Abortion falls to lowest level since Roe v. Wade.
Some of this may be due to greater restrictions on abortion access, but numbers based on similarly falling numbers of unwanted pregnancies suggest greater access to reliable, long-term birth control (i.e. IUD's) is a bigger factor.
Planned Parenthood happens to be one of the biggest providers of such services. So, ironically, though they happen to offer abortion services, they also play perhaps a bigger role in preventing abortions.
But good luck getting your regressive anti-women moralizers to accept this logic.

They won't. I was listening to an interview with one of the many pro-life group leaders and he said that access to birth control wasn't causing abortion rates to go down; people were finally condemning getting an abortion.

Even when he was told that Pew polling shows that opinions on abortion really haven't budged, but hey, facts are for the godless heathens.

Fuck Republicans and their duplicitous bullshit. What happens when you take away healthcare options? People get sick. People die. But these religious assholes would rather see an impoverished woman die from cancer because her HPV went untreated. "Pro-life" my fucking ass.

On a related note, if you're in the DC area on Saturday, please come join the march.

Also while I'm at it, fuck the Washington Post for this bullshit, rating Sander's statement:

As Republicans try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they should be reminded every day that 36,000 people will die yearly as a result.

as a 4 Pinnochio lie because the 36,000 figure is based on a handful of assumptions. Hey dipshits, people are still gonna die. Whether it's 20,000 or 36,000, people are still going to die. And your false neutrality just plays into the murdering assholes' hands.

Numbers are important to fact checkers. Bernie may have been correct on principle, but the problem with using inflated numbers is that it plays into the hands of the opposition. They either get to call Sanders a liar or use their own exaggerated numbers or more likely both.
But the bigger point is if even just 100 people die for lack of access to affordable health care, that's 100 people dying needlessly for an ideological pissing match.

That's my problem, though. Was the number wrong? Yes. Should the fact checkers called him out on it? Yes. Should the fact checkers have ignored the fact that some number of people are going to die? No.

Had an argument recently regarding Planned Parenthood. Many people honestly don't know what Planned Parenthood actually does. They hear it and instantly think abortions and fetal tissue sales. "I don't want my taxes to fund abortions!" Good news, that's already illegal and if you cut funding, you're taking away other services that are offered, like cervical cancer screenings, STD testing, UTI & yeast infection care. They also help with infertility!

Do you really want to increase the number of people with untreated cervical cancer, yeast infections, and gonorrhea?

They'll only have bad things happen to them if they sin. They just need to stop having sex and not going to church and Jesus will bless their wicked bits by not smiting them.

And of course the vital service that they're named for- family planning. By providing reliable contraception they're preventing abortions and unwanted pregnancies. Taxpayers don't pay for abortions but they sure do pay for supporting poor kids.

Now do you all see why I flipped my shit after the election? :/

I'm still being offered an immense estate in a developing nation. The kind where it doesn't really matter what the law is because my high walls say the law doesn't see what happens, and my money says the officials don't care.

Sometimes I consider it. But then I hate myself.

Can we please fix this shit? Who has a real plan to educate the populace aside from letting their world burn so they can finally learn?

p.s. I am feeling better. I was extremely sick and probably should have been in the hospital when the election happened, but I felt like rolling the dice to see if maybe I would die. Obviously, I did not. Since then I have been throwing money left and right (well... entirely left) at organizations that might do something.

Glad that you're alright. Please take care of yourself!

If they're keen on states rights, perhaps its best to make greater strides locally. If republican ideas have legs let the red states run with them. If they fail their constituents then those constituents can either vote with their feet or with their ballots. If more progressive reform works, then its implementation on the state level with blue states will provide a nice enticement.

The US benefits by having people with the pioneer spirit emigrant from around the world, sometimes at a great cost. If a Guatemalan will travel to NYC to escape death camps, then a Wisconsin cheese head can move to the coast for better health care and jobs. Let them bleed their children away to the cities, like they already do. Maybe that process should be accelerated.

You're expecting people to react rationally. That doesn't seem to happen a lot.

I think they do, but only within the context they understand. Stay with me a moment.

- No one thinks they're the bad guy.
- No one thinks they are being irrational.
- In both instances, the individual has a skewed world view where their response makes perfect sense.

It isn't a matter of getting them to act rationally, but of changing their world model so that their rational response better matches our rational response.

To explain it one more way: if you see a man scratching off his skin, you would think him insane. This same man sees you doing nothing about the spiders burrowing under everyone's skin and thinks you are insane. In the context of his world, even if that context is totally fallacious, his actions are entirely rational. If you lived in spider skin world, you would also be trying desperately to do something about it.

What makes our current situation so difficult is that it isn't that black and white. Everyone exists in a world made of reality and unreality. No one can fully embrace or dismiss anyone else's context because at least some portion of it is valid, and other portions may be subjective (such as a simple difference in how we rank our values/priorities). We may both agree prison reform is important, but we live in a world of limited resources where we must choose between prison reform and other priorities. We might also both agree that fixing the roads is very important. The conflict, then, comes when we must choose which to address first (or even at all if resources are so limited).

You and I could have all the same nominal values, but rank their priority differently. Even if we were to have the same values and the same ranking of those values, we could disagree on how best to address them because there is not sufficient evidence to know definitively which method will yield the best results and would need tremendous data to weed out other variables so we could find a true answer.

In light of all of this, the only value I can champion is this:

Love eachother, especially those who least deserve it because they are the ones who need it the most.

Do not take this as an argument to let bigots suffer no consequences, or to understand them in a way that excuses them, but rather to embrace them so that with a firm and gentle hand we might guide them.

I say this today at this moment. Two minutes from now I'll want to burn it all to the ground again. This cycle has not only left our nation a house divided, but many of us have become so deeply divided within that reconciliation seems hopelessly distant.

Know this, many of you at times infuriate me, but the truth is that I keep coming back because I do love you. Even the ones of you I hate, I really do love. That might not make sense now, but I promise someday it will.

For this to work, wouldn't we have to cut all federal support from the red states? Otherwise, as usual, they blame the feds for their failing infrastructure. And, should we do that, what's the opposite of secession? You know, when you kick a region out of your country like the Czechs did to the Slavs?

Would we create a federal grant for refugees within our own country? And how would this influx in people of dire need of financial support affect the blue states? Their public programs can only be stretched so thin.

I am led to believe we must succeed or fail as one nation, indivisible.

Unfortunately, I am also led to believe the latter is more probable and more effectual than the former.

The current administration, the GOP really, is looking to dismantle the federal government. They want to cut taxes, and cut federal programs. So thats part of the work being done already. All im really advocating is a push for state level progressive reform, and competitive measures to address outliers like Texas. Refugee programs? Stronger state schools, robust scholarship programs to attract exceptional students from across the country. Increased taxes to reinvest in citizens makes for a electorate, better workers, and a nicer place to live. California and Wisconsin, who needs who more? If you believe people have value, that they generate wealth, then this would mean a fire sale on the best and brightest the midwest has to offer.