Why Planned Parenthood?

Comment posted to the T&G on why fight over Planned Parenthood funding is not about abortion:
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The fight over funding Planned Parenthood is not about abortions, it's about power. It's about a return to the world of Sigmund Freud and his famous quote about women: "anatomy is destiny." A world where a woman got one choice, usually while little more than a child, and then returned to a state of servitude. It's about the power of husbands to rule their wives. And it's about the power of the corporations to use men to control the lower-paid women in the workplace, keeping us divided and driving all of our wages down.

Men, as we love the women in our lives - our wives and girlfriends, our sisters, daughters, nieces and daughters-in-law, we must not let this nightmare return to the past happen. The cost will be disease, violence and too often the early death of someone you love. And the cost will be families bound together by fear, poisoned by anger and bitterness, unable to have honest conversations with each other.

And the cost will be further destruction of our ability to organize and to a decent workplace.

Men, we mustn't let the secret pleasure of imagining more power over women - or the camaraderie of the locker room or bar or hunting lodge - lead us astray. Standing by our women and standing up for their rights is one of the keys to the unity we need, as we try to stop the corporations and the banks from wrecking our economy, taking our homes, exporting our jobs and reducing us all to poverty and peonage.

Our Democratic representatives have caved on almost everything else - don't let them cave on this too!

Reid's Manager's Amendment to the Senate Health Care Bill contains

a. no public option,
b. no Medicare buy-in - and
c. a back-door version of the House's Stupak Amendment - that would effectively block abortion coverage in the health insurance exchanges and would probably result in its being dropped from most private plans as well.

(See NOW's bulletin: http://www.now.org/lists/now-action-list/msg00416.html)

If the liberals and progressives who elected Obama are to have any credibility, we must act to block this deeply flawed bill unless it meets bare minimum standards of doing more good than harm.

I am calling Kerry and Kirk (866-338-1015)and urging them to make clear that they will vote against this bill unless either a. or b. (or both) is included, and unless c. is removed. They must make it clear to the leadership that either no public option and no buy-in or removing abortion coverage is a deal-breaker.

The Blue Dogs need to understand that they will be running next time as candidates of the party that couldn't pass the health-care bill we promised - because of them - unless they back down. They've been playing "chicken" with us long enough; it's time to call them on it.