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IPFS News Link • Healthcare

The Politics of Women's Health Care

• http://www.commondreams.org, by Renee Parsons
 

After months of Republican presidential candidates embarrassing themselves and the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt with religious zealotry dominating the primary season, the relentless assault on a woman's health care choices can be expected to continue as it distracts American voters from an authentic debate on other important issues that dominate American life today.

More than just a divinely-inspired reverence for life, the coordinated war on women has whipped the ideologically-pure Republican base to a fine froth that has added a gender gap to the national campaign and alienated registered Independent female voters, 48 percent of whom are now siding with the Democrats.

At the center of the anti-choice movement is a testosterone-driven opposition, the majority of whom will never find themselves pregnant yet believe they are imbued with the right to impose their religious beliefs on a woman's most intimate life decision and on a woman who does not share their views.

Social conservatives have conveniently lost sight of the fact that Roe v. Wade was based on the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment 'due process' clause guaranteeing each individual a right to privacy, free from unwarranted government intrusion and that Constitutional protection for the use of contraceptives was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1965.


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