Kansas Legislators: Stop Playing Doctor and Start Growing Up
Posted by Katherine
January 27, 2014
Kansas isn’t new the notion of politicians saying and doing ridiculous and inappropriate things when it concerns reproductive rights. Hell, just in the past few weeks since the new legislative session opened, we’ve already had our governor equate abortion to slavery and another representative claiming women over 50 don’t need gynecological services. But, last Wednesday, on the anniversary of Roe v Wade, Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook might have taken the cake when she orchestrated a sonogram during a meeting of the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee.
Sen. Pilcher-Cook claimed that she was trying to “give committee members a science education on life within the womb,” but really what she was trying to was try to use an outlandish stunt to disrupt the proceedings for the day—as well as shame anyone who might want to retain their right to choose whether or not to continue their own pregnancy.
Sen. Pilcher Cook. I have a lot of words for you. Some of them would require some old school comic censorship, with an extra side of asterisks; others can be summed up best by my friend Elise Higgins from Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri who spoke pure #truth when stating that “A committee room is not an appropriate place for medical procedure to happen, and it’s also not a place for medical procedures to be legislated.” There are a multitude of ways I would like to admonish, educate you, etcetera, etcetera—but I don’t have time for all that, because I have to work my ass off trying to prevent my state from being the total hell for young people in need of reproductive health services that you and your colleagues seem to want it to be. But I do have two words for you (and no, they do not require asterisks).
Grow. Up.
Grow up and stop attacking the reproductive rights of your constituents. Grow up and stop using fear mongering. Grow up and start addressing the ACTUAL reproductive needs of those you represent, like say, the education funding cuts that are incredibly detrimental to the needs of children. Grow up and realize you only like “science” when it suits your purposes. Grow up and own up to the fact that you are harming, more than you are helping, Kansas.
And if you can’t grow up, I have another two words for you. Get out.
Because Kansas has enough on its hands without it’s own legislators pulling stunts at the capital in order to make some kind of statement about the pregnancy—the same tactic required by Kansas law before you’re allowed to have an abortion: that you have to have a sonogram because apparently Kansas doesn’t believe we can trust Kansans to think through their decisions. We don’t need our legislators trying to intimidate us, or perform medical procedures. We need them helping us, not harming us.
We need them to grow up—and playing doctor isn’t a very grown up thing to do, now is it?
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