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Monday, October 07, 2013

Author speaks on anti-abortion activists in Wichita

Anti-abortion groups have passed about 300 anti-choice (abortion) restrictions in this country and Robin Marty has written a book on their strategies, Crow After Roe. She held a book signing, Saturday in Wichita at Watermark Books. Robin Marty is the Senior Political Reporter for RH Reality, a freelance writer and editor. She has recently written for theRolling Stone.
“I started in Nebraska with the fetal pain bill and went to Ohio’s heart beat ban,” Marty said as she explained some of the actions that drew her interest into writing her new book. She warned that Anti-abortion foes have worked for years on a strategy of slowly placing restrictions, in small increments and laws designed to be tested in the courts to try and make it impossible for women to get abortions in this country.
“They will attack birth control next,” she warned. “We could see some of that soon. They believe birth control is just another form of abortion.”
Marty said she got the idea for her new book after she started tracking all the legislation these groups passed in one state after another.
There are waiting periods. The latest is 72 hours and the woman must visit at a pregnancy crisis center. The idea is to show them enough information to try and stop them from getting abortions. They exempted holidays and weekends so those at the pregnancy crisis center employees can stay at home with their families while the patient waits.
She told the crowd that Americans for Life is one of the main groups coordinating these efforts. She went over all the different bills they have passed. Most have been based on claims that that fetuses feel pain at a certain stage of life, bans on those who have a heartbeat, waiting periods, medical requirements for abortion clinics that cost those clinics so much money and cause so many requirements they just can’t stay open.
She also pointed out that they use fake institutes, such as the Charlotte Lozier Institute and Life Issues Institute, organized, financed and run by anti-abortion groups that pay doctors and scientist to find proof of fetal pain, causes breast cancer and other issues. Then they site studies that look as if they are done by independent doctors or scientist, when they are actually just people who work for the anti-abortion group. These groups are patterned after the fake institutes that the Koch brothers set us such as the Cato Institute.
“Kansas focuses mostly on conscious clauses,” Marty said.
Those laws protect any person, usually medical workers, whose job may require them to help in an abortion or dispensing birth control pills. If such people refuse to do that job the law prevents them from being fired. It has protected pharmacist who won’t dispense birth control.
“The law affects more than just medical doctors and pharmacists,” Mary added. “There is a case of a bus driver who refused to go to a clinic, in Austen Texas. He sued for back pay because he got fired. The pharmacy law may not make much difference in a town such as Wichita. But in some rural communities there may only be one pharmacy in the whole town.”
Marty said most of her strategies for countering the anti-abortion strategies are in the back of her book.
“In the last elections some Republicans lost because they wanted to force rape victims to carry through with their pregnancies,” she added.
But Republicans won in other races. She also mentioned a case in which a Planned Parenthood clinic sued the state over undue” burdens passed by the government meant to close them down.
The book signing was partially sponsored by Trust Women, which is now providing abortions in Wichita.
Pix from SubText.

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