Monday, July 4, 2016

An Open Letter to Christine Flowers

Regarding: "Swallowing My Pride and Standing Up for Life and Voting for Trump"

You claim you, “cannot put Hillary Clinton in a position to shape the Supreme Court,” and offered your apologia by essentially admitting that you’re unable to refrain from bigotry, and unable to accept that women have as much right to their body as the NRA has to its guns.

You lament that everything piled up for you; same sex marriage, individuals becoming what sex they come to accept they are, and the bearded lady peeing next to you in the “Ladies’ Room.”

The straw that broke your backtrack on voting for Donald Trump was the Supreme Court overturning Texas’s HB2, “Close the Clinics” abortion law. HB2 was a blatant attempt to shutdown access to abortion and it succeeded. In the two years the law has been in effect, abortion clinics have gone from 41 to some 18 operating clinics. If SCOTUS had let the law stand, it is likely that only 9 or even fewer clinics would be available to Texas’s roughly 5 million reproductive age women.


 HB2 has resulted in women seeking the procedure to wait longer, pay more, leave their county (well over a third of women live in counties without abortion clinics) and drive long distances to over crowded clinics. This after having to navigate Texas’s already onerous requirements to be granted “permission” for an abortion. These requirements include state-directed “counseling,” an ultrasound, and description of the fetus by the provider, among other things.

Second-trimester abortions have become more common because of the need to meet these requirements and to wait for an appointment. And according to Texas law, an abortion may be performed at or after 20 weeks post-fertilization only if the woman’s life is endangered, her physical health is severely compromised or the pregnancy is “medically futile.”

All of these procedural impediments, which you term, “inconveniences,” are not only a denial of women’s rights under the Constitution, they are an attack on the authority of the Supreme Court in granting these rights to women under Roe vs Wade.

You, Ms Flowers, are clearly more interested in espousing your anti-abortion agenda than protecting the integrity of our constitutional system. I can forgive you for that — abortion is antithetical to your faith. What I can not forgive you is using your opposition to abortion as a reason to vote for a man whose many grievous faults include his advocacy of torture and extrajudicial killing, his demeaning of and intolerance for ethnic and religious minorities, and a misogyny so ingrained that he spontaneously refers to women in the most degrading terms. Putting such a man in a position to “shape the Supreme Court,” let alone lead this great nation, is unthinkable.

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