"Respect for Human Life" My Ass

*Note:  This was originally composed during the RNC.  But I had some issues verifying the entire story about the young girl in the Dominican Republic.  You can replace that entire paragraph with the same rage directed at Savita Halappanavar's situation.  
 
Rage.  Feminist rage.  You want to know why I'm an angry feminist?  It's because I'm terrified.  I'm terrified of what I hear on the news.  There are days I cannot listen to the news, because it literally is too depressing and frightening what is actually going on.

Today's panic attack is brought to you by the official Republican platform plank that confers all the rights of a human life on an unborn child. Personhood starts at conception.  I understand on it's face, it's a noble intent to value all human life.  But it isn't valuing all human life - it's valuing pre-born life over female life.  A woman is in the picture, too, you know. If you define life as starting at conception, when a pregnant woman has cancer, her treatments become murder.

This law will determine that the human in the uterus is worth more than the human with the uterus.  Tell me how that isn't a war on women???  Humans with uterii are worth less than fetuses who will not survive if the treatment is withheld and the mother dies anyway.  This is not a hypothetical situation, people.

A teenage girl in the Dominican Republic recently DIED of cancer because of this.  I am not drawing extreme, ridiculous slippery slope conclusions here.  A young woman is DEAD because the laws in her country said that a fetus couldn't be threatened, even to treat it's mother's deadly condition.  Well guess what... Both child and mother are dead now.  Good thing she didn't get her chemo and risk that baby which is now... oh right, still also dead!!  Is that what we want for our sisters and daughters in this country? (Edit:  Apparently.)

Call a spade a fucking spade.  These assholes are NOT pro-life.  How is legislation that will result in nothing but the DEATH OF WOMEN (plus those fetuses the legislation is supposedly trying to save) pro-life?  Criminalizing abortion does not save lives.

Criminalizing abortion kills women.  Not "just" babies.  Not just people (generic).  Women.  People in possession of vaginas.  Disproportionately, specifically, kills women whose only crime has been having a medical crisis while pregnant.

Then there's the other side of how illegal abortion kills women. Abortion is definitely a demand-side market. Women will have a need to control their fertility, whether the law makes that easy on them or not. 

We're already seeing the impacts of overly regulated abortion in Texas.  Women who have a constitutional right to medical care, including abortion, are facing major obstacles to that care, such as 24 hour waiting periods.  In desperation, they're going to unregulated, under informed pharmacies in Mexico to get prescription drugs for off-label use.  The back-alley coat-hanger abortion of the new era is the "black market" pharmaceutical abortion. These don't cause tummy aches, folks. 

One of the drugs women can get is Cytotec.  Moms out there recognize that one?  Yeah, I got it when they were inducing my labor for my first delivery.  In Mexico, it's prescribed for ulcers, and it is used for perfectly legal, early term abortions in the US.  However, since the women aren't getting the meds from a doctor, they aren't getting proper counseling on how much to take, what to do if they experience complications.  It appears that for some of our Texan women are so limited by the laws in their state, their only option is to run for the border.

This is the war on women.  Now ask me again why I'm an angry feminist.