Reid starts election-year push on ‘Prevention First Act’

March 16, 2006

Yesterday, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) tried to add the Prevention First Act (S. 20) as an amendment to the federal budget resolution. Atrios noted that it’s “the olive branch thingy we’re always supposed to be doing to appeal to the mythical ‘don’t like abortion but aren’t anti-sex’ voting bloc,” and “the press will ignore it.” Maybe so, but it’s worth talking about anyway.

Reid, who opposes abortion rights, is co-sponsoring the bill with Sen. Hillary Clinton, and has a straightforward goal: reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and the resulting abortions by taking prevention seriously. More specifically, the measure would increase funding for the National Family Planning Program, pass the Equity in Prescription Insurance and Contraceptive Coverage, improve awareness and understanding of emergency contraception, and improve teen pregnancy prevention programs. NARAL, hardly Reid’s natural ally on choice-related issues, embraced the measure shortly after it was unveiled last year.

How have Republicans and conservatives reacted? Not very well. The Prevention First Act has 23 co-sponsors — all Dems. The Family Research Council, a leading religious-right policy group, called Reid’s bill “unacceptable.” Tony Perkins, FRC’s president, said he’d support reducing unwanted pregnancies, so long as it doesn’t include contraceptives, family-planning programs, or comprehensive education on sexual health. (He apparently studied at the George W. Bush School of Compromise.) Just this week, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family said there is no “middle ground” on abortion.

Noting the landscape, Atrios said:

The Republicans will reject it because in case anyone hasn’t noticed they’re also anti-contraception and radically anti-“emergency contraception” and aren’t actually interested in reducing unwanted pregnancies.

That’s true, but that’s part of why I think efforts like the Prevention First Act are political winners for the Dems. Democracy Corps did a poll last year and found that an overwhelming 74% of white Catholics would be more likely to vote for a Dem candidate if he or she “believes in a woman’s right to choose but believes all sides should come together around common goal of preventing and reducing # of abortions, with more sex ed, including abstinence, access to contraception and more adoption.”

At the end of the day, there’s still only one side of the political divide offering serious policy proposals to reduce abortions in this country — and it’s not the Republicans. Something for “values voters” to consider.

It also makes sense to pass these kinds of bills because an unwanted pregnancy creates all sorts of emotional and physical hardship on the pregnant woman and her family and partner. There is no reason to think that it is a bad idea to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and as a result the number of abortions.

I am vehemently pro-choice and leave the choice on whether to carry a pregnancy to term entirely up to the woman who may be pregnant. It’s not my or the government’s business.

But abortion is still a medical procedure with risks to the woman who undergoes one. The idea that we shouldn’t try to prevent most abortions is like saying that we shouldn’t try to ensure that people lose weight, drop their colesterol and exercise in order to reduce the number of open-heart surgeries.

The reason why we are often called pro-abortion instead of pro-choice is the dismissal from Atrios and Pandagon and other progressives of the views of so many people who want to reduce abotions. These “progressives” see these bills as impure and accuse their sponsors and promotors of thinking abortion is “icky,” an insulting and mean-spirited attack. It’s not about icky, but reducing the pain and heartache of an unwanted pregnancy and the possibility of a medical procedure.

  • The reason why we are often called pro-abortion instead of pro-choice is the dismissal from Atrios and Pandagon and other progressives of the views of so many people who want to reduce abotions. These “progressives” see these bills as impure and accuse their sponsors and promotors of thinking abortion is “icky,” an insulting and mean-spirited attack. It’s not about icky, but reducing the pain and heartache of an unwanted pregnancy and the possibility of a medical procedure.

    I have to say, I think this is a bullshit anti-choice talking point. I don’t know, nor have I read anyone who thinks that this kind of bill is a bad idea. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who’s pro-choice and opposed to more contraception, better sex education, etc. NOBODY wants more abortions. NOBODY.

    What people are opposed to is the move where you piss all over your pro-choice base by rhetorical triangulation with the “criminalize abortions” forced-breeding lobby and hope that helps you out somehow, WHILE introducing this sort of bill. All that triangulation does is reinforce the talking points of the forced-breeding lobby, and will never satisfy them, as we can see from the response to this bill by the forced-breeding lobby.

    If, by contrast, you say that your goal is preventing unwanted pregnancies, and that will of course reduce the abortion rate, which we understand that everyone would like to see, while introducing this bill, that’s just fine.

    I note in passing that almost every abortion performed in the United States has a lower health risk to the woman on whom it is performed that carrying the pregnancy to term.

  • Tony Perkins, FRC’s president, said he’d support reducing unwanted pregnancies, so long as it doesn’t include contraceptives, family-planning programs, or comprehensive education on sexual health.

    Once again, 100 years ago, Bertrand Russell hit it right straight on the head, and this could have been written yesterday:

    We sometimes hear talk to the effect that Christianity
    improved the status of women. This is one of the grossest
    perversions of history that it is possible to make. Women
    cannot enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is
    considered of the utmost importance that they should not
    infringe a very rigid moral code. The teaching of the church
    has been, and still is, that virginity is best, but that for
    those who find this impossible marriage is permissible. By
    making marriage indissoluble, and by stamping out all
    knowledge of the ars amandi, the church did what it could to
    secure that the only form of sex which it permitted should
    involve very little pleasure and a great deal of pain. The
    opposition to birth control has, in fact, the same motive:
    if a woman has a child a year until she dies worn out, it is
    not to be supposed that she will derive much pleasure from
    her married life; therefore birth control must be
    discouraged.

  • Forced Breeding. I like that paperwight!

    That’s exactly the point with the Religious Right and their minions in the GOP. They believe that Sex should only occur between heterosexual married couples and only for the purpose of procreation. Everyone else should abstain.

    Contraceptives, according to them, breed promiscuity. For the Right, the only way to prevent “unwanted” pregnancies and pre-marital Sex is through their two main tactics – Fear and Ignorance.

    Once they have driven the United States back to the Dark Ages, they will have achieved their goal.

  • Nar:

    I’m with Paperwight on this one. That’s an anti-choice talking point that is absolutely 100% wrong. Neither Atrios nor Pandagon opposes the idea of reducing the number of abortions. Nor am I familiar with any other progressive site or commentator out there that opposes reducing the number of abortions. In fact, I think it was Kos or myDD that linked to this legislation and brought it to my attention oh so long ago. I called both my (fortunately Democratic) Senators to ask them to cosponsor.

  • It isn’t the unplanned and aborted pregnancies that are the enemy – it’s sex in the first place. These people really, really hate sex/repoduction. Think about it. All the gay issues they screech about, abortion, sex ed, creationism v. evolution – all have sex/reproduction components and all are used to rally the base and scare the Christianists.

  • Gary Bauer. Fred Phelps. Jim Dobson. Pat Robertson.
    Is there really any doubt these people spent all of their teenage and college weekend nights home alone and utterly sexless? They hate sex, because it eluded them, made a mockery of them, humiliated them. They hate people who have sex. They hate women who get to decide to not have sex with the likes of them. They hate that others got/get to enjoy sexuality, while they didn’t/don’t.

    I would almost pity them had they not weaseled their ways into positions where they can be dangerous.

    no, i guess i really wouldn’t.

  • You nailed it, ET. They don’t care about consquences, or anything else in the real world. They only care about what they imagine about other people having sex. It’s a power trip for them. They are thugs and don’t deserve honest debate or even respect.

    The least-churched areas of the world have the least problems with their (real) sex lives. There’s a message there, but our Puritanical culture doesn’t want to hear it.

    As the main character in “Sons and Lovers” says, they constantly breathe religion out through their nose and see the world in its mist. They’re deluded, mostly demented, and often perverted.

    If it were they alone who suffered, I’d say let it be; they get what their ignorance and superstition deserve. Trouble is they make life miserable for those who, otherwise, could really be enjoying life.

  • Honestly, wouldn’t you think a great nation would have more pressing things with which to concern itself than who is screwing whom???

  • NAR says: “The reason why we are often called pro-abortion instead of pro-choice is the dismissal from Atrios and Pandagon and other progressives of the views of so many people who want to reduce abotions.”

    No. The reason we’re called “pro-abortion” is that pro-lifers frame us that way. The reason they frame us that way is that they know the moderate middle is uneasy about abortion – they’re pro-choice, but anti-abortion, and they don’t want to have to talk or think about it any more than necessary (this is the same strain of “people who talk about X are making it political, and we’re uneasy about X, and we don’t like being manipulated” that unfairly doomed the Kerry/Edwards “Dick Cheney’s daughter is a lesbian” argument).

    NAR, like many other well-meaning people who accept conservative spin at face value, has it exactly backwards. Pro-choice progressives want *less* abortion, and more sex ed/birth control. People who tell you otherwise are repeating Republican lies.

    It is conservatives – pro-lifers – religious reactionary activists – who don’t care about the number of abortions. In a perfect world, there’d be none, they say, but it’s more important to make it illegal than to make it happen less, because it is a moral value, and you cannot compromise on a moral value. They would rather have abortion illegal, a thriving black market in abortion, women bleeding to death, and more abortions than accept abortion as legal and more better sex education and birth control. We know they don’t like sex. We know they don’t like independent women. We know they don’t like pop culture.

    The next and necessary step is for us to know that they are not trying to reduce abortion, and to call them on it. That’s what I love about the Reid/Clinton bill: it’s calling BULLSHIT! on the Republican preference for making abortion illegal instead of less common.

  • I don’t understand why women don’t take the lead here and simply deny sex to their boyfriends or husbands. If the men are going to deny them access to contraceptives and abortion, then deny the men access to their most primal need: sex. Also, get some female pharmacists to refuse to fill Levitra prescriptions on moral grounds. Women ultimately have the upper hand in this, so why aren’t they taking it?

  • Isn’t great how all those pro-choice republicans and DINO’s, who NARAL have supported over the years, are co-sponsors of this Act? Whoops, my mistake, they’re not. Not a single one.

  • When my wife and I were first married and poor, we decided early on not to have kids. Either the state or county government paid for my vasectomy, I can’t remember. (Now, we are well off.)

    Subsidize birth control and contraceptions. It works, saves money, and people want it.

    I’m not just a liberal in theory, I actually believe in this crap.

  • I *love* the Prevention First Act, because it gets to the heart of why America eventually might reject and marginalize the “Christian” ayatollahs: they don’t care about anyone’s health or well-being, but solely and exclusively about whether or not you’re following their fundie rules.

    For them (and excuse me while I channel the Rude Pundit here) it is ALWAYS and ONLY about fucking. And a country with our core anti-authoritarian, gov’mit-off’n-m’back streak should ultimately consider that view with utter revulsion.

    The Republican leadership, by the way, knows this. They’re terrified of this debate. Unfortunately they can probably keep the PFA bottled up in committee for as long as they have the majority. However they vote on it, they lose: to the vast moderate middle and those further left, a nay vote sends the message that they, too, want to control the sexual behavior and choices of Americans. To the Christofascists on the right, a yea vote signifies that the Republican Senator is really one of the godless minions, an enabler of the devil.

    It’s certainly not about what the bill might actually do. (Is it ever?) The PFA is pretty much certain to reduce unwanted pregnancies, and thus to reduce abortions. But these guys don’t care about abortions, their protestations to the contrary. They care about fucking. The goal is to reduce fucking; if a few less potential humans are killed as a result, that’s great too, but they’re not really much concerned.

    This is the same reason these colossal scumbags are trying to sit on the HPV vaccine. What’s a few thousand preventable deaths per year, so long as it’s just slutty sinners who die?

  • dajafi,

    obscenities aside, I totally agree. It is all about sex and the need to control it for these theocons.

  • I generally try to avoid the obscenities… but something about those people just makes me feel like the pottymouth is called for. I’d argue that the real obscenity is letting women suffer and die needlessly; it’s actually kind of like playing God, which I believe their doctrine doesn’t look kindly upon.

  • These clowns are not now, nor have they ever been, anti-abortion. They are anti-sex. This is clearly coming out now, and I’m glad Reid is forcing their, um, hand. They’re moralists. Not content with owning your womb, they want to own your penis too.

    The religious whackos are out of the mainstream. I’m glad to see them immanetizing the political eschaton: bring out the battle between insane madmen who insist that jerking off is an immediate one-way ticket to hell, and let’s have them battle with the sane majority for political supremacy. I suspect the sane will prevail.

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