Hey, look! More depressing news coming out of my home state!

Less than three months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ban on a controversial late-term abortion procedure, a Cincinnati Republican has reintroduced legislation to outlaw all abortions in Ohio. Rep. Tom Brinkman Jr. hopes his bill will become the vehicle for overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which legalized abortion.

I didn’t know much about this guy prior to these events, as he’s not my representative– he covers the eastern segments of Cincinnati, such as Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout, and Mt. Washington. However, a quick skim of his campaign website makes a strong case in my mind for him being an asshole.

This is, of course, not the first time he’s tried this; in 2005, another bill banning all abortion in Ohio was introduced by the same legislator. Luckily, it didn’t pass; unfortunately, another anti-abortion bill introduced around the same time did, and was signed into law by the outgoing Republican governor only a few weeks before our current Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, took office. As a result, “it is the public policy of the state of Ohio to prefer childbirth over abortion to the extent that is constitutionally permissible”, and “None of the funds appropriated to administer [health assistance for poor Ohioans] shall be used to counsel or refer for abortion, except in the case of a medical emergency” (HB 239, as sent to the governor and signed into law). In effect, there’s discrimination against allowing poor women in Ohio to have access to a full range of reproductive choices, including abortion, since the procedure is often expensive and can’t be subsidized by any governmental funds below the federal level in Ohio.

Reading the comments on a Cincinnati Enquirer blog post on the subject made me feel vaguely sick. Relatively safe in Oregon, which just passed laws granting domestic partnerships and subsidizes reproductive health care for patients under a certain income level, it’s always a shock when I take a quick glance at what average people in Ohio are saying. There’s so much work to be done in educating people that abortion rights are deeply necessary to offering women free choice in their reproductive health, and with more and more of the people in my generation fleeing the midwest, how are we ever going to manage it?

Time to go write to my state representatives. You should write to yours, too.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 10:33 am and is filed under Feminism, Conservatives, Politics, Reproductive Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.