#clinic protesters

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Alabama House Holds Hearings on Trio of Anti-Choice Bills

An Alabama house committee held hearings Wednesday on anti-choice bills that would restrict access to reproductive health care, with one proposal threatening to outlaw abortion before many women know they’re pregnant. Susan Watson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, told lawmakers during the House Health Committee hearings that the bills are “bad for Alabama,” and that if they become law, the state will be on the hook for the high cost of litigation if they face legal challenges. Representatives from the Alabama Citizens for Life and Alabama Pro-Life Coalition as well as other anti-choice activists testified in favor of the bills.

Read more here. 

Follow my reporting for rhrealitycheck.

Photo: The Alabama State Capitol building. 

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Undercover Audio: Intimidation Tactics of Texas Anti-Abortion Groups

NARAL Pro-Choice Texas and Progress Texas released a video today containing audio from “Keeping Abortion Facilities Closed,” a training hosted by Texas anti-abortion groups at the State Capitol on August 4, 2014. The video reveals the alarming methods anti-abortion activists currently employ to physically intimidate women from accessing safe and legal abortion care. The disturbing tactics outlined by the four speakers in the video include: identifying and monitoring patients, providers and clinic staff, lining sidewalks outside clinics to dissuade patients from entering clinics, tracking and cataloguing the physical descriptions and car license plates of patients, and searching tax records to find locations of new abortion providers.

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Pro-Choice Supporters Take a Play From Pro-Life Wins

What Massachusetts' pro-choice legislators are doing something that, for decades, the pro-life movement has been really good at: using Supreme Court rulings as a playbook for what subsequent laws can, and can't, be pursued.

The Supreme Court tends to rule more on abortion restrictions than it does on laws protecting abortion, possibly because more of the latter types of laws exist. And when it does, there's usually a quick move by pro-life groups to figure out — even when one of their restrictions falls — what that means for the laws that they can pursue next.

Read more here. 

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The video shows paternalism at its best, so to speak. Invoking his benevolent authority as a father, the man huddles with his children as if in a bunker to prepare them for a lifelong war. “That woman over there” is the enemy, whose personhood is entirely separate from, and inferior to, that of any pregnancy she may have. “That woman over there” is advocating sin (which the toddler probably doesn’t understand the meaning of yet) because life begins at conception (definitely doesn’t get that one) and wants to kill babies (this much she mightbegin to grasp).

It’s a reminder of how infantile the anti-choice rhetoric can be. If there were a Right to Life Style Guide, it would say, “Whether referring to infants, fetuses, or embryos, always use the term ‘precious little babies.’”Fetus dollsturn playtime into something more sinister. Sex is a scary abstraction,worthy of punishmentmuch worse than a time-out.

Read more of this commentary from Emily Crockett at rhrealitycheck here.