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Activists take back the night
at the Wisconsin State House with a bright demonstration against
GOP politicians determined to limit access to abortions. Photo: Light Brigading | FlickrCC. |
A win for reproductive
rights in Wisconsin as a federal judge permanently blocked a law designed
to limit access to abortions. The law mandated that doctors who perform
abortions have admitting privileges at a local hospital within 30 miles.
Opponents of the law argue, rightly, that it had no medical benefit and was
designed simply to make abortion access harder to achieve. Similar laws have
been attempted in Texas, and those will eventually go before the United States
Supreme Court during its next term.
What if a doctor isn’t even
within 30 miles of a hospital? Do women have to travel halfway across the state
just to have access to the abortion that, for four decades now, has been legal
in the United States?
But that’s the idea: since they
can’t ban abortions, anti-abortion states try to find loopholes to chip away at
access to abortion. Denying Planned Parenthood Medicaid funding, or slapping
impossible restrictions on clinics. It’s one theater in a two-front war against
reproductive rights, a war on women, which sometimes becomes literal, because the
other front in that war is domestic terrorism.
Protesting outside of clinics
or Planned Parenthood offices is common, but frequently, those protests turn
into vandalism or attempted arson. There are plenty of people out there who
think they have the right to attack or even kill doctors, clinic staff, or
patients.
Take the recent assault of the
Planned Parenthood office in Colorado Springs. Three people died because one criminal,
a right wing extremist, decided to commit an act of terrorism inspired by his
hatred of women and their rights to autonomy.
And before you say “those
things aren’t related,” remember that right wing, conservative politicians
refuse to refer to people like that, namely white men who shoot up abortion
clinics or schools, as terrorists. If that isn’t tacit approval of these
actions, what is?
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