Shocking: “916” War on Women Bills Introduced Since the Republicans Took Over

Does it help? In the sense that I find this statement of your position clearer than other statements, yes. Does that help me agree with you? Only to some very limited degree, and certainly not totally.

You find it hypocritical for a person to be against publicly funded birth control and simultaneously to be against funding income transfers to support the poor who, to your mind, inevitably will increase if abortion services are made more difficult to obtain. Our first area of disagreement is the point I was trying to get out of you and which you didn't quite directly answer. Your answer seems to me to say that you think there is a huge degree of overlap between those opposing abortion and those opposing welfare. I don't find that so much. Poking around threads dealing with welfare and with abortion services, I find a very frequent occurrence of conservatives who feel strongly on one issue and don't really seem to care about the other. Maybe you've found differently, and SH doesn't make it easy to search on the issue, but I really don't find what you allege.

I certainly don't find it in my own case. We can quibble a bit as to what I believe about welfare benefit levels, but clearly I believe in what Liberals would call an ungenerous welfare system. But I actually favor abortion as social policy, and worked to that effect when I was a student intern in the NYS legislature when abortion was statutorily legalized back in 1971. I ended up being lumped in with conservatives on the topic a few years later because I found - and find - the rationale for asserting a Constitutional right to abortion to be absolutely laughable. Somehow I just can't be convinced that the Civil War was fought to extend to women a federal constitutional right to chose abortion in an unfettered manner when feminists are insisting to me that women of the time were chattels to their husbands. Something in that statement - several things, in fact - just don't work for me. But I digress.

But even if the people believing in reduced welfare funding and reduced access to abortion services are the same people, I take exception to your use of the word "hypocritical". Hypocrisy is defined by Webster's to mean "a feigning to ... believe what one does not ... a false appearance of virtue ..." There's nothing thatyou've presented on this thread that requires the conservatives you're talking about to have engaged in any type of feigning. What you talk about is illogicality,not hypocrisy. Now it may be much more satisfying to accuse someone of being a hypocrite, but I'm afraid you're going to have to upgrade your rhetoric to do so. On the other hand, "illogical" does equate to "stupid", and there's a degree of invective-derived pleasure you can get from calling someone that, or, at least, I can.

First of all, I'm certain I haven't voted for a Republican candidate who won a Senatorial or Congressional election since well before this century began, and, before that, I can't really recall whether the winning Republican candidates I did vote for were pro-Choice or pro-Life. I did vote for a pro-Life Democrat since 1999, albeit not because he was pro-Life, but on at least one occasion I voted for his pro-Choice Republican opponent (again, albeit not because he was pro-Choice), too. Do we want to look for common ground? Oh, pardon me, Republicans aren't supposed to do that, right, you're the one who's supposed to be looking for common ground with me and I brush you off in a surly manner. Well, to save time, let's pretend that is what happened and you came back and pressed me once again. What's the argument with which you press me? The argument is that it is sort of stupid for our Senators and Representatives to be taking up immense amounts of their time on this issue, and it's wasteful for us to have legislators who are extremely capable in dealing with matters of energy policy or national defense, have their elections hinge on something as un-national in scope as abortion policy. You think you can say that to me? Okay, if the answer to that is "Yes", i.e., that you can say that, then you've won. Show me a Democrat running for Congress or Senate who agrees w/ you and has a contrary opponent, and we'll spend our summer jointly working to elect that Democrat and defeat his stupid Repug opponent. I'm ready.

After reading what this is all about, it appears to be a State issue with many of these bills introduced at the State level not the Federal level as it should be, let the States decide, its a State issue.

To date, legislators have introduced 916 measures related to reproductive health and rights in the 49 legislatures that have convened their regular sessions. (Louisiana’s legislature will not convene until late April.) By the end of March, seven states had enacted 15 new laws on these issues, including provisions that:
expand the pre-abortion waiting period requirement in South Dakota to make it more onerous than that in any other state, by extending the time from 24 hours to 72 hours and requiring women to obtain counseling from a crisis pregnancy center in the interim;
expand the abortion counseling requirement in South Dakota to mandate that counseling be provided in-person by the physician who will perform the abortion and that counseling include information published after 1972 on all the risk factors related to abortion complications, even if the data are scientifically flawed;
require the health departments in Utah and Virginia to develop new regulations governing abortion clinics;
revise the Utah abortion refusal clause to allow any hospital employee to refuse to “participate in any way” in an abortion;
limit abortion coverage in all private health plans in Utah, including plans that will be offered in the state’s health exchange; and
revise the Mississippi sex education law to require all school districts to provide abstinence-only sex education while permitting discussion of contraception only with prior approval from the state.