How dare the hourly janitor worker with church insurance need a costly blood transfusion.

Assuming you are male, you have NO IDEA what it is like to walk in life as a woman, and therefore have no concept of what it is like to be subjugated, discriminated against, forced against your will in the name of patriarchy. I DO KNOW WHAT THAT IS LIKE and I know MANY others who do. I don’t tell people to “check their privilege” to be snide: I tell them to check their privilege because they do actually have privilege and have little regard for those who do not enjoy the same privilege. In American society, white males are the default: Everyone else is “the other,” including women (in addition to persons of color or non-Western, non European ethnicity, and, yes, indigeneous Americans who were slaughtered and displaced in the name of “Manifest Destiny.”). It’s a fact that people like me and the remainder of the hereinafter styled “Other” live with day to day for all of our lives.

Furthermore: No woman in her right mind wants to have to resort to an abortion. As I’ve posted elsewhere in these forums, as long as we cling to farcical notions like “abstinence only sex education” and generally low information about contraceptives and sexual health (both physical health and mental/emotional health), there are going to be women that will undergo abortions. The “personhood” bill recently defeated in Mississippi (and being introduced in Oklahoma this legislative session by GOP Rep. Mike Reynolds) will also make contraception illegal.

You cannot stop people from having sex, whether consensual or non-consensual (all non-consensual sex is rape, whether violent or not). If contraception is made illegal, in this quest to end abortion, you are going to have MORE abortions, and, at that, risky ones that will harm the life of the woman who didn’t ask or expect to be impregnated in the first place. Historical horror stories of women who have attempted to self abort? Women who have undergone abortions with wire hanger and pencils and God knows what else? Those days will be back, and more women will die as a result.

The only way to effectively reduce abortions is comprehensive, age-sensitive education about contraception and sexual health, period.

And further furthermore: If GOP lawmakers expect women who are impregnated unexpectedly, against their will, or whatever, to carry these fetuses to term, these game GOP lawmakers are more than willing to cut funding to programs like AFDC, WIC and the like. How is this fair?

If it sounds like I’m unconcerned about the “unborn,” I can’t help but notice that conservatives place more concern upon a mass of cells, a zygote, an embryo, that is completely dependent on the host (the mother) until it has completed the nine-month gestation cycle, and place little concern on the women that have to carry it.

I am through discussing this; you have your opinion, and I have mine. Your feelings are very clearly deeply felt, as are mine.

That doesn’t change the fact that I think it’s offensive for women to be subjugated by the letter of the law for reasons of perpetuating a patriarchal and religiously-based (despite the Establishment Clause) set of ideals. I am sick of religion being in my government, and all this boils down to is the pushing of narrow religious dogma on a number of people who might not share those same beliefs, and being forced to live by the narrow beliefs of a smaller group of people. That isn’t what MY America is about.

Good day to you.

However, I think its a bit unfair to assume that all people (specifically men) who are pro-life equate to right-wing extremists who view women as property. While there will always be those individuals who see others as lesser beings, this isn’t an attribute that is common amongst pro-life men, nor does it keep to any specific group, race, sex, or ideology.

The main argument pro-lifers have against abortion isn’t to take away rights from women, but to protect the rights of the unborn. And while I do not for one instant condone the acts of despicable people who rape and molest and do other terrible and unspeakable things, that isn’t what most abortions are used for. In fact, pregnancy from rape is a somewhat rare phenomenon. Most abortions today are to not have to face the consequences of having sex. We live in a society with an adolescent mindset of not wanting to deal with the inconvenient or the difficult but still wanting to do whatever we want. We are all guilty of this, men and women.

It is this kind of thinking, of being able to live consequence free that most pro-lifers are worried about. History shows what happens in those kinds of societies, you get things like oppression and slavery and the Holocaust. When people are allowed to get rid of the inconvenient and the ones we simply do not wish to deal with, we wind up looking like the Adolf Hitlers of the era.

I’m not even saying that abortion should become 100% illegal no matter what the scenario, but only that it should be kept for the rarest and most difficult of situations, not something you can simply get done like it was a dentist appointment. If we are talking about rape and molestation victims, shouldn’t they at least receive some kind of counseling before making this sort of decision? And in the cases of women simply getting them because they don’t want to deal with what a child would do to their current lifestyle, what about the men who might want to keep the child? Are their rights meaningless simply because they aren’t the ones that have to carry the child to term? And for those that believe in the rights of the unborn, that life begins at conception, does anyone truly have the right to deny life simply because we don’t want to deal with it?

But you right-wing Christians sure have a way of pushing your narrow views on ME. Especially when it comes to taking away my bodily autonomy and not allowing me to make decisions about my own body without having to jump through hoops (or submit to an invasive ultrasound at my own expense). If I was a victim of rape or incest I’m already traumatized (if not beaten by the perpetrator to within an inch of my life) as it is and THEN have to deal with shelling out money to have to go through this procedure.

I applaud the state senator in Virginia who valiantly attempted to amend an ultrasound in that state by adding an amendment that required men seeking erectile dysfunction meds to undergo a digital rectal exam and cardiac stress testing. It’s only fair, since those erections are going to impregnate someone like me against my will. Of course, it was shot down — but barely.

At the end of the day what is at stake here is the continued control of women as if they are property or chattel. That should be unacceptable in this day and age, but I am reminded that Christian societies equal patriarchal societies where women are meant to be property and meant to be subjugated. As far as I am concerned (and be it known I am a values voter too: My values are pro-Union, pro-choice, and pro-LGBT equality), Oklahoma will NEVER move forward SOCIALLY as long as patriarchal values are perpetuated like this.

I know you can barely tolerate the fact that women are allowed to drive and vote. If you had your way you’d take that away from us too.