"It Just Overwhelmed Me"
by digby
Rep. Jackie Speier listened to debate on the House floor on Thursday evening as a Republican Rep. Chris Smith read a long, detailed description of an abortion and a "mangled image of a dead, tiny baby." Finally, Speier stood up and told her colleagues she had undergone an abortion in the early 1990s following a complication nearly four months into her pregnancy. "As the night wore on, the vitriol and grotesque commentary got worse and worse," Speier, a second-term Democrat from California, told HuffPost. "I sat there thinking, none of these men on the other side have even come close to experiencing this, and yet they can pontificate about what it's like. It just overwhelmed me."
Speier underwent an abortion in her early 40s, while she was serving in the California State Assembly. The procedure used to terminate the pregnancy was the same type that Smith's book described. As she listened, Speier said she became more emotional and made the decision to speak out.
"This was a wanted pregnancy, it was the second miscarriage I had had," she told HuffPost. "What they express doesn't come close to the experience that a woman goes through when she is losing a baby or when a pregnancy is terminated. It's a painful, gut-wrenching loss."
She said she had spoken publicly about her experience with abortion only once before, while debating late-term abortion in the California state legislature.
After she told her story, Speier said many colleagues -- both male and female -- offered their support, some saying she put tears in their eyes. One Republican told her the amendment was inappropriate, she said, while Smith, whose remarks caused her to speak up, said nothing.
Representative Speier shouldn't have to bare her personal life to the whole country. But she did because cynical, paternalistic Congressmen like Smith and Mike Pence thinks she is a child, a cruel child, who like all women cannot be trusted to make her own decisions. They have no clue about these experiences and no respect for the agency and autonomy of those who have to deal with them. (The women who support these patriarchal nincompoops are just as disrespectful.) It is a rare woman who has an abortion without understanding the seriousness of it and no one but she can rightly make the decision.
The House passed this punitive, partisan "defund the left" law banning funding for Planned Parenthood earlier today. It was almost a party line vote, but a larger percentage of Democrats crossed over to vote with Republicans than the other way around, which says something considering the GOP's large majority.
This is an ACORN gambit, of course. I just saw some forced pregnancy robot on Matthews pimping those Lila Rose videos as if they came down from Mt Sinai. Sadly, Matthews didn't know what she was talking about, so he just let it go when she said that Planned Parenthood is working with pimps to put underage prostitutes back out on the streets after their abortions. Steve King (R-mental damage) on Candy Crowley was even worse, going on about the "filthy, disgusting Planned Parenthood offices." Crickets from Crowley.
It would be really neat if our pro-choice President could issue a veto threat right about now so that we can shut down this assault before it gets to the Senate. This is just sickening.
Update: Via Mike Stark, another cruel and stupid little girl who can't be allowed to make her own decisions:
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