By Chloe Angyal • @chloeangyal • 12 years ago

Connie Schultz on the Ohio “Heartbeat” bill

Last night on The Rachel Maddow Show, Cleveland Plain-Dealer columnist Connie Schultz talked about the Ohio “Heartbeat” bill, which would ban abortion as early as 18 days after conception – as soon as the fetus has a heartbeat, and long before most women would realize they were pregnant at all.

Schultz, who was present at the March hearing at which a fetus “testified” in favour of the bill, observed that “this has nothing to do with protecting life. This has everything to do with playing to their extremist base.” And when you have male representatives giggling about how if we just had a vaginal probe, we could find the heartbeat – which they couldn’t, at one point – and making analogies to compare abortion to Romeo and Juliet-style suicide, you do get the sense that the people who endorse these kinds of measures aren’t interested in saving lives at all. They’re either cruel, or entirely detached from reality. Or both.

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Full transcript here.

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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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