Pine Belt Progressive

We need to fight them here. We aren’t going to win many victories in the sexist Supreme Court for a while. Let’s get a huge megaphone and advocate women’s reproductive rights in Mississippi.

Let’s rip away the veil and reveal the so-called “Right to Life” movement for what it is: a misbegotten relic of our vicious past. A pack ideologues who are happy to tell pregnant women that they cannot have a safe, legal medical procedure, but who couldn’t care less whether your 18-month-old baby has health insurance. That’s exactly what they are.

Don’t buy the culture of life rhetoric they’ve been selling all these years. If they were serious about promoting a “culture of life,” they would be saying something about the alarming infant mortality rate in this state.

Riggsveda got me thinking about this with this post at the American Street.

This nugget is especially on the mark:

Clean up your own houses, you fools and jesters of the right-wing, before you start telling the rest of us how to live. Your priorities are showing.

Riggs points to this article byEric Alter which informs us:

Even China’s infant mortality rate is less than half of that of the Southeast United States, as well as that of our national capital.

Before you jump to the conclusion that Riggsveda is being too hard on our poor, maligned Southern politicians and so-called “Right-to-Lifers,” take a look at this information that Frontline was nice enough to provide us in 2005.

The important bit:

The pro-life movement has dramatically changed the landscape of abortion politics. In Mississippi alone, they helped pass 10 laws regulating abortion. And in the last two years, the state has passed legislation on fetal homicide prosecution, new clinic regulations, requirements to report abortion complications, rights of conscience, and a law that would prohibit the state’s last abortion clinic from offering abortions beyond the first trimester.

Americans United for Life (AUL), the nation’s oldest national pro-life organization, considers Mississippi an example for the nation . . . Our goal is to see that other states pass the type of legislation that Mississippi has passed over the past decade, and we see a lot of legislative activity.”(emphasis added)

If you are an anti-choicer who thinks that abortion is just too icky to think very much about and can’t wrap your mind around the idea that criminalizing abortion equals mandating forced pregnancy (and if you’re still with me at this point), all this probably makes you proud.

But, if you believe our government is allowing a minority of the country to prevent women from making intelligent, independent health care decisions, and doing it in an entirely irrational way, I hope you will stick around and help me figure out what to do about it.

The so-called ‘Right-to-Life” movement really would be more aptly named the Anti-Choice, Forced Pregnancy movement. They are not going to stop until abortion is illegal in this country. They don’t care whether Roe v. Wade is overturned or not. What they want is to criminalize all abortions, for any reason. If you don’t believe me, go and read this.

Don’t count on being able to go to Louisiana or Florida to get an abortion if the anti-choice movement continues to have its way.

As the Frontline piece makes clear, Mississippi has been a a pilot program for a national political strategy aimed depriving every woman in this country of the right to make intelligent, independent decisions about their health.

If you really don’t know where your leaders stand on the issue, you can get some info from NARAL here.

Note that, according to NARAL, even your state Democratic party is anti-choice. Maybe if we could convince the party to adopt a more freedom-friendly attitude, we might start winning again.

Now it’s time to see if we can find a little hope. It may surprise you to know that an organization named Pro-Choice Mississippi actually exists. And they have an up-to-date website! I just discovered it. If you scroll down to the article about Gov. Barbour signing the latest anti-choice bill, you’ll notice that it was denounced by Planned Parenthood of Alabama. I thought that was curious, so I dug around on the internets for a couple of minutes, and found this, which will give you a partial explanation for why the Alabama chapter of Planned Parenthood feels obliged to work in Mississippi.

Here’s something for you to think about between now and the next post. The Anti-choice Con isn’t the only pilot program the reactionary wing of the GOP is running in the Magnolia State. Mississippi is the Beta version of their 21^st Century Transcontinental Dystopia.

The big money and the red state theocrats think they own this place. They think they own you and me. The only way to put the brakes on their 50-year plan for a stupider, more bankrupt America is to fight them where they live. And they live right here in the Deep South. Things won’t change until some people who live here decide it’s time to make the GOP spend some real money to steal our elections.

More Thursday. In the meantime:

1. See what a real economist has to say about the state of things for the people of Mississippi.

2. Abortion does not cause breast cancer

3. Demographic info on reproductive health services in the state.

4. Progressives!! In Mississippi!!

5. Lottalinks to blogs on the recent Supreme Court decision here.

5/01 UPDATE: After reflecting on my comment about NARAL and the state party, I think a note is in order. I don’t think I am going to take NARAL’s word for that. So, I will be drafting a letter to Chairman Dowdy in the next day or so asking him to clarify the state party’s position.

I am in fact a Democrat, but I am a Democrat who is tired of losing and tired of seeing candidates get elected as Democrats and switching parties immediately thereafter. I must also give credit where credit is due here: both my local party and the state party seem to be taking candidate certification very seriously. There have been two certification controversies here in recent weeks surrounding candidates with ambiguous party affiliations. I am happy to give the state party a for finally deciding that only Democrats should run on the Democratic ticket.

MORE UPDATE:

The Platform of the Mississippi Democratic Party:

CHOICE The Mississippi Democratic Party is the party of inclusion and we believe in the sanctity of life.

That answers that, I suppose. Guess I’ll just have to write a different sort of letter hehe.

And, they blog (well, sort of).