You Are What You Roll in the Hay With?

Christina Page posted an alarming note in the Huffington Post when she stated that the Department of Health and Human Services, "(I)n a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right...released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception." In doing so, HHS is seeking to define many forms of contraception -- In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40% of Americans use -- the pill, the patch, the shot, the ring, the IUD, and emergency contraception -- as "abortion," and thus using the law to prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for "abortion" services, and that would include contraception.

Further, Page goes on to point out: "As the HHS proposal proves, the absence of fact or evidence does not slow anti-abortion movement attempts to classify hormonal contraception as abortion. With HHS' proposal they have struck gold. Anyone working for a federal clinic, or a health center that receives federal funding--even in the form of Medicaid--and would like to prevent a woman from accessing most prescription birth control methods has federal protection to do so...Because the statutes that would be enforced through this regulation seek, in part, to protect individuals and institutions from suffering discrimination on the basis of conscience, the conscience of the individual or institution should be paramount in determining what constitutes abortion, within the bounds of reason. As discussed above, both definitions of pregnancy are reasonable and used within the scientific and medical community. The Department proposes, then, to allow individuals and institutions to adhere to their own views and adopt a definition of abortion that encompasses both views of abortion...Most dangerously, perhaps, this new rule establishes a legal precedent that may eventually be used as a basis for banning the most popular forms of birth control along with what is, in fact, abortion."

Echoing Page's concerns, Track Clark-Flory points out in Salon.com:

"The Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control...It is worth restating: The administration wants to ensure that recipients of federal health funding -- including women's clinics -- cannot deny employment based on a refusal to perform abortions or distribute birth control.

She goes on to add: "The proposal could potentially redefine birth control as abortion. The proposal classifies abortion as "any of the various procedures -- including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action -- that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation." That last part is critical because some argue that hormonal birth control and emergency contraception can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg."

And in responding to the proposal, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards comments,"As a result, women's ability to manage their own health care is at risk of being compromised by politics and ideology"

It's no secret that there are men who fear women taking control of their bodies, and that includes their reproductive systems. So why do you think they're resorting to whatever means necessary to achieve their goals of the moment.

Your tax dollars at work: transforming America into a theocracy. That's what happens when your politicians and their sycopahants hop into the fourposter and do the horizontal fox-trot with theocratic political sacraprostitutes.

Pathetic. Period.