Cross-posted from The Nation
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has attacked the rights of working
people to organize unions and to speak up in their workplaces and the
political life of their communities, their state and their nation.
He has attacked the right of citizens to dissent and to have a voice in the legislative process.
He has even attacked voting rights, with a draconian Voter ID bill that is seen as the most restrictive in the United States.
The list of assaults on basic rights is so long that it is not surprising that close to 1 million Wisconsinites have petitioned for the recall and removal of Walker in a June 5 election.
The list of reasons for voting Walker out of office is so long that it is hard to imagine what more could be added to it.
But there is the matter of what the governor's critics refer to as "Scott Walker's War on Women."
Because Walker signed anti-choice laws enacted by legislative
Republicans who do not believe women can or should make decisions
regarding their own bodies, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin has decided
to suspend providing certain basic health services to women. Among
other things, Planned Parenthood will stop providing drugs to women for
abortions in the first nine weeks of pregnancy -- a method the provider
says is used in about a quarter of the abortions it provides in
Wisconsin.
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Why? The law signed by Walker criminalizes a physician's failure to follow specific protocols laid out by the the anti-choice legislators -- and interest groups -- that drafted the legislation.
"In just one year, we have seen how women can lose ground in their health care options as a result of who holds power," explains NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin executive director Lisa Subeck.
Specifically, Subeck is referring to Act 217 -- a law that, she
correctly notes, adds unnecessary and intrusive restrictions for
abortion providers and subjects physicians to felony criminal penalties.
"It is unacceptable that women in Wisconsin are losing health care
options because Governor Walker has enacted a law that is hostile to
abortion providers, and that means women in Wisconsin will suffer," says
Subeck. "This is what happens when out of control politicians like
Scott Walker practice medicine without a license and interfere in the
relationship between doctors and their patients. In the end, it is women
who lose out."
She's right.
So, too, is state Representative Chris Taylor, when
she argues that "this is indicative of what is to come from Scott
Walker and legislative Republicans. They will stop at nothing to make
abortion and birth control illegal in every circumstance."
If Walker remains in office, women will lose more services, more basic protections and more rights.
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John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.
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