Editorial: How the "family values Legislature" is destroying families

Extremist demagoguery is always counterproductive:

The simplest and best way to reduce abortions is to avoid unwanted pregnancies. The best way to avoid an unwanted pregnancy is through sound family planning, access to contraceptives and good affordable health care for women. It is not complicated and shouldn’t be controversial.

But it is, largely because one of the best providers of these services and information to help women avoid unwanted pregnancies happens to be an organization that also offers legal abortion services to women – Planned Parenthood.

If this was merely an anti-abortion debate, Republicans would be tripping over themselves creating clinics that offered affordable health care for women, supplied various contraceptive methods, and rendered first-class prenatal and neonatal treatment to ensure healthy babies. The fact they don't speaks volumes about their true motivations, which is to perpetuate an outdated patriarchy in which women are merely vessels for procreation, and should be totally reliant on a husband to provide the things she needs. If a third party (the government) were to provide these things, the importance of that husband fades, and with him the entire social construct fades. And that construct is so important to these men that putting lives at risk is a small price to pay to strengthen their primacy:

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