23 February 2011 Teavangelists wage war on women

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/22/AR2011022205350.html

Side effects of the GOP's war on family planning



By Ruth Marcus

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

“House Republicans voted to increase the number of abortions, raise federal health-care costs and swell the welfare rolls. “

Marcus does an excellent job of defining the cost to the nation if the teavangelists and their GOP keepers are allowed to further deny access to health care to the poorer citizens of this land. There will be serious consequences that outweigh any argument for denying funding to Planned Parenthood advanced by the religious and reactionary right wings of the GOP.

Women, and their families, denied family planning help and information will become pregnant with unwanted and un-affordable children. Those children, refused funding for nutrition, education, health care, and even housing by the GOP and the teavangelists, will place an ever-increasing burden on the families that can’t care for them without government assistance. Since the right’s concern for unwanted children ends at delivery, there will be no form of support for such new citizens.

Venereal diseases are a constant problem. If women are not able to afford private physicians – most OB/Gyns won’t see uninsured patients – many women with asymptomatic diseases will fail to receive treatment and will infect their partners and perhaps children, as some of these diseases are transmissible in-utero and others may be transmitted during delivery. Providing care for undiagnosed patients with STD’s places health care professionals who may happen to see these patients in emergent situations at risk of infection as well.

The teavangelists will complain about the immorality of abortion and about disease being divine retribution for engaging in sex without the approval of some mythical sky creature. They fail to realize that they may be placing some of the most innocent and most deserving of concern at grave risk by blocking funding for Planned Parenthood.

While the monumental blockheads who want to remove Planned Parenthood from the landscape may think that their artificial morality, if forced upon our citizens by institution of a theocracy, will limit the spread of diseases and unwanted children; they are living demonstrations of group delusion. All the school programs stressing abstinence have made absolutely no positive change in the behavior of people with regard to engaging in sex, conceiving children, or acquiring and passing on diseases. Denial of accurate information about birth control and disease avoidance as provided by Planned Parenthood does make a difference.

I’ve omitted the topics of increasing our prison population, our homeless population, and the long-term effects of citizens with HIV/AIDS infections. Suffice it to say that Planned Parenthood has a role to play in reducing the numbers of people in these categories as well. They are not considered by the teavangelists to be worthy of care as they at some time must have violated some religious proscription handed down by religious leaders as medieval in character as the most fundamental imams of Iraq.

Our theocons don’t truly care about the people they are leaving open to increasing harm. They care about establishing a religious control over all Americans as brutal, as medieval, and as hateful as the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan or of the current Iranian regime.

The attack on Planned Parenthood is couched in terms of opposing abortion. That may be minimally true. But the long-term aim of the American teavangelists is to create a theocracy that will return women to the days of no education, no civil or political rights, and no control of their own bodies or lives. This must be stopped.