Women As Beans | Republicans Romney & Ryan Make Chili of American Women

I Am Not A Bean

This is an election about choice; surely you have no doubt in your mind about that. Do you choose to believe that the Republican War on Women is real? Or do you just vote for the stud muffins because they make you feel like Cinderella and you have a closet desire to be taken care of?

Don’t be seduced American women. Paul Ryan may have great abs, but he told you at the vice presidential debate that your rights are no more important than those of a bean — a baby bean that is.

You are not anti-life because you believe you are not a bean, and that as a grown woman with or without children, you have a brain — one that hopefully comes with backbone.

Absolutely no one is suggesting that you should use birth control if it causes you a religious conflict. But to support the right of any employer — ANY employer to deny you birth control as part of your insurance package because he finds it morally objectionable is an assault on ALL American women.

Romney & Ryan Believe Women Have NO Rights Under the US Constitution

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan — and the entire Republican party wants to return women to the 1950s, stripping away every right women have won in the workplace and in our rights to control our own reproduction.

Mitt Romney’s adviser on future Supreme Court appointments is Robert Bork. When Ronald Reagan appointed the defeated Robert Bork to the US Supreme Court in 1987, it was widely known that Bork not only opposed Roe v. Wade, but Griswold v. Connecticut, the decision by a Republican Court that granted women access to birth control as a right under the 14th amendment.

Paul Ryan flatly stated at last week’s debate that he doesn’t support 14th amendment Supreme Court decisions that given women expanded rights under the Constitution. His views are the same as Bork’s:

Throughout his career Bork was highly critical of the judicial activism practiced by the Supreme Court in milestone cases involving abortion, affirmative action and civil rights. Bork claimed he was a strict constructionist who would exercise “judicial restraint.” In his view, too many judges (and Supreme Court justices) had been interpreting the intent of the Constitution much too broadly. He opposed the 1965 Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which established a broad right of privacy that was not stated in the Constitution.  Bork was also a foe of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that gave women the right to have an abortion, calling the decision “a serious and wholly unjustifiable usurpation of state legislative authority.” The courts, he felt, should not thwart the will of the popularly-elected lawmakers, and judges ought not to substitute their values for the “original intent” of the Constitution’s framers. What made Bork dangerous from the liberal perspective was the undeniable fact that he was one of the most astute legal scholars in the country; the American Bar Association (ABA) had given him its highest rating: “exceptionally well-qualified.”

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California & New York Allow Nurses & Health Officials To Administer Birth Control in Schools & Communities

French Roast News

Anne is reading about birth control in big cities … 

California governor Jerry Brown signed legislation this weekend that allows registered nurses to dispense hormonal contraceptives to women under a standardized procedure.

The law “also allows RNs to dispense drugs and devices upon an order by a certified nurse-midwife, a nurse practitioner, or a physician assistant while functioning within specified clinic settings,” according to a news release from Brown’s office.

The new law, signed by Governor Brown at Planned Parenthood’s Los Angeles headquarters in South Los Angeles, will take effect on Jan. 1.via LA Times

Think Progress writes that due to a shortage of physicians in California, women are often unable to schedule timely appointments to obtain the birth control prescriptions they need.

Birth Control in City Schools

New York City is expanding its pilot program that will distribute morning-after pills and other contraceptives to high school students, reports the New York Times.

“In New York City, over 7,000 young women become pregnant by age 17 — 90 percent of which are unplanned,” Alexandra Waldhorn, a health department spokeswoman, said. “We are committed to trying new approaches, like this pilot program in place since January 2011, to improve a situation that can have lifelong consequences.”

The program called Catch or Connecting Adolescents to Comprehensive Healthcare program began with 5 schools in January 2011 and is now operating in 13 schools.

New York is among 21 states and the District of Columbia that allow all minors access to contraceptive services, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group in Washington that supports abortion rights. But because of a court decision in the early 1990s, some form of parental notification and the right to opt out is required at school.

Related: IUDs, Implants Urged for Teen Girls’ Birth Control Huffington Post

American Feminism: History of Right to Choice

The march to contraception and abortion access in America is analyzed in a new book ‘All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy’ Since the 1962. Salon publishes an excerpt.

In the late ’60s and ’70s, women’s advocates cast the female body as a site of political struggle, the place where the intimate and personal became the legal and public and where the personal became the political. In doing so, they put forward reproductive rights as a bedrock of female citizenship. Abortion and forced sterilization emerged as the key issues. Across the country in the early 1960s, state laws prohibited virtually any form of abortion, turning hundreds of thousands of ordinary women each year into criminals, and dozens of states coerced women into sterilization procedures.

Mitt Romney Joins Ayn Rand in Condemning Democratic Moochers | GOP's 55 Anti-Women Bills

Dior Magazine’s first issue is out and it’s a beauty. Explore Marion Cotillard’s editorial by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.

GOP’s 55 Anti-Women Votes

Democrats in Congress argue that serving pink drinks at the Republican Convention and rounding up women only to stand behind Mitt Romney on campaign stops won’t be enough to change the perception that the Tea Party Republicans are out to get women good.

In a new report published by Democrats, Team Obama argues that House Republicans have sponsored 55 votes on legislation is intended to “undermine women’s health, roll back women’s rights and defund programs and institutions that provide support for women.”

In a statement, Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) called the current House “the most anti-women … in modern history.”
“I have worked for decades to promote equality for women, but the bipartisan support for women’s programs that used to exist in Congress has been shattered by Tea Party extremism,” he said.

The report claims that the House took 17 votes that would “allow health insurance companies to discriminate against women’. Eleven votes would have “cut women’s access to preventive care.”

Ten bills “restricted or rolled back abortion rights’, while others cut key nutrition programs or “weakened” violence and discrimination protections for women.

Not brought to the floor for a formal vote is the Personhood Bill, signed by the vast majority of Republicans including Speaker John Boehner and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

The Personhood Bill will give an hour-old fertilized egg the same Constitutional rights as a married woman doctor with three children, a loving husband, and a part-time job as mayor of her city. Republicans say she is no more valuable to America than a fertilized egg. Can the Republican view of the role and importance of women in America be any clearer?

The law will make many forms of birth control illegal and Anne’s form of contraception — an IUD — murder. Mitt Romney is on record also supporting a Personhood bill.

Reproductive Rights ARE Economic Rights

The GOP continues to insist that women voters are interested in economic rights, not reproductive health and freedoms. “What women care about are jobs, the economy, the unemployment rate,” says Florida attorney general Pat Bondi.

Writing for The Baltimore Sun, Christine Adams reminds the GOP what every woman knows — and what GOP men seem not the comprehend — that control of fertility is a woman’s greatest guarantee of upwards mobility and providing a good life for her family.

During the Great Depression, fertility ratios decreased significantly, despite the fact that the Comstock Laws made it difficult to get legal contraception and abortion was illegal throughout the United States. In her book on reproductive politics in the U.S., Rickie Solinger notes that 25-40 percent of all pregnancies were terminated in the 1930s, a steep increase over abortions in the 1920s. Had pollsters inquired, most of those women would undoubtedly also have said that “jobs” were their primary concern, but an unwanted pregnancy can be the tipping point for women and families facing economic hardship.

The attack against women is all the more galling because it comes from Catholic bishops who argue that THEY have the right to control women’s fertility as part of freedom of religion in America. The bishops choose to omit the reality that the Vatican and Catholics were banned in 10 of the original 13 states because America’s founders feared the theocratic power wielded by the Vatican over almost every aspect of daily life.

Related Reading

Mo. lawmakers override veto of birth control bill BloomergBusinessweek

Craft Store Chain Sues for Right to Deny Their Employees Contraception Coverage ThinkProgress

Mitt Romney on Democratic Moochers

Mother Jones has obtained video of Mitt Romney talking at a fundraiser earlier this year. To protect their confidential source, the magazine will give neither the date or the location of the event.

In the video, Romney speaks of Democrats and Obama supporters.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

At the same event, Romney quips that after being born in Mexico, he’d have a better shot at the presidency if he was Latino and that several of his consultants have worked for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As for the greedy 47 percent of voters who include seniors on social security and families who benefit from Republican led Child Tax Credits, Romney says his job isn’t to worry about them.

“My job is not to worry about those people,” Romney said. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

You can rest assured that the Obama campaign will make one heck of a new video from these stunning remarks.

J’Adore:  Deborah Soffel’s blog Grapes and Greens

Searching just now for a specific outdoor sculpture on Long Island, I came across this simply delightful image of a Classic White Table Wine from the Wölffer Estate Vineyard, a local winery in Sagaponack NY.

Deborah Soffel was on hand from California to cater an East End benefit for Wellness in the Schools