National Youth Rights Association

How The "U-Word" Exposes the Anti-Choice Movement

It's mostly teasing Republican squeamishness, with a hint of them hiding their squeamish behind concerns for teh chillenz.

Excerpts:

But the excuse was real life concern trolling, in the guise of claiming “uterus” was a dirty word, with a side helping of “think about the children!”

Among the "children" being invoked as a shield to protect anti-choice legislators from confronting their misogyny and hypocrisy were the congressional pages. I personally found this to be interesting, because pages are teenage kids. And teenagers are especially being targeted by anti-choicers, with parental notification laws and attempts to block sex education and contraception access. In other words, conservatives believe that a girl of 15, 16 or 17 is too young to hear the word “uterus,” but she’s plenty old enough to be forced to bear a child against her will. Which seems to bring up an interesting dilemma. How do Florida Republicans expect the young women who they would force to have babies to handle the prenatal care if they’re too young to hear the names of body parts spoken aloud? When a young woman is going through labor against her will, how do you shield her from the words and knowledge of what’s going on down there? Would they suggest we just sedate teenagers who are going through mandatory pregnancies throughout the process so their innocence isn’t destroyed by knowing what goes on during pregnancies they’re actually experiencing by government mandate?

I probably shouldn’t even mention this dilemma, because knowing how much the anti-choice movement likes to control what goes on in a doctor’s office—mandating ultrasounds, mandating unscientific scripts to be read aloud, mandating waiting periods—I wouldn’t put it past them to pass a law banning doctors from using scientifically accurate terms for body parts in front of teenage patients. Think of all the fun that the anti-choice legislators could have creating a list of approve euphemisms to use in front of teenage patients, both willing and unwilling to be giving birth.