Rep. Sean Duffy “probably agrees” with mandatory transvaginal ultrasound legislation. But he doesn’t really know because, he says, “I haven’t had one.” Well, I have. I’ve had several, in fact. So, Rep. Duffy, pull up a chair and let me explain how a transvaginal ultrasound works, and how it feels.
Newly released documents show Texas Health and Human Services Commissioner Tom Seuhs instructed his staff to try to create new abortion reporting requirements that would please one anti-choice legislator–and also “not be offensive to women.”
The Texas Department of State Health Services Council met this week to push forward the potential adoption of new abortion reporting requirements drafted at the best of one rogue, anti-choice legislator, but the opposition from pro-choice Texans is finally gaining steam.
How did one Texas legislator get the state Department of Health Services to enact requirements on abortion care that failed to pass even the Texas legislature? Documents show the answer is simple: he just asked. Yet despite inquiries, the DSHS can not justify many of the requirements and seems not to have thought them through.
What does it say about the state of our society when so many state legislators seem to make the passage of laws de-humanizing women their main priority, but newspapers are afraid of running comic strips satirizing these laws? Garry Trudeau, the brilliant political cartoonist, has produced a series on forced trans-vaginal sonogram laws in Texas, but papers in a number of the states with similar laws are not running it.
After weeks of protest in the state of Virginia and nationally, Governor Bob McDonnell signs a bill forcing women to have and pay out of pocket for an expensive and often medically-unnecessary medical procedure before they can terminate a pregnancy, suggesting it is an effort to “empower women.”
A senator pushing for mandatory ultrasounds in Alabama claims his company wouldn’t benefit financially. But is he telling the truth?
Pictures worth 10,000 words… Virginia sends in riot police to arrest peaceful protestors supporting women’s rights. Apparently, they can occupy your uterus, but you can’t occupy your state capitol.
While there has been much fury recently over Virginia’s recently proposed transvaginal ultrasound bill, other states’ anti-choice lawmakers have chosen the equally unacceptable route of psychological—rather than physical—violation of women.
After a year of signing laws and regulations decried by medical professionals as unnecessary and costly intrusions into the doctor-patient relationship, Bob McDonnell has suddenly found religion on medical evidence. At least a little bit. He now says he will not sign mandatory trasn-vaginal ultrasounds into law. But he’ll restrict women’s rights other ways.
