A few tips:

Nothing stops rape other than *rapists not raping.* Maybe in some circumstances a potential victim wielding a gun might stop a rape. It won’t address the vast majority of rapes, which don’t actually tend to happen in dark alleys where one might be attentive to possibly needing to use a gun. Rapes happen in our dorm rooms, in our homes, in our friends’ homes. They happen when we’re not fully dressed, when someone refuses to listen when we say we don’t want to go further. They happen when we’re sober, but they also happen when we’re a little tipsy or drunk or have been drugged by our dates. They happen in situations where a gun is not close to our bodies or our thoughts.

So maybe guns would interrupt individual attempted rapes. In many other cases, they would be useless, unavailable, or even lead to the intended victim being additionally shot or killed. But let’s not pretend that guns solve the problem of rape. Rape victims already undergo tremendous scrutiny about their actions, their dress, their location, their behavior, anything to pretend that somehow the victim must have been a little to blame. The absence of a gun too easily becomes just one more way to blame victims for not doing enough to prevent attacks. The surest way to prevent rape? Rapists not raping.

Rape is not a compliment. This whole thing apparently started when @AdolfJoeBiden tweeted that we should “Go for the Democrat woman look…you definitely won’t be raped.” Accompanied by a graphic calling Democratic women “old, bitter ugly-ass women.” Let me repeat – rape is not a compliment. Nobody actually wants to be young and compliant and pretty enough to get raped. People of all ages and appearances get raped. Calling Dem women too ugly/bitter to be raped just tells us who YOU are, what YOU look like on the inside.

Guns just prevent someone from raping you (or, the “as long as *someone else* is victimized” approach). There’s evidence that rapes are very often committed by repeat offenders. It’s a common refrain that a woman who was out a night, wearing this, in that place, should have done something different to prevent her rape. Worn something different. Not had a drink. But individual choices don’t prevent rape; at best, they just make you not the specific victim. Which might be good enough for selfish assholes, but is not good enough for the world. Steps that put responsibility on the victim are just a wish for somebody else to be victimized instead, not an actual strategy for preventing rape.

Having a gun is not sufficient to ward off an attacker. Contrary to popular myth, most victims aren’t raped by some stranger jumping out of the bushes. In about 2/3 of cases, the attacker is known (this is probably even higher on college campuses). It’s a friend, colleague, family member, even a spouse. Having a gun doesn’t prevent rape – the intended victim has to be willing to shoot and possibly murder a brother, a father, a boss, a fellow student, a friend. The gap between having a gun and being willing to use it on one of those people is large. That’s before we even talk about the implications of college kids firing off guns inside of dorms or other shared housing.

But here’s the thing. We know you’re not actually anti-rape. We know you’re not actually concerned about women’s rights to their own bodies. If you were, you would speak out against bills that would force them to have ultrasound wands shoved in their vaginas to obtain legal medical care. If you were, you’d approve VAWA. If you were, you’d talk about how to prevent rapists from raping, not all the ways women should be expected to defend themselves against rape. If you were, you wouldn’t promote myths and victim-blaming and rape culture in your tweets, and you’d show some consideration when people tell you what’s wrong about what you’re saying. If you were, it might occur to you that an endless stream of tweets using the specter of rape to argue for concealed weapons on campus might actually harm rape victims. If you were, you’d stop to ask whether those college boys with concealed weapons are going to help prevent rape, or cause more of it.

I didn’t see that. I saw rape culture. I saw victim-blaming. I saw trivialization of the experiences of rape victims. I saw active, explicit misogyny pretending to stem from concern for women. Dear anti-women, anti-feminist Conservatives: stop talking about rape. You obviously can’t do it without doing harm.

Forced Ultrasound and Post-Ultrasound Waiting Period for Abortion Proposed in Tennessee

A bill has been proposed in the Tennessee legislature that would force pregnant women to obtain ultrasounds prior to having an abortion. The bill would also impose a 24-hour waiting period between the ultrasound and the abortion.

As introduced, requires that an ultrasound be performed prior to an abortion, with an exception for medical emergencies. The bill tries to avoid controversy about transvaginal ultrasound that has encouraged opposition to other forced ultrasound bills, by saying it should be an transabdominal ultrasound. This is still forced use of a medical procedure with absolutely no medical indication, and without any room for the judgement of the clinician or the specific separate consent woman seeking the abortion.

Women would be also forced to either view or listen to a description of the ultrasound, and to receive a printed copy. Hey, that will be super awesome for women who were raped, or have illnesses that prohibit pregnancy, or for whatever reason wanted but simply cannot continue the pregnancy! Let’s traumatize women so we can better control them!

It’s unclear how transabdominal (over the belly) ultrasound could even fulfill the other requirements of the proposed law, given that most abortions occur very early in pregnancy and the heartbeat and visible images required by the bill are probably not going to be technically possible transabdominally when those abortions occur. There is nothing in the bill language to address this scenario, so there’s reasonable concern that this could prevent abortions by making them impossible to obtain under these requirements.

I’m concerned that providers, fulfilling the requirement to keep copies of the ultrasound in the medical records, are going to be in a bind – if they document transabdominal ultrasounds that do not show anything they’re supposed to be describing (because the technology can’t), perhaps they’ll be penalized. If they want to document those physical structures with an ultrasound, they’ll have to go the transvaginal route in many cases. This puts providers in a bind for legal compliance while letting the politicians off the hook for potentially forcing women to have objects placed in their vaginas as a roadblock to legal medical care.

It’s also unclear how the 24 hour waiting period could be enforced. Tennessee, based on its constitution, has previously held such restrictions to be unenforceable. However, this is going to a popular vote next year, so the bill if passed could definitely become enforceable at that time. The waiting period provision could also be stripped or modified before the bill goes to a vote – I’m hoping to hear more about the implications of this part of the bill from knowledgeable folks soon.

SB 632 was introduced in the state Senate by Republican Jim Tracy. The companion House bill (HB 984) was introduced by Republican Rick Womack.

The prime co-sponsors of the Senate bill at this time are all Republican women – Janice Bowling, Mae Beavers, and Dolores Gresham. Proponents of forced ultrasound bills often argue they’re needed so that women will really understand what they’re doing when they have abortions. I’d be interested in whether any of these women Senators would go on the record as stating that they think forced ultrasound is necessary because women who go for abortions simply don’t know that “pregnant” means “there’s a fetus in there.” Especially the 2/3 of women seeking abortions who are *already mothers.* I’m sure they have no clue what pregnancy is, and just turned up at the abortion clinic for ignorant funsies.

Please, Senators, come right out and tell your women constituents exactly how much you think of their mental abilities. You either think they’re stupid, or you’re simply trying to obstruct their ability to access a legal service however possible (while pretending it’s for their own good), or both. Come out and say it. You owe it to us when you’re trying to restrict our rights.

Additional resources:
-Full-text of the bill as introduced
-State Sen. Jim Tracy Files an Ultrasound Before Abortion Bill – coverage at Pith in the Wind (Nashville, TN)

Sunday News Round-Up – Dolly Parton Flips the Bird Edition

Tennessee state Senator Stacey Campfield brought back the “Don’t say gay” bill to forbid teachers from discussing sexualities other than heterosexuality. He was rightfully mocked on the Colbert Report for this and other bills he’s filed. The bill (SB 234) technically forbids discussion of anything “inconsistent with natural human reproduction” – because, you know, all sex results in reproduction and all straight people are capable of reproducing. Worst, though, is that it requires teachers and school counselors who talk to a student who might be questioning their sexuality to notify the parents right away. So, good on you, Campfield, making sure K-8 students potentially get abused and/or kicked out of their homes.

The only possibly reaction to Stacey Campfield

I understand the sentiment (such as from LeftWingCracker) that paying any attention to Campfield distracts us from real damage our GOP-controlled legislature is doing elsewhere in less noisy ways. But I also think that fostering an environment where it’s okay to encourage counselors to snitch on kids in ways that may physically and psychologically harm them *is* real damage to our state (even if the bill doesn’t pass). Just being out there, these bills tell our vulnerable people what we think of them, and it demands objection.

Tomorrow I’ll have a post up on the forced ultrasound and waiting period bill proposed in Tennessee.

This grosses me out: Scientists Discover Children’s Cells Living in Mothers’ Brains. The way the article starts out by acting like all mothers and their children exist in some happy bubble of perfect bonding and contentment is also kinda gross.

Hahaha, FoxNews.

Call for submissions to a collection on mothering in conflict areas.

At the Crunk Feminist Collective: Immigration Reform: What Queer & Trans Immigrants & Our Allies Need to Know

New report from the CDC (in the MMWR): Progress in Increasing Breastfeeding and Reducing Racial/Ethnic Differences — United States, 2000–2008 Births

Recent stuff at Our Bodies Our Blog (also see @oboshealth):

• Getting Personal: What It’s Really Like Living With a Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) (guest blog from Jenelle Marie)
• In Armenia, Abortion Rates are High and Access to Contraception is Limited (guest blog by Taleen K. Moughamian)
• New Study Shows Excellent Outcomes in Birth Centers (from me, after a ton of discussion with the team and helpful responses from the authors)

Possible elimination of abortion access in North Dakota and South Dakota.

From The Rachel Maddow Show, GOP War on Women Continues to Rage in the States.

At CureThis, something I think is really important:
Mississippi’s last abortion clinic, and the silence of healthcare providers

So, physicians in the state, especially the state’s medical association, which supposedly speaks on behalf of physicians and is vocal about the government not intruding on physicians’ rights and clinical judgment, must be up in arms, right?

Wrong.

There are tons of states where legislatures have or are trying to restrict abortion by intruding on medical practice, by requiring ultrasounds, biased consent, forbidding telemedicine, or other provisions. If doctors want to keep wondering why patients don’t always just trust them and take their word as shiny beacons of highly educated authority, they should remember that we saw them, when they wouldn’t stand up for us, even when not doing so affected their ability to make professional judgments. See Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health for one example of docs actually trying to do something, but these restrictions are many and widespread – individual clinicians in every state could and should be pushing back.

Forced Ultrasound Bill Proposed in Tennessee

More on this later, but for now read Betsy Phillips at Pith.

State Sen. Jim Tracy Files an Ultrasound Before Abortion Bill

One wonders why Tracy thinks women go to have abortions if we don’t know we’re pregnant. But this is clearly just designed to be an egregious pain in the ass of women who want to have an abortion. Tracy and the state just want to make sure we know how stupid they think we are, and how little they think of us. They also want skirt the disastrously unpopular transvaginal ultrasound legislation that caused so many headaches for Republicans when many states tried to pass it last year.

Sunday News Round-Up – New Whovian Edition

An update on the Tennessee Democratic Party (#TNDP) chair election – Roy Herron was elected, 39-27. I’m personally already sick of the explanation that if we want to “win” in Tennessee, we need to accept being “pro-life, anti-gay, and pro-gun.” Winning on those terms doesn’t sound like winning at all to, say, women, and gay people, and the folks who love them. That sounds like keeping people in power just for the sake of it, and it’s disgusting.

Some recent posts over at Our Bodies Our Blog:

• Carol Sakala with a guest item on maternity care and medicolegal liability: Fixing Persistent Liability Concerns in Maternity Care: We Can Do It!
• When Pregnancy is a Crime: Arrests, Forced Interventions in the Name of Public Health
• Roe Round-Up: Analysis on the 40th Anniversary of Legalized Abortion

National Advocates for Pregnant Women, whose director (Lynn Paltrow) is the lead author on the study of forced interventions discussed in the link above, has a lengthy post on the topic of Post-Roe v Wade and “Pro-Life” Measures.

Bill Moyers spoke to NAPW’s Lynn Paltrow, and National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health’s Jessica González-Rojas, for an episode of Moyers & Company that might be airing today where you are. Check online, too. (see also from NAPW)

Radical Doula also talks about the ACNM’s statement on quality care for transgender, transsexual, and gender variant people, with links to additional resources.

“In Malpractice Case, Catholic Hospital Argues Fetuses Aren’t People” – No, really.

To the Point (KCRW, heard on NPR) doesn’t seem to offer transcripts, but I believe it was guest James Bowman (@JamesVBowman), who, in an episode on women in combat, refused to acknowledge the possibility that women could be honorable, insisting that men historically have shown their honor through combat, while women have shown *their* honor through chastity. That sound you heard was a million women simultaneously headdesking, vomiting, and punching their computers/radios.

*Of course* Tennessee’s Diane Black is a headliner in the “March for Life.” She doesn’t speak for me, either.

Why I won’t be moving to Texas, either, part eleventy million: After Forcing Women To Drop Their Doctors, Texas Gives Them A Faulty List Of Replacements.

Libraryland nerd stuff: the copyright issues involved in the Jonathan Coulton/Glee/Baby Got Back story are complicated (but something fun to talk to the resident audio engineer about), but I think his response of releasing “a cover of Glee’s cover of my cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s song” is pretty clever.

And The Feminist Librarian talks about writing fan fiction, especially the sex bits. Complete with Doctor Who images.

This week’s “Edition” title is a nod to the fact that I just started watching Doctor Who for the first time ever recently (starting with Eccleston). I just finished up with the Tenth Doctor last night. It was the Ood song that really crushed me, in the end. Wept.