Plan B Forum

50% ? I doubt if it is even that many if he makes it to the Big Show.

To deprive people of the very information which makes a moral decision possible; is to treat them like farm animals.



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Emily Rapp on Why the American Public Sphere Really Does Not Need Rick Santorum, or This Republican Party, at All

Emily Rapp:

Rick Santorum and prenatal testing: This week my son turned blue, and for 30 terrifying seconds, stopped breathing. Called an "apnea seizure," this is one stage in the progression of Tay-Sachs, the genetic disease Ronan was born with and will die of, but not before he suffers from these and other kinds of seizures and is finally plunged into a completely vegetative state.

Nearly two years old, he is already blind, paralyzed, and increasingly nonresponsive. I expect his death to happen this year, and this week's seizure only highlighted the fact that it could happen at any moment—while I'm at work, at the hair salon, at the grocery store. I love my son more than any person in the world and his life is of utmost value to me. I don't regret a single minute of this parenting journey, even though I wake up every morning with my heart breaking, feeling the impending dread of his imminent death. This is one set of absolute truths.

Here's another: If I had known Ronan had Tay-Sachs (I met with two genetic counselors and had every standard prenatal test available to me, including the one for Tay-Sachs, which did not detect my rare mutation, and therefore I waived the test at my CVS procedure), I would have found out what the disease meant for my then unborn child; I would have talked to parents who are raising (and burying) children with this disease, and then I would have had an abortion. Without question and without regret, although this would have been a different kind of loss to mourn and would by no means have been a cavalier or uncomplicated, heartless decision. I'm so grateful that Ronan is my child. I also wish he'd never been born; no person should suffer in this way—daily seizures, blindness, lack of movement, inability to swallow, a devastated brain—with no hope for a cure. Both of these statements are categorically true; neither one is mutually exclusive.

That it is possible to hold this paradox as part of my daily reality points to the reductive and narrow-minded nature of Rick Santorum's assertions that prenatal testing increases the number of abortions (a this equals that equation), and for this reason, the moral viability or inherent value of these tests should be questioned. Prenatal testing provides information, a value-less act. I maintain that it is a woman’s right to choose what to do with the information that attaches value and meaning, and that this choice is—and must be—directly related to that individual’s experiences. What’s at stake here is not the issue of testing, but the issue of choice. I love Ronan, and I believe it would have been an act of love to abort him, knowing that his life would be primarily one of intense suffering, knowing that his neurologically devastated brain made true quality of life—relationships, thoughts, pleasant physical experiences—impossible.

Here's another set of truths for the moral and ethical mix: I was born with a physical deformity in the age before the evolution of advanced ultrasound technology that may have detected it. My mom did not have a choice about terminating her pregnancy, although when I was born and she was told that I might be retarded, that I might never walk, and that given these possibilities she might want to consider institutionalizing me, she probably wished she'd had the choice. Regardless of what she may or may not have decided had she been possessed of all the information prior to my birth, regardless of the fact that none of the doctor’s warnings had any truth to them, it would have been her choice to make.

In 1974, we did not have the prenatal testing available to us now, and the restrictions on abortion were much different. Santorum's ideas advocate a return to that oppressive historical situation where women were punished for having sex, for making any kind of reproductive choice whatsoever, for being women, for being human beings, for making decisions about the course and shape of their lives. Do I think people with disabilities are of value in the world? Obviously, as I am one of them, and I love my life. Do I wish my child wouldn't suffer, that it would have been better for him to have never been born than to watch him struggle to breathe? To know that he will never speak, walk, chew solid food, toddle, or move? Yes. One statement doesn’t cancel out the other.

Rick Santorum, I would like you to meet my child. You should see how beautiful he is; you should see how he suffers, how his parents suffer. And I'd like you to meet me, as well, with my artificial leg and strong body and big, beautiful, complicated life full of friends and books and meaningful work and sex and all kinds of texture and heaps of subtlety and contradiction; in short, a full life. My mother made a choice without knowing she had one. I made a choice without having all the information. Neither choice is bad or good; neither is this one thing or the other.

The tenor of the current debate frightens me, as it heralds a return to another age when women were not the trustees of decisions made about their own bodies. What I hope for other women is that they have the power to make their own decisions with as much information as it is possible to have, with respect to the specificity and complexity of their own circumstances, according to their own minds and hearts and not the dictates of another person’s worldview.

Santorum believes that all life is inherently valuable, no matter how compromised or of what limited quality; that is one view. I believe that we need a more nuanced discussion about what quality of life is, and that it should be a woman's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy when the path of her child’s life is as compromised—and as terrible—as my son’s.


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yrs,
rubato

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... rticles%29

Why Rick Santorum Is Surging With Women Voters
by Patricia Murphy Feb 26, 2012 4:45 AM EST
Rick Santorum is zealously pro-life and has said birth control hurts women, but he’s surging in the polls among female voters. Patricia Murphy on the GOP’s ladies’ man.


On the campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich., a tour bus pulled up to the the snow-covered student union. Marilyn Musgrave, Maggie Gallagher, and other pro-life women were in the middle of a six-day bus tour to rally support for Rick Santorum in the crucial Midwestern state.

Santorum will need the help of women voters to pull off a victory on Mitt Romney’s home turf, and the women on the Leadership for Life tour say they believe he’s going to get it, despite weeks of controversy in the national press over his aggressively pro-life record, including his unapologetic opposition to abortion and past statements that contraception is “harmful to women.”

GOP strategists have openly worried that the recent focus on social issues could sink Santorum’s chances among female voters in a general election and even doom his candidacy for the nomination among Republican women. But midway through their Michigan caravan, Gallagher said she has seen just the opposite, as women turn out at Santorum rallies to show their support for the former Pennsylvania senator.

“What I think women are responding to as they get to know Rick is that he is a good man,” Gallagher said. “You don’t see guys like that in politics very much.”

She called the contraception issue in particular “political clutter” and observed that Santorum’s willingness to stand by the position that he personally opposes contraception may actually have helped him among conservative women, who are looking for a leader willing to stand their ground on issues they care about. She also said that the perception that all women are liberal and pro-choice, and so would be alienated by Santorum’s positions on social issues, is wrong.

“The political narrative that women are liberal and pro-choice may be true of half the country, but the other half really care very deeply about marriage and religious liberty, and Rick Santorum is their champion,” she said. “It’s certainly not a problem for Republican women that Rick is a faithful Catholic.”

A Washington Post–ABC News poll released Friday backs up what Gallagher says she’s seeing, namely that Sanorum’s popularity is surging among Republican women across the country. Although Mitt Romney remains the most popular candidate among GOP women, with a 61 percent favorability rating, his popularity has fallen since January, while Santorum’s approval rating among GOP women has spiked from 34 percent to 57 percent.

Santorum has also won endorsements recently from conservative women’s groups like the SBA List, which endorses pro-life candidates.

“The tide is turning in this country. More and more women are pro-life, and they’re looking for heroes on the issue,” says Musgrave, a former Colorado congresswoman who is a vice president of the SBA List. “We can always count on Rick Santorum.”

Musgrave also said that Santorum’s personal story, including his eight children, has won over numbers of women who see him as a devoted husband and father.

“They’re very drawn to the way Rick Santorum relates to his wife and children and the way he relates to Bella,” she said, speaking of Sanoturm’s youngest daughter, who has a life-threatening genetic disorder. “He has that strength of character, but he has that tenderness as he relates to his wife and his children that is just amazing.”

At Santorum’s recent campaign events and rallies, women indeed describe him as someone they connect with, mentioning Santorum’s children, his background growing up in a working-class family, and his Italian-immigrant grandfather as the elements that make him a man they can they can relate to.

“He’s genuine, very real,” Elaine Hutchings of Roswell, Ga., said this week after seeing Santorum in person for the first time. “He is heartfelt in what he wants to accomplish for the country.”

Janet Johnson of Marietta, Ga., described him as someone real, unlike most politicians, whom she could connect with far more than the other Republicans running for the nomination.

“Rick Santorum speaks to where I live,” she said after seeing him at Redeemer Church in Cumming, Ga. “I feel like he represents me.”

‘What I think women are responding to as they get to know Rick is that he is a good man.’

But while his numbers are going up nationwide, Santorum could run into a buzz saw Tuesday in Michigan, where Romney and the super PAC supporting him are outspending Santorum by a 12-to-1 margin and pulling support away from him in the process. The latest Mitchell/Rosetta poll in the state showed Romney up by six points over Santorum and broadening his lead among women from 29 percent to 28 percent in mid-February to 37 percent to 31 percent by the end of the month.

But Gallagher said she thinks the momentum is with Santorum, even among women.

“People see there’s a real human being there who gets up every morning and works hard and tries to do the right thing,” she said. “You could do a lot worse than having a husband or a son-in-law or a president like Rick Santorum.”

He has polled slightly better than he did with women vs Newtie, Romney and Ron Paul. Romney is still by far the leader among Republican women voters, btb.

Relative success vs the weakest field of presidential candidates in memory (or is it in history?) is not exactly praise.

yrs,
rubato

the weakest field of presidential candidates in memory (or is it in history?) is not exactly praise.

Coming from you this gives me even greater confidence. I think it has and continues to be a great field of candidates.

Head and shoulders above McCain and Bob Dole especially.

I would venture to guess that 100% of the women that vote for him would be Republican...

Why would anyone sane, regardless of gender, vote for such a nasty bigoted little prick as Santorum?

edited to add;

"I have to tell you a lot of my Democratic friends will vote for Santorum in something they are calling Operation Hilarity," Michael Moore said at the end of an interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

According to the Daily Kos, who launched this campaign, Operation Hilarity is "an opportunity for Democrats to actually help prolong this election a little bit longer because we’ve seen that the longer this drags out, the worse it is for Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum and the best it is for Barack Obama."

Ah members of one party voting in an election for their opposition leader, hat insanity again!

keld feldspar wrote:I would venture to guess that 100% of the women that vote for him would be Republican...

Any literate?

I guess as literate as any cow...

Santorum may be gaining support among Republican women, but he is still hosed among women generally, as is the Republican party. Women get it.

An AP-GfK poll conducted Feb. 16-20 showed that on overall approval Obama has gained 10 percentage points among women since December, from 43 percent to 53 percent ....

Women also are the reason behind Obama's lead over Republican hopefuls Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum: In one-on-one matchups, Obama beats Romney 54 percent to 41 percent and tops Santorum 56 percent to 40 percent among women ....

And far more women are Democrats than Republicans:

Among women, Democrats maintain a solid double-digit advantage in party identification over Republicans, 41% to 27%.

Women get it.

Leave us face it folks, if only men could vote, the DNC would be out of business.

If only gainfully employed people could vote, ditto.

If only people who pay Federal income taxes could vote, ditto. In fact, if one could create a threshold of, "unless you pay X dollars in FIC..." Dems would lose at every level until you reached the point of people who make so much money that they just don't care (millions annually) before the Dems would have any chance whatsoever.

If only people who own real property could vote, ditto.

Translation: If only rich old straight (predominantly) white males could vote this would be a different story. Who cares about what the vast majority of the country thinks?