Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
If it seems to you like women in Red states are the subjects of witch hunts, you're right. And it has nothing to do with "life": it's all about economic and political power.
Jaci Statton wanted her baby, but the fetus wasn't developing properly and was dying inside her. If it wasn't removed from her uterus it might kill her, too. She was experiencing vaginal bleeding, high blood pressure, debilitating cramps, and "intense nausea."
As reporter Ben Felder wrote for The Oklahoman:
"The longer the fetus remained inside her, the higher risk she would be for internal bleeding, kidney and liver failure, and even a stroke."
She and her husband first went to a nearby hospital, but -- like one-in-six hospital beds in America -- it was run to earn money for the Catholic Church and so refused to provide her with any help beyond fluids.
Next up was the hospital at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center but that, too, was a dead end. As Felder reported:
"They said, 'We can't touch you because of the Oklahoma law,' Statton recalled the doctors telling her husband, even as they acknowledged the pregnancy posed serious health risks and removing the fetus was the best medical decision."
To save her life, Jaci's husband drove her to an abortion clinic in Kansas where she was forced to walk through a gamut of jeering anti-abortion protestors carrying signs proclaiming their followers should "STONE ALL THE WHORES!"
If it seems to you like women in Red states are the subjects of witch hunts, you're right. And it has nothing to do with "life": it's all about economic and political power.
Prior to the 1980 election, the official position of the GOP was the same as the Democratic Party. Pre-viability abortions were a decision to be made by a woman alone, with consultation -- if she wished -- with her physician, spouse, and/or religious counselor.
California Governor Ronald Reagan had, in fact, signed into law the nation's most permissive abortion regulation in 1967, a full six years before the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision. And Reagan's 1980 running mate, former Texas Congressman George HW Bush, had supported Planned Parenthood -- including abortion rights -- all the way back to the 1960s as well.
But leading up to the election of 1980, the Reagan campaign determined that the growing backlash to Roe v Wade was a great issue to help ride to victory in the polls. It combined a general Republican distrust of the Supreme Court -- dating back to the 1954 Brown v Board decision desegregating public schools -- with an embrace of both Catholic and Evangelical Protestant positions that were ardently opposed to abortion.
In this, the Reagan campaign was following a long tradition of men seizing political power on the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) backs of women. The first widespread witch hunts in the 1500s, in fact, were the Catholic Church's response to the growing Protestant Reformation competing successfully for church membership.
As researchers Peter T. Leeson and Jacob W. Russ noted in The Journal of the Royal Economic Society:
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