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Republicans want you to know they care about the sanctity of human life so much they're willing to kill for it

Meanwhile, this week saw the fourth death of a child in the president's war on immigrants

Molly Jong-Fast
New York
Friday 17 May 2019 21:02 BST
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Sam Bee offers sex ed lesson to the men behind the new abortion laws

This week the GOP’s war on women kicked into high gear with the signing of the most anti-choice anti-choice bill since the advent of the internet.

Of course, this bill was brought to you by the state that ranks 50th in education.

Yes, this entire week has been one big exercise in GOP hypocrisy. Remember that governor who signed that most restrictive anti-choice bill, Kay Ivey? Well, she has so much respect for human life she’s about to execute her seventh prisoner. And let’s not forget this week also saw the death of the fourth child in the President’s war on immigrants.

We sort of knew evangelical Trump would toe the anti-choice line; we just didn’t know how zealously he would. The president told us he would try to pack the courts with ultra-conservative justices in the hopes of overturning Roe v Wade during his campaign; he said to Bill O’Reilly in 2016, “I will protect [the sanctity of life] and the biggest way you can protect it is through the Supreme Court and putting people on the court. Actually, the biggest way you can protect it, I guess, is by electing me president.” So now republican legislators in Alabama have cooked up the most restrictive bill they can think of, a bill that has no cutouts for rape or for incest, a bill that is largely designed to be kicked up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court is, of course, where the President has installed two ultra-conservative judges as promised, after Mitch McConnell refused to even hold a hearing for Obama’s pick Merrick Garland.

The heartbeat bill is the atom bomb in the GOP’s war against women and of course it was shot to prominence by a publicity stunt-addicted birther called Janet Porter who was also Roy “Banned From Malls” Moore’s press secretary in 2011. Obviously Janet is a serious Christian, because one would have to be if one was the spokeswoman for someone most famous for having numerous sexual misconduct allegations made against them by high school-aged girls.

Originally the heartbeat bill was thought to be too fringe to survive, Under the bill, a foetus is basically granted personhood even though it couldn’t survive outside the womb. The possibility of a man therefore has more rights than the woman carrying it.

The idea was to ban abortion at six weeks, a time when most women wouldn’t have the faintest idea they were pregnant. So far, this bill has passed in Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Ohio.

In Alabama, the doctor who tries to perform an abortion on a 12-year-old girl made pregnant by incest will get more jail time than the family member who impregnated her. That’s the kind of legislating one does when one is in the state that is last in education but first in football. Yes, that’s right: preforming an abortion in Alabama is now a Class A Felony but committing incest in Alabama is only a Class C felony.

A great irony here is found in the fact that a national deputy finance chair of the RNC Elliot Broidy is currently being sued by his mistress, a former Playboy Playmate, for welching on the hush money payments he owed her. Did I mention that Elliot Broidy coerced his mistress into having an abortion after impregnating her? it’s strange that the party so obsessed with stopping abortions would be funded by someone who convinced his girlfriend to have one.

So, what happens now? The GOP is, of course, ultimately hoping to get Roe v Wade overturned so that women’s reproductive rights will be kicked back to the states to decide. Affluent women will be able to take time off work and drive to another state to have an abortion, but this was never about affluent women. These heartbeat bills, like some many of the GOP’s policies, will largely affect the poor. You know, the people who Trump is trying to take healthcare away from? Those people will be the hardest hit by the abortion bans.

So the party headed by a thrice-married adulterer believes in the sanctity of human life now — just not the lives of immigrant children, or of criminals, or 12-year-old rape victims, or women who have had abortions, or children in schools at risk of school shooters because of inadequate gun legislation, or anybody awaiting the death penalty.

Why, it’s almost as if the GOP doesn’t really believe in the sanctity of human life at all.

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