It's not news that there's a lot of work underway in the states to limit women's access to abortion, but it's not just the extreme religious fanatics underwriting it. Extreme-right conservatives have finally achieved their long-standing dream of building unholy alliances using women as pawns in their endgame.
Rolling Stone ties up the package in a very ugly bow:
Of the 30 states that have been actively pursuing the anti-abortion agenda, most, like Michigan, are also anti-union right-to-work states, where the alliance of powerful donors and corporate interests has been steadily working to change the political game. Thanks to the 2010 Citizens United decision, conservative dark-money groups have spent millions on political campaigns, much of it impossible to trace. "There's a lot of money behind this effort, and you have to ask, 'Why is that?'" says the Center for Reproductive Rights' Nancy Northup. "It's been apparent to me for a long time that this is part of a huge, larger agenda, and we're just the canary in the coal mine. What this is really about is democracy."
In Michigan, Amway scion Richard "Dick" DeVos, the 58-year-old former Republican candidate for governor, is a force behind what he refers to as the state's "freedom to work" legislation, which passed in 2012 despite a 12,000-person protest that locked opponents out of the state Capitol. DeVos has also funded a variety of religious-right groups, including Right to Life of Michigan and the Michigan Family Forum, which supported the state's "rape insurance" bill.
A similar scenario has played out in North Carolina, where millionaire Art Pope has single-handedly changed the face of state politics by pouring millions into state races since 2010, which gave Republicans control of the Legislature and also delivered the governor's mansion to the GOP in 2012. Since then, North Carolina has enacted some of the nation's harshest voter-suppression laws, as well as a sweeping package of TRAP laws that drew national attention last year, when lawmakers attempted to sneak it past the public's scrutiny by first attaching it to a bill ostensibly banning Shariah law, and then attaching it to a bill regulating motorcycle safety. Despite weekly protests, the "motorcycle-vagina bill," as abortion-rights advocates dubbed it, was passed and signed into law in July, threatening the state's 16 abortion clinics.
Unlike DeVos, a longtime Christian conservative, Pope calls himself a libertarian and has served as a national director of the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity. Koch money, through various "social welfare" organizations it supports, has helped fund a significant part of the pro-life agenda, even though the Koch brothers, like Pope, have never taken a personal interest in reproductive politics, and David Koch has even stated his support for marriage equality. "They know the policies they want wouldn't be attractive to enough people unless they also included the social-conservative policies, so what's happened is they've merged the social and economic agenda into a single product," says Rachel Tabachnick, an associate fellow at the progressive think tank Political Research Associates. "This is not new, it's a project that goes back decades," she says, "and it's one in which the war on reproductive rights is a non-negotiable part of the deal."
In other words, if the billionaires want the social conservatives, they'd not only better toe the rhetorical line to restrict women's reproductive rights, they'd also better put their money up to fund it. They've definitely made good on their end of the deal.
In 2011, Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS organization sent $2,025,000 to National Right to Life to fund their "grassroots." The now-defunct Koch bank known as TC4 sent Concerned Women For America $1,335,000 in that same timeframe. Another non-profit in the Koch network, Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR), pushed nearly $2 million to Americans United for Life and Susan B Anthony list, which also push legislation to restrict abortion and interfere with women's reproductive health.
They've gotten results. Those millions buy lots of votes in statehouses, it appears.
Much of the public outrage in recent years has revolved around extreme measures, like proposed "personhood amendments" that would have outlawed abortion outright, and banned many common forms of birth control, stem-cell research and in-vitro fertilization. But the anti-abortion movement's real success has been in passing seemingly innocuous regulations known as TRAP laws ("Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers"), which are designed to punish abortion providers by burying them in mountains of red tape, and, ultimately, driving them out of business.
Twenty-six states, including Texas, have laws on their books requiring that abortion clinics become mini surgical centers, a costly proposition that would require clinics to widen hallways, expand parking lots, modify janitorial closets or install surgical sinks and pipelines for general anesthesia – regulations most providers say are unnecessary. Four states currently (and four more may soon) require that the doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges at local hospitals, which applies even in places where the nearest hospitals oppose abortion or are simply too far away to meet the state's distance requirement. Sixteen states restrict medication-induced abortion; in 39 states, only licensed physicians – not their physician's assistants or nurse practitioners – are permitted to hand out the drug. Fourteen states ban its use via telemedicine, which is often the only way a woman in a rural part of the country can consult with her doctor.
Meanwhile, they whine about the IRS? This is exactly why none of these groups should be allowed to exist, and why full disclosure and transparency are so necessary. Every last one of them should have been disqualified.
