Saturday, May 30, 2015

Scott Walker: Women Should be Forced to Have Ultrasounds


Proving once again that the Republican Party's war on women is real, would be presidential candidate Scott Walker has stated that women considering an abortion should be forced to have ultrasounds.  Underscoring Walker's contempt for women, he described the procedure as "cool."  I wonder if Walker would think the procedure was so "cool" if the probe was forced up his ass against his will?  What fetid swamp did Walker crawl out of? Sadly, Walker's mind set is all too prevalent among Republicans - especially the males - who believe that men should make decisions about women's control of their own bodies.  It's no doubt the mindset of scum like Josh Duggar as he took improprieties with five girls, including some of his sisters.  A column in the New York Times looks at Walker's shocking statement.  Here are excerpts:
We’ve been wondering when a presidential candidate would say something incredibly insensitive about women and reproduction.

The moment has arrived. The 2016 Todd (“Legitimate Rape”) Akin Award for Sexual Sensitivity goes to Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

Maybe it was inevitable. Of all the practicing politicians in the scramble, Walker is possibly the sloppiest public speaker. Compared with him, Chris Christie can be a pinnacle of verbal discipline.

Last week, Walker was on a radio talk show, praising a law he signed requiring women who want an abortion to undergo an ultrasound. Which they’re supposed to watch, while the physician points out the features of the fetus.   An ultrasound, he said, was “just a cool thing.”

Walker was complaining that, in his words, “the media is a gotcha.” He then bragged about his anti-abortion agenda: “We defunded Planned Parenthood. We signed a law that requires an ultrasound, which, the thing about that, the media tried to make that sound like that was a crazy idea.  

Let’s leap, temporarily, past the fact that Walker was conflating the vision of happy parents getting their first glimpse of their baby-to-be with what’s appropriate for a woman who has made the stupendously profound and private decision to terminate a pregnancy.

His larger point was apparently that the sight of a fetus in an ultrasound is so moving that a woman undergoing an abortion would almost certainly change her mind. This is wrong. There’s no evidence these ultrasound laws discourage women who have already decided they want an abortion. And it’s incredibly insulting because it presumes that they’re making this choice on a kind of whim. If they’d only thought things through.

“I just don’t understand why politicians want to be in the middle of this,” she said in a phone interview.
At one point — during a re-election campaign against a female opponent — Walker seemed to get that resentment against political intrusion. So he claimed the then-pending ultrasound proposal “leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor.” Although neither the woman nor the doctor gets any say in the ultrasound-plus-commentary.

[W]hile Walker keeps describing external “jelly-on-the-belly” procedures, representatives of the medical community say doctors will sometimes have to use intrusive vaginal probes to meet the law’s requirements.
[W]e have here a potential president who justifies a law on how doctors treat their abortion patients by citing what we know from watching TV and movies. Seventeen months to go. Lord knows what’s next.
Walker needs to go crawl under a rock - maybe he can take Josh Duggar with him.

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