What you can do to stop the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act

It’s on. The fight to stop the GOPs from redefining rape and further restricting abortion access is ON, and we need you to help win it.

If you’re on Twitter and follow feminist folk, you’ve probably noticed the hashtag #DearJohn. It’s the creation of Sady Doyle (@sadydoyle), mastermind of the #mooreandme protest that last year so successfully drew attention to how Michael Moore was minimizing and mocking the assault allegations against Julian Assange. The John in question here is Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, who cries at the thought of children missing out on the American dream, but seems to shed no tears at the idea of a rape survivor being forced to give birth to her rapist’s baby.

Here are just a few of the problems with the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act:

1. This bill narrows the “rape” exception to include only “forcible rape.” As Sady explains:

Under this new bill, the only rape survivors who would be able to receive funding would be those who were able to prove that their rapes involved “force.” If your rapist drugged you, intoxicated you, or raped you while you were unconscious, you don’t get coverage. If your rapist used coercion, you don’t get coverage. If this is a case of statutory rape — that is, if you are a thirteen-year-old child, raped by someone outside of your family — you don’t get coverage. If you’re an incest survivor over the age of eighteen — if, say, years of abuse only culminated in a pregnancy after your nineteenth birthday — you just don’t get coverage.

2. This bill narrows the “life of the mother” exceptions to include only physical threats to the life of the mother. If carrying to term a pregnancy that you do not want might make you suicidal, or if giving up a baby for adoption might be more than you can emotionally bear, too damn bad. No abortion coverage unless the pregnancy causes a risk to your physical health.

3. This bill empowers rapists. This bill makes it pretty damn clear, by only offering the rape exception to pregnant survivors of “forcible rape,” that any form of sexual violation that doesn’t involve force isn’t really rape. And since about 70% of rapists don’t use force when they rape, that lets about 70% of rapists off the hook.

4. This bill goes even further than the Hyde Amendment, which already prevents federal funds from being used for abortion. By amending the tax code to make it incredibly unappealing for private health insurance companies to cover abortion, this bill makes abortion less affordable than ever. As the New York Times reports:

The tax credits that are encouraging small businesses to provide insurance for their workers could not be used to buy policies that cover abortions. People with their own policies who have enough expenses to claim an income tax deduction could not deduct either the premiums for policies that cover abortion or the cost of an abortion. People who use tax-preferred savings accounts to pay medical costs could not use the money to pay for an abortion without paying taxes on it.

5. This bill completely contradicts what the GOP’s professed priorities. Speaker Boehner and the rest of the GOP claim that their top priority is creating jobs for Americans. But this bill, their third piece of legislation in the new session, has nothing to do with creating jobs and everything to do with sexism and culture war politics.

While the Twitter protest is focusing its attention on Speaker Boehner, we’re hoping that people will also call their representatives, especially if those representatives are among the Democrats who have signed on to the bill or progressive Democrats who are likely to speak out against it. If your congressperson falls into neither camp, please contact them anyway – preferably by calling them – and ask them to vote against it.

If you’re on Twitter, tweet at Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) and use the hashtag #DearJohn. You can follow Sady, as well as RH Reality Check’s Amanda Marcotte, Jaclyn Friedman, Steph Herold aka @IAmDrTiller and Shelby Knox for more information about the bill and the protest.

People like to talk about how feminism is dying because young feminists don’t have that fire in their belly when it comes to protecting reproductive rights. They like to say that we spend too much time navel-gazing online and not enough time protesting and demanding that women’s rights be expanded, not restricted. Here at Feministing, we know that’s not true and when it comes to HR3, we’re going to demonstrate just how much young feminists care about reproductive justice, and just how powerful young feminists, with the help of the internet, can be.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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