Last week the House passed H.R. 36, which bans abortions after 20 weeks, and soon the Senate will take it up. Remember that almost all abortions happen before the 21st week, which means that this ban won't save very many fetuses at all. And though the bill makes exceptions for rape, incest, and the life (though not health) of the mother, the former two exceptions only apply if the rape or incest has been reported to law enforcement before the abortion, and you can easily see why that might not happen. In short, it's bad policy, not least because it won't reduce abortions. If we want to reduce abortions -- and we do -- we should stop being such hardasses about birth control, and we should stop lionizing sex in our media as if it's the Holy Grail of All Experience. And that means making birth control as available as the Obama Administration has tried to do, as well as shaming overly sexualized media programming, supporting a la carte cable packaging and net neutrality, and opposing media consolidation. In the meantime, CREDO helps you tell the Senate to reject the 20-week abortion ban.
In a related note, the Washington, D.C. City Council has lately passed a bill called the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Act, which prevents employers from firing workers for using birth control, getting an abortion, or becoming pregnant without being married -- or even having someone in your family who has done these things, all of which are legal. And yet Congress -- which somehow has the ability to essentially nullify laws passed by the D.C. City Council -- has trained its sights on this law, and would like to kill it. House Republicans say the law "unconstitutionally" "violates" the "religious freedom" of employers -- why should they be forced to keep employees who'd do what they would never do? they ask. More to the point is why an employer should care, as long as the employee does a good job. And for the umpteenth time, employers do not have a right to run roughshod over other people's rights! So People for the American Way helps you tell the House of Representatives to keep its hands off Washington, D.C.'s attempts to protect workers from discrimination.
Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell California Gov. Jerry Brown to ban fracking in that state and crack down on oil corporations' abuse of the water supply. Why? Because the state has done bupkus to stop oil corporations from soaking up California's water (they use as much as the cities of San Francisco and San Diego combined every year), even as the Governor has mandated reduced water consumption by citizens, and also because we know fracking contaminates drinking water, and as you may have heard, drinking water ain't something California's got a lot of at the present moment. It's gotten so bad there that Chevron has been caught actually selling wastewater to farmers so they can irrigate their crops. And California doesn't test such water very vigorously, even though independent scientists have found carcinogens in it. At the risk of piling on, oil corporations have been dumping their sludge into unlined pits in the Central Valley, where a lot of California's agriculture just so happens to sit. So at least one household ain't eating any California strawberries this year!
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