When bayprairie (with TruBlueDem) posted her diary here at Booman Tribune presenting a compelling case for opposing Democrats for Life, every last face in her Rogues’ Gallery belonged to a man. There’s no objective reason that we should expect more compassion from women on issues involving reproductive freedom than we expect from men. Certainly we shouldn’t. Especially not from women such as Missouri state representatives Belinda Harris (left) and Kate Meiners (right) – both DFL All-Stars.
Just how hard-line are the positions of these two women? Before the 2004 election, both Harris and Meiners won strong endorsements in bold type from Missouri Right to Life, an organization that is 100% anti-abortion, anti-birth control and anti-stem cell research — and that trusted these Democratic women to further those extremist goals over their staunchly “pro-life” male Republican opponents.
And that’s about as hard as the line can get.
Meiners (left) and Harris (right) understand loyalty to a cause; it is what unites them. We hear a lot of talk about loyalty ourselves, about party unity, about not “applying a litmus test on every issue” — especially if that test involves a women’s right to control her own reproduction — because “when push comes to shove, they’ll be loyal to the party and vote our way.” We’re scolded that in failing to support all Democrats all the time, we are not only hurting the party’s chances now, but sabotaging our own future interests. Lockstep right down the line, no matter who a Democrat is or what they stand for, because we’re sick and tired of losing elections: “We Wanna Win!”
And the American Catholic agrees that Democrats ought to be more practical.
State Sen. Patrick Dougherty and Reps. Patricia Yaeger, Belinda Harris and Thomas Villa, a few of the estimated 25 to 35 pro-life Democrats in the Legislature, said the Democratic Party needs to reassess its positions as it looks to the future. Dougherty termed the reassessment “soul-searching.” Others said they believed that the 2004 Democratic candidate for governor, state auditor Claire McCaskill, would have won the election if she had not taken a position in support of keeping abortion legal. “Look at who won and who lost” the Nov. 2 elections, Yaeger said.
That’s the ticket. Step right this way into the Big Tent, and save yourself a spot before it gets to be standing room only. Sashay your pro-choice ass inside, pipe down, and try to find a seat in that crowded back row. But why is it that the only ones who owe unwavering loyalty and support to the Democratic Party are the voters, the people — you know, US? What about the Democrats our loyal votes carry into office?
Belinda Harris damned sure doesn’t lose any sleep over it. In fact, she takes the Democratic Party’s solid support and financial contributions, tallies its straight-ticket voters in her “win” column, and then tells it, and us, to go straight to hell.
State Rep. Belinda Harris, a 30-year member of Morse Mill Baptist Church who chairs the 27-member Democrats for Life Caucus in Jefferson City, said that it is important for elected officials to be completely pro-life. Whether the topic is abortion or embryonic stem cell research, defending life is defending life, she said.
“This is a moral issue,” Harris told The Pathway as her longtime pastor, Jim Johnston, quietly, but firmly expressed his support during interviews in the central Jefferson County brick church nestled in a suburban/country setting near the Big River. “This is something that is a part of your being. If you are a Christian or a church-going person, it doesn’t matter what (political) party you are, this is really kind of instilled in you. To go against it is a destroying factor to you as a person and as a Christian.
“If you truly feel this way, then to buck your party is not the problem. You don’t want to buck God. You are ultimately responsible for your actions when your time has come. To me, honoring God’s wishes is more important than honoring any political party.”
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“I feel like on the state level we are winning more support as Democrats for Life,” Harris said. … “After Roe v. Wade, the Democratic Party just kind of took that one side. I felt that was wrong. I’m even really strong on young girls that were raped or had incest to spare that child. The rape and incest is not the experience that’s going to be wiped away by killing this child.”
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Her goal is to defend even the tiniest embryo that contains a human being. The potential of curing a disease that is keeping someone in a wheelchair pales in comparison to the moral necessity of defending that embryonic soul, in her mind.
At least no one can ever say that Harris hid her true agenda. So none of us should be surprised by what Belinda Harris and Kate Meiners did today.
Women Will Sponsor Abortion Bill
08/27/2005
A group of 10 women state legislators – eight Republicans and two Democrats – have agreed to co-sponsor an abortion bill in the Missouri Legislature’s special session that begins Sept. 6.
The bill will deal with the primary provisions sought by Gov. Matt Blunt, who ordered the session. According to state Rep. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield and one of the lead sponsors, those provisions will include:
Requiring physicians who perform abortions to have clinical privileges at a hospital within 30 miles that provides obstetrical or gynecological care.
Allowing the parent or guardian of women under 18 to sue anyone who helps the minor get an abortion without the parent or guardian’s consent, as required in Missouri.
That provision is aimed at curbing the number of Missouri minors who obtain abortions in Illinois, which does not have a parental-consent requirement. Parents who commit incest will be barred from suing, Cunningham said.
The bill also is likely to include a requirement that minors seeking a judicial bypass to the parental-consent mandate must be accompanied by a “next friend” who is over 18, Cunningham said Saturday. That person cannot be someone who would benefit financially from the minor’s abortion decision, such as an employee of an abortion clinic.
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Paula Gianino, head of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region, said Saturday that if the women co-sponsors truly wanted to discourage abortion they would seek to resurrect the state’s family-planning program, which the Legislature killed several years ago.
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Cunningham identified the other co-sponsors of the anti-abortion bill as: state Reps. Belinda Harris, D-Hillsboro; Cynthia Davis, R-O’Fallon; Kate Meiners, D-Kansas City; Susan Phillips, R-Kansas City; Therese Sander, R-Moberly; Danie Moore, R-Fulton; Kathy Chinn, R-Clarence; Jodi Stefanick, R-Manchester; and Sally Faith, R-St. Charles.
Well, what’s wrong with a little compromise? Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land, at least so far, and those provisions don’t sound all that bad, do they? If any of this sounds like the voice of sweet reason, either you’re an anti yourself or you just haven’t learned to decipher their carefully crafted and coded language yet. This bill’s hard-line antiabortion sponsors understand a whole lot more than most of their constituents do about what these provisions really mean and what they’ll really do.
Requiring physicians who perform abortions to have clinical privileges at a hospital within 30 miles that provides obstetrical or gynecological care.
Well, what’s so bad about that? Won’t that help make sure that abortions are performed more safely, and only by qualified doctors? After all, what kind of an OB/GYN doesn’t have clinical privileges in at least one area hospital?
That would be the kind of OB/GYN that provides abortions, especially in an area (like the state of Missouri) where there are so few local providers. Sometimes a doctor has to travel to a clinic from another city, or even from another state. Abortion care is now so marginalized that “mainstream” OB/GYNs who regularly admit women to hospitals for hysterectomies, endometrial ablations, tubal ligations or deliveries hardly ever provide abortion care anymore, especially, again, in places like Missouri. And how does a doctor gain clinical privileges at a hospital in the first place? By a standard credentialing process and by regularly admitting a minimum qualifying number of patients, which becomes highly problematic for abortion-providing physicians in places where hospitals won’t permit abortions to be performed.
Abortion is such a safe procedure that emergency hospitalization for complications is an extremely rare event — so much so that if a doctor whose practice was confined to the provision of abortion care sent enough women to the hospital to qualify for admitting privileges, I wouldn’t let him/her spay my dog. But if a woman should need to be hospitalized for complications of an abortion, that would qualify as an emergency admission, and obviously a doctor wouldn’t need hospital privileges in order for her to be admitted for any treatment she needed.
That one innocent-sounding provision alone will go a long way toward doing away with access to abortion care in the entire state, since abortion providers in Missouri are already nearly as scarce as they are in Mississippi — and small wonder when the few existing Missouri providers are targeted by having their photographs posted on the Internet by rabid anti activists like Angela Michael, to whom we’ll return in a moment. And that brings us to the next booby trap.
Allowing the parent or guardian of women under 18 to sue anyone who helps the minor get an abortion without the parent or guardian’s consent, as required in Missouri. Parents who commit incest will be barred from suing.
That afterthought of an exemption in the last sentence is the only drop of Christian mercy you’ll find in this entire bill. If you clicked on the “Missouri” link above, you saw only one listing for a provider in that state; the others were for clinics in Colorado, Arkansas and Illinois. That alone tells you how hard it already is to get an abortion in Missouri. Many women there, and most teenagers, cross the Mississippi River instead to seek care at clinics such as the Hope Clinic for Women in Illinois, a state where legal restrictions on abortion are less severe.
Others flock across the river to Illinois as well, but with entirely different motives. As promised, meet Angela Michael – head of Small Victories Ministries, mother of 11 children, “pro-life” street activist, and bosom friend of Operation Save America/Operation Rescue‘s notorious Flip Benham.
Angela is an authority on the relationship between [Hope Clinic and St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, located directly across the street], having sidewalk-counseled outside [the] abortuary three or four times a week for seven years. Hope Clinic sits on land the hospital sold … to abortionist Hector Zevallos, who was on St Elizabeth’s staff when he built it, in 1974. In 1981, Zevallos hired hospital colleague Yogendra Shah to join him there as an abortionist. In 1982, Angela reports, Shah bought the business, Zevallos having lost his taste for it when he and wife Rosalie were held captive for eight days by a wildcat prolife group calling itself The Army of God.
(Well, I have mentioned before that there are fewer abortion providers now than there used to be . . .)
For years it has been Michael’s self-appointed mission to harass anyone who approaches Hope Clinic and to make life hell for everyone who’s dedicated and determined enough to work there.
Angela is always there, just outside the clinic. Taking names. Taking license numbers. Taking pictures and posting them on the net. Calling the police with wild accusations. Producing a radio show that airs in St. Louis seven times a week. And watching changes in Missouri’s abortion laws like the vulture she is. What do you think will happen now every time she sees a young woman get out of a car with Missouri plates? That’s the kind of thing Harris, Meiners and their Republican girlfriends are really counting on to “curb the number of Missouri minors who obtain abortions in Illinois.”
Minors seeking a judicial bypass to the parental-consent mandate must be accompanied by a “next friend” who is over 18. That person cannot be someone who would benefit financially from the minor’s abortion decision, such as an employee of an abortion clinic.
“Benefit financially”? Give me a crying break. Is there anyone, anywhere, of any political persuasion, who actually believes that there is a judge anywhere in the country – let alone in a state as antagonistic to abortion rights as Missouri — who would routinely grant bypasses solely as favors to abortion providers? Because unless you think that’s exactly what this provision is saying, it is clear that its sole purpose is to prevent minors from having any access to judicial bypass at all.
When Texas instituted parental notification (now consent) and judicial bypass in 1999, pregnant teenagers there were fortunate that a group of compassionate pro-choice attorneys created Jane’s Due Process as an advocacy organization. When a young woman under 18 is unable, for whatever reason, to obtain the consent of at least one parent, JDP eases her access to the judicial bypass process by giving her information about her rights and connecting her with an experienced pro bono attorney who will represent her and accompany her to court. JDP is nationally recognized as a model for such legal advocacy, and it’s a sin and a shame that it has so little competition for that honor.
Even adult women with financial resources of their own would be intimidated by the prospect of having to hire an attorney, go to court and share the most intimate details of their personal lives with a judge in order to be allowed to have an abortion. For the average scared-to-death teenager with no moral support or accurate information about to access the legal system in the first place, the judicial bypass option might as well not exist at all. In states without a legal advocacy group like JDP, most often the only available assistance for a pregnant teen seeking an abortion comes from the clinic itself – and antis like Harris and Meiners know it.
Belinda Harris and Kate Meiners: Democrats, Democrats for Life. This is what they support. This is who they are. This is what they are. Now somebody explain that litmus thingy to me one more time.
Here’s the real falsehood: the Vichy Democrats say that we should vote for “pro-life” Democrats because they’ll vote the Democratic line on non-abortion votes.
Problem is, it doesn’t work out that way. They’ll vote the pro-criminalization line on other issues, which is often indistinguishable from the Republican line. Take John Roberts, for example. He’s a disaster for progressives in dozens of different ways. And yet, Reid the traitor supports him wholeheartedly. Why? Because Roberts, like Reid, is pro-criminalization.
Reid wholeheartedly supports Roberts? I had not heard that and hope it is not true. Do you have a source for that information?
Reid’s been pushing for Roberts’ confirmation from day one. Numerous articles, even after information about his stances came out, have had quotes from him describing Roberts in nothing less than glowing terms.
Source : The Hill, 25 Dems could vote for Roberts
Time will tell.
Source:
The New Yorker, How a pro-gun, anti-abortion Nevadan leads the Senate’s Democrats.
And you can bet that Reid’s list of people he didn’t want included many pro-choice or, at the very least, not pro-criminalization names.
We’re also assured that so-called “pro-life” Democrats even can be relied upon to set aside their personal beliefs on votes related to reproductive rights for the sake of party unity. Maybe once in a while, when the moon is blue . . . but don’t count on it.
and I would also add the following:
We are always assured that a (D) majority leader will set the agenda, hence no legislation destructive to choice will make the agenda because … historically that’s been the case.
Anyone in the business of making predictions will tell you about the danger of over-reliance on the historical model. Historically, Dems have been unified on choice. Once the pro-life element creeps in, there is no guarantee that destructive legislation will not creep in as well.
I am extremely tired of reading:
“Because the majority Party sets the agenda. Period!”
Here’s the real falsehood: the Vichy Democrats say that we should vote for “pro-life” Democrats because they’ll vote the Democratic line on non-abortion votes.
They tell us that because they think we’re stupid and powerless. Which, with one thing and another, is rather telling, no?
keep voting to compel raped children to bear children of their own, it doesn’t matter to me how they vote on any other issues.
Nothing else they do can make up for that. It simply doesn’t matter.
As always, “conservative” beliefs are evidence of a skewed, injured, illogical worldview. They indicate a hate or fear of some perceived “enemy” group – in this case, liberated women – and a negative reaction against them. They’re rarely, if ever, found alone. Those that have one usually have a large number of others. (Progressives, in comparison, are generally all over the map about everything beyond basic human rights, and more than glad to argue our heads off.)
yes, every day i hear that i’m supposed to “swallow” my single-issue interests for the “good” of the party and be quiet because, at the national level, these people will vote for pelosi and reid who will control, and empower, a pro-choice agenda.
these pro-(fetal)life democrats from missouri vote their single issue over party every single time do they not? it seems clear to me that they do.
i say it’s best to follow their example. do not vote party ticket any longer, the party is being infiltrated by the republican agenda. examine each candidate and then skip the one’s like the above.
the way to address this problem in the democratic party is to unelect them all.
…if it embraces pro-slavery folks like these women. They might as well go after the KKK vote while they’re at it. After all, African Americans can swallow their “pet cause” too in the name of the greater good of electing any kind of Democrat.
how many of the women evacuauted from NOLA and surrounding areas are pregnant and — in their newly and nightmarishly altered circumstances — are now desperately seeking to have an abortion?
Right now, the TRAP laws in southern states are taking an even greater toll than usual.
That is why it is our job to vett these candidates. Not only reading their bio or propaganda they send in the mail. Find the schedule of speaking engagements they are apt to do and ask the tough questions and don’t back down one bit.
That is why it is our job to vett these candidates.
Perhaps someone can tell me how these women and Democrats for (some) Life differ from the religious right? How do they differ from Orrin Hatch or Rick Santorum (except that they don’t have as much power yet) How do they differ from Jerry Falwell?
they’re different because … because … they’ve got D‘s after their names! So you better vote for ’em! 😉
OK, I’ve had my fun, and you asked a serious question. DFL legislators often stick with other Dems except when the vote at hand deals with such “moral values” issues as birth control, abortion, stem cell research (which they call “human cloning”) and equal civil rights for gays and lesbians.
On those issues, they’ll vote with the Rapture Right bloc every time. As Belinda Harris says: “To me, honoring God’s wishes is more important than honoring any political party.”
She comes across as what she is — a religiously motivated extremist — but she’s really quite typical in her beliefs, lacking only the PR skills that enable other DFL types to frame their positions in more publicly acceptable terms.
Belinda Harris says that God wants her “to defend even the tiniest embryo that contains a human being,” while releases from the DFL press office in DC say that “with bold new ideas, sound research and policy arguments, the 95-10 Initiative contains proven policy suggestions to dramatically reduce the number of abortions in America.”
But they all vote the same way.
a thorough and informative post moiv! this is infuriating on so many levels. the whittling away of our reproductive rights…. the democrats who not only acquiesce, but enthusiastically participate in that dimunition of our fundamental rights…. the abusive harassment by people like angela michaels who have nothing better to do than spy on women seeking healthcare… the irresponsibility of voluntarily having 11 children in this overpopulated world!… the flawed logic of those party hacks that insist an anti-rights DINO is better than no democrat at all…
thank goodness for people like you and bayprairie and true blue, who are keeping me informed about what’s going on. it may not be good on my blood pressure, but it’s important to have this knowledge, in order to fight back.
damn! i have this urge to follow these democrats for death, day in and day out, documenting where they go, what they buy, who they talk to, what they drive and posting their personal information on the internets.
angela michaels offers this contact info on her web page:
smallvictories@juno.com (email),
618-654-5800 (phone)
or write them: Small Victories P.O. Box 143 Highland, IL 62249.
Angela Michael is such an attention freak that she would just eat that up, and then probably publish the entire email exchange on her website, the same way her mentor Flip Benham does.
From the Columbia Daily Tribune.
Good luck with that application, doctor. Something tells me you’re gonna need it.