The Guttmacher Institute has calculated the impact of H.R.1 on U.S. international family planning and reproductive health assistance. The H.R.1 is the Republican-controlled House of Representative bill to fund the government to the end of the fiscal year 2011.
It's a good thing that the Senate is not yet under Republican control, because the bill proposes to cut 200 million dollars from international family planning. That is about one third of the total currently allocated.
The Guttmacher numbers suggest that if the Republicans in the House had their way about 10,000 more women would die while giving birth and about 1,600,000 additional abortions would be performed, 1,200,000 of them unsafe.
The specific estimates can probably be debated. But what cannot be debated is the fact that the Republican focus on banning abortions always translates into more suffering for the women, and especially for those women who cannot vote in the United States. Even the women in the United States should not have access to reproductive medical care if that might mean access to abortions. We have learned that from the Planned Parenthood debacle.
What's so weird about all this is that the Republicans didn't run on forced birth arguments in the last elections. Those are what we are getting, however, on all levels of government. The Republicans don't seem at all concerned about jobs, and the only kind of labor that concerns them is the kind associated with giving birth.
And yes, this post relates to my previous one.
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Added later: Read Shakespeare's Sister on more domestic examples.