Va. Bill Would Force Procedure on Those Seeking Abortions

Sen. Jill Vogel: Bullshit!

While our Republican brothers and sisters are raising holy hell over the Obama Administration's relatively weak-kneed health care bill that they say illegally requires people to have health insurance, the Virginia General Assembly is going one better. The Senate has passed a bill (pretty much along party lines) that will require any woman wanting an abortion to have an ultrasound, a medical procedure that lawyers are assigning to medical patients.

If this is not rank hypocrisy, it doesn't exist. Here you have a group of (almost all) men determining a procedure that physicians say isn't usually necessary and the women seeking the abortion are left to pay for it. Talk about unfunded mandates. This is a pure and simp a way to discourage women from having abortions, a right granted by the constitution, according to the Supremes.

Repubs have been going backdoor on this problem, state by state to the degree that abortion--a fully legal medical procedure--is not available in more than 80 percent of the localities in the United States. The newest offensive is against birth control itself, a bridge too far at the moment, but one that could be crossed in the near future if these people remain as persistent and unable to compromise as they have been even on the simplest of ideas.

The least these sorry bastards could do is be honest about their intent. Sen. Jill Vogel of Fauquir County (and yes, a woman) was quoted as saying, "It absolutely does not infringe on her right to have an abortion. All it says is that you'll have an ultrasound. It doesn't compel you to see the results." That's just bullshit. And she knows it. So does everybody who voted for the bill.