All Up In Our Uteruses: Rick Santorum Says No To Prenatal Testing, Virginia Says Yes To Vaginal Probes

Please believe me, I never imagined that anyone would ever have to write a post explaining why prenatal testing is important and necessary, but here we are, having to defend it after Republican presidential nominee Rick Santorum made clear that if he won the highest office in the land, he’d make it so insurance companies and Medicaid didn’t pay for them.

During a campaign stop and on the Sunday morning program, Face the Nation, Santorum said President Obama’s healthcare law requiring health insurance companies to cover amniocentesis encourages abortions of fetuses with disabilities. Oh, and Rick Santorum also thinks President Obama hates disabled babies because he supports partial-birth abortion, a procedure Santorum insists is used “almost exclusively to kill children late in pregnancy when they’ve been found out to be disabled.”

People have the right to have prenatal testing done, Santorum added, “but to have the government force people to provide it free, to me, is a bit loaded.”

So we’re absolutely dead ass clear: a man who wants to be president of the United States thinks that pregnant women—specifically those too poor to afford health insurance or out-of-pocket prenatal care on their own—should either scrape up more than $1,000 for amniocentesis or just, like, go without tests that could give them a head’s up on the reality that their children will be severely disabled and live in pain for their whole lives while their parents go bankrupt paying for healthcare—the same healthcare Rick Santorum and his conservative Republican ilk would patently refuse to allocate government funds to help those children and the parents who will have a hard time affording their care.

Does anybody see the irony here? Anybody?

Nevermind that, contrary to what’s insisted by Santorum—a former senator who, as far as I know, doesn’t have a medical degree or experience as an OB-GYN or an effing uterus—amniocentesis is used for more than determining whether a fetus has birth defects, chromosome abnormalities and metabolic disorders. A conversation with a qualified medical professional, or, I don’t know, a simple Google search, could have easily informed Santorum that amniocentesis also is used to help doctors figure out if a baby’s lungs are strong enough to allow the child to breathe normally after birth. Which is kinda some useful information to have if you’re in danger of premature birth—a condition that greatly affects black women, extremely young moms-to-be and pregnancies that occur after age 35.

Mind you, Santorum’s pronouncement capped off a week of massive assaults against women’s bodies, critical healthcare we need for our lady parts, the legal procedure we all know as abortion (of course) and, good grief, even birth control. In Virginia, the Republican-controlled House passed legislation that would require women seeking first-trimester abortion to undergo a vaginal ultrasound. Not for any medical reason, mind you. The vaginal ultrasound would be given to women, even if they don’t want it, just so that women can be forced to look at the captured image of the fetus before deciding to undergo a legal medical procedure that would end their pregnancy. Which, as our friends over at Jezebel pointed out is outrageous because “by most definitions, forcing a woman to have something put insider her vagina against her will and for no reason is, uh, rape.”

That vote came just days after the same legislators passed a so-called “personhood” bill that would give unborn fetuses—including embryos—the same rights available to “other persons” in the state—a move opponents say could restrict women’s access to abortions and some forms of contraception, like those that prevent implantation of fertilized eggs.

And that vote came just as federal legislators held a congressional hearing on the birth control mandate in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act—a hearing that involved exactly zero people who have a uterus. Seriously. Here’s a picture of the folk who were called to testify. All of them have penises. But there they are, a bunch of men representing religious institutions, standing in front of Congress, hollering and screaming about how being “forced” to give women birth control pills at religious-run institutions will absolutely stop the Earth’s rotational spin.

And I don’t know about y’all, but I’m STILL hot about that Susan G. Komen madness that saw one of the most powerful breast cancer charities pull its funding from Planned Parenthood coffers, effectively giving a middle finger to poor and minority women who turn to Planned Parenthood for low-cost mammograms and breast healthcare when they can’t get it from anywhere else.

Sisters, seriously: We all have to wake the hell up. It’s easy for us to duck our heads down, go on about our busy days and our overwhelmed lives and pretend like these measures don’t matter. But if this continues, the rights afforded us to get quality, affordable healthcare for our bodies and, with the help of our physicians, choose what we think is right for our uteruses and our lives, will be completely erased by a bunch of insane, Bible-thumping conservatives who don’t give a rat’s patootie about us or the children they would have us birth but refuse to help us care for, or any of our rights as women.

As my friend Heather so eloquently stated:

Slowly but steadily, our rights are being taken and in my opinion what we will end up with are “alternatives” to legal venues and the unnecessary deaths of beautiful women. Please, I am not advocating abortion, just the fact that no matter how we raise our little girls, we can’t forsee their future, and Heaven forbid there is a day where they lay on metal table and become rape victims of the government.

I couldn’t agree with Heather more. This is about the rights of millions of women who want to have control their own lives and bodies and plan their own parenthood without having to endure the moral indignation of a bunch of largely white men who refuse to acknowledge that rejecting birth control coverage, forcing women to become mothers when they can neither afford children nor want to be parents, and the piecemeal whittling away of coverage for basic women’s healthcare is unfair, immoral, extremely expensive to not only women personally but society in general and, above all else, downright outrageous.

How do we fight this? By making sure that lunatics like Rick Santorum and anyone else who thinks they have the right to pass legislation and policies concerning your uterus, prenatal testing or anything that has anything to do with your personal, private medical choices, does not get into office. Create and sign petitions. Write blog posts. Raise your voice. Call your local congressman (and congresswoman!). Donate to the political action committees of organizations like MomsRising.org and Planned Parenthood. Hell, VOTE. And join up with organizations that are working hard to make sure that our right to vote is protected, too. Or else, we’re going to keep seeing our rights as women raped—over and over and over again.

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