Editor,
The Republicans’ failed American Health Care Act would have effectively dismantled all insurance coverage for abortion; eliminated requirements of essential services to be covered under Medicaid; and defunded Planned Parenthood, a move opposed by 75 percent of Americans.
It was reported in January that the U.S. abortion rate is now at the lowest level it’s been Since Roe v. Wade. That is probably due to both expanding contraception coverage, and also the GOP’s “War on Women.”
In Israel, abortions are both legal and free. They are covered under insurance. So, why make it harder here especially since we’re buddies with Israel and give them tons of money?
The right to a safe and legal abortion is not a religious issue, it’s a human rights issue. As long as the Republican Party continues to use religious beliefs to oppress American women, they are just as guilty of human rights violations as extremists who use Islam to commit atrocities against women and girls.
Medicaid currently funds 70 percent of births in the failed state of New Mexico! Republicans have currently added a manager’s amendment to the AHCA allowing states to revoke Medicaid coverage from new mothers who haven’t found a job within two months after giving birth. When’s the last time you heard a PRO-LIFE Trump Republican call for higher wages, paid maternity leave, sick leave, universal child care, expanding the Marxist socialist safety net?
On February 28, 1933 the right-wing Fascist Nazi regime banned birth control organizations on the grounds that they were Marxist! In January 1941 the Nazis categorically banned the production and distribution of contraceptives.
According to “Weimar and Nazi Germany - Continuities and Discontinuities,” Panikos Panayi writes, “The pronatalist imperatives of the Nazi regime could not be met with the prevailing climate in German society of relatively easy access to birth control advice and contraceptives, and with the effects of the relaxation of the abortion laws during the Weimar era. The birth control centers, marriage and counseling centers set up during the Weimar Republic, were shut down by the new Nazi Government or absorbed into the public health offices. This suited the political aims as well as the pronatalist ambitions of the Nazi regime.”
Josef Goebbels had put it in more homely terms in 1929, “The mission of the woman is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world. The female bird pretties herself for her mate and hatches the eggs for him. In exchange the mate takes care of gathering the food, and stands guard and wards off the enemy.”
On March 30, 2016, President Trump stated there had to be, some form of punishment for women if abortion becomes illegal. Abortion legislation had been incorporated into the German Penal Code on January 1, 1872 in the form that a pregnant woman who purposely caused herself to abort was subject to imprisonment for up to five years.
In “Students Against Tyranny - The Resistance of the White Rose,” Inge Scholl writes, “The Nazis tended to view the German woman, despite the concealing verbiage of ‘motherhood’ essentially as a unit of reproduction. Consequently, to prevent the obstacles that the Weimar Republic had allegedly placed in the way of conception and childbirth the Nazis enforced anti abortion legislation zealously. Between 1934 and 1938 there was a 50 % increase in convictions. They also closed birth control clinics and placed every obstacle in the way of the propagation and distribution of contraceptive devices, practices, and knowledge. These policies were supported and endorsed by the Catholic Church in Germany. The battle for births had, like all Nazi campaigns, an ominously negative side. Only appropriate women, the truly Aryan (White) were encouraged and expected to have offspring prolifically. The fear was Jews, gypsies, the disabled, those suffering from hereditary illnesses, the presumed a-socials would breed and thus degrade the German bloodstock.” “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies. You’ve got to keep your birth rate up, and that you need to teach your children your values,” King said, paraphrasing remarks he said he’s delivered to audiences in Europe. “In doing so, you can grow your population, you can strengthen your culture, and you can strengthen your way of life.” - Republican United States Representative Steve King
Brian Fejer
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