But Texas is big, I need the broadest brush I can possibly find.
At this point, maybe they should just go out of business and reopen as something else (how about "Freedom medical centers"?) since clearly the name alone is what's making them the target. People obviously have no idea what they actually do. One in New England was attacked this week by a crazy guy with a hatchet who smashed computers and medical equipment, and they don't even perform abortions at that center.
"Not Completely Alcohol-Based Parenthood"
Announce a Planned Parenthood/ ACORN merger, and try to register everyone who shows up to one to vote with the message "this medical help will absolutely not be here in six months if you don't vote the right way"?
At this point, maybe they should just go out of business and reopen as something else (how about "Freedom medical centers"?) since clearly the name alone is what's making them the target.
I've had this same thought.
Do yourself a favor and don't go look at Greg Abbott's Twitter feed. It's incredibly depressing.
What happens if a PP worker in TX or FL shoots a protester because they felt threatened? Stand your ground and all that.
Family Liberty Institute could work, maybe.
But if you hate on Texas, be sure to do it with delicate nuance because it's annoying if you paint the whole state with a broad brush.
Is it nuanced enough if we hate on Texas' government?
This is one of those tough ones where you have to wade into the question whether the people of a state are in any way responsible for its government.
Texas is very broadly messed up, but it is messed up in many different ways in many different parts.
Thus, many small brushes are more appropriate.
I hear there's this one town that's a bit of good zoning away from being paradise. I wonder if it will make it!
I find nuance really gets in the way of my righteous indignation, so I find it easier to mock America as a whole. Avoids missing any particularly mockable bits.
Conservatives don't have a problem maligning an entire state for the actions of a plurality of it citizens. Its just like liberals to be squishy about that.
Family Liberty Institute could work, maybe.
Hmm, needs more heritage.
I wonder how many young women in the RGV will cross the border into Mexico for abortions.
Apparently Norwegians are actually using "Texas" to mean "crazy". (I read it on fb so it must be true.)
15. I've never noticed any squishiness from liberals about painting Texas with a broad brush ("except Austin is okay..."). Maybe your liberals are squishy, but ours aren't. Too broad a brush there!
I wonder how many young women in the RGV will cross the border into Mexico for abortions.
I had a related thought - I wonder if there are any statistics about women dying from back alley abortions in states with restrictive abortion laws. Are there even back alley providers anywhere? Or has it just driven up the pregnancy rate?
My guess is that anyone with the resources/gumption to find a back-alley provider would probably manage to get to a legal state, or at least that there'd be enough of that to make back-alley provision not a viable business.
18: I heard an interview about that on NPR recently. It's evidently not a new thing or driven particularly by modern politics--it's more about Texas as everything big + Westerns. (The interviewed worked in a Norwegian consulate in Texas; most of her anecdotes were about her mom and friends at home.)
Is this a new (extremely chilling ) development, or in the original story?
"Texas Orders Health Clinics to Turn Over Patient Data.
Three days after Gov. Greg Abbott announced his decision to end Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, state health department investigators showed up on Thursday at Planned Parenthood health centers in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Brownsville with orders to turn over thousands of pages of documents, including patients' records and employees' home addresses and telephone numbers. Some, but not all, of the extensive records sought by the state related specifically to abortion."
That situation wasn't covered in our on-line training but I suppose it depends on where they got the order from.
I know there are provisions in HIPAA about police investigations.
I know congress members can't be prosecuted for what they say on the floor, don't know about state equivalents, but could a member get a list of medical records and just decide to read out all the people who'd had abortions?
If they were communists or work in the State Department.
could a member get a list of medical records and just decide to read out all the people who'd had abortions?
That list would need to be vetted pretty carefully to purge the names of all the daughters/wives/girlfriends of prominent Republican elected officials / evangelical clergy / right wing talk radio hosts.
In any event, I suspect a widespread campaign of outing would backfire massively. One of the reasons antiabortion sentiment seems more pervasive than it really is is that women (in the flyover states especially) tend to be secretive about their personal abortion histories. If it were widely known just how common the procedure is in those communities, the stigma that persists even among pro-choice moderates would be diminished and might well disappear in time.
30 seems about right to me. So much of the right wing abortion rhetoric takes the form of "abortions are things that those people have". Making very visible the fact that "those people" are "everyone" - and quite plausibly that pro-life people account for a disproportionately high percentage of abortions - would undercut that significantly.
31: The problem, of course, is that any conservative woman who's been discovered to have had an abortion merely needs to say that she regrets it (perhaps now that she's been "saved"), and abortion goes right back to being something that only "those people" have.
Do wealthy, connected women go to Planned Parenthood, though? I thought they often went to private doctors or something.
(Not that PP is a place you'd only go if you're poor, by any means - it's great for everyone from all accounts - but I can still easily see the wealthier choosing otherwise.)
34, 35: I don't know enough wealthy women to speak from sure knowledge, but I suspect that many women prefer the relative anonymity/privacy and the nonjudgmentalism of a Planned Parenthood over the potential lack of same with a private doctor. Certainly, when once I had a pregnancy scare, my own doctor felt the need to deliver a lecture on proper birth control methods, along with some probing about the number of sexual partners I did or didn't have, whether I was monogamous, and so on. Let's just say that reproductive matters weren't her strong suit.
I'm guessing a lot of clinics just don't offer that service anymore, even the fairly ritzy ones. The divide between old doctors who remember pre-Roe times and newer ones who don't is, from what I've heard, pretty significant.
Wife had to go to PP for birth control implant, no one else around here does it.
One thing that was interesting to me about the PP smears recently was the approval/disapproval data on PP. I would have expected a much lower approval rating for them than they got (+16 with a largish 'didn't say' that I would assume includes a fair bit of "well obviously I oppose abortion but the clinic in my city is actually pretty great and I certainly approve of that one"). It makes me wonder if there aren't a lot of areas where the local (other) clinics haven't just abandoned reproductive healthcare almost entirely and left it up to PP.
It makes me wonder if there aren't a lot of areas where the local (other) clinics haven't just abandoned reproductive healthcare almost entirely and left it up to PP.
There's data on that ... somewhere. Kaiser Family Foundation, maybe? I don't have time to dig into it right now.
Off the top of my head, though, I suspect that many respondents to such polls don't need such services themselves, and are vaguely imagining that services are out there, sure, because that's what they've been told, though they really have no idea.
Wait, the double negative in the portion of 39 I quoted is confusing me now: are you wondering whether other clinics (what are they?) do, or do not, continue to support reproductive health services?