Badass prochoice hero of the day: Wendy Davis

Written By: - Date published: 7:00 pm, June 26th, 2013 - 18 comments
Categories: abortion, sexism - Tags:

Davis-Fight

I was on the edge of my seat this afternoon following the #SB5 hashtag on Twitter.  Good context from the Guardian here.

For thirteen hours, Texas State Senator Wendy Davis filibustered a bill which would close 30 abortion clinics in the state, leaving only 5 to provide medical care to its 26 million inhabitants.

She couldn’t sit, or lean, or take a sip of water, or pee, or stop talking.  She was challenged by antichoice Republicans for daring to go “off-topic” by talking about sonograms – which you’re forced to get in Texas before an abortion – and Planned Parenthood – who, among other health services, provide abortions.

She stood and spoke and shared the stories of people who needed abortion services, who are being ignored by the kind of blinkered fundamentalists who think female bodies can just “shut down” pregnancies caused by rape or that rape kits cause abortions.

And at the end of the day the bastards tried to cheat their way through anyway, claiming the vote on the bill was taken before midnight when hundreds of thousands of people watching live knew damn well they hadn’t.

They’d raised a point of order against her because she needed help with her back brace, and then they tried to pretend that 12:03 was really 11:59 to get their way.  That’s the hypocrisy of the antichoice movement in a nutshell: one rule for women, another/none for themselves.

Wendy Davis, you are one badass state senator.

~

And lest you think this is just a Republican-heavy US state issue?  See Coley Tangerina.

18 comments on “Badass prochoice hero of the day: Wendy Davis ”

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  1. AsleepWhileWalking 1
    26 June 2013 at 9:22 pm

    TG Wendy was tough enough to stand up and with the help of an “unruly mob”…heh, heh…prevented another triumph of religion over common sense – Hours after claiming victory, Bill is rendered moot: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/us/politics/texas-abortion-bill.html?_r=0

  2. AmaKiwi 2
    26 June 2013 at 10:04 pm

    It’s a sick empire.

    Every American President since Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) has committed war crimes. $1.2 trillion of the entire US $3 trillion annual budget is spent on wars and homeland security. They have piled up ruinous debts they can never repay. Poverty is widespread and youth even with college degrees can’t find jobs. One in every 100 Americans will sleep in prison tonight, half for victimless drug offenses.

    Yet Americans allow themselves to be diverted from these survival issues by arguments about abortion, gay marriage, gun control, and whether their 3 to 5 million foreign laborers should have any rights of citizenship. All the time they bask in their self-love: “America’s the greatest country in the world.”

    They say Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

  3. weka 3
    26 June 2013 at 10:09 pm

    That’s phenomenally awesome.

    Although I agree with the commenter on the Guardian article – has democracy really been reduced to this?

    • QoT 3.1
      26 June 2013 at 10:40 pm

      I wouldn’t say “reduced”, since these kind of procedural foibles are a part of the grand historic tradition of most democracies. (Trying to explain clearly to the Kiwi Twittersphere how amendments to Bills were voted on, during the marriage equality readings, was an eye-opener.)

      • weka 3.1.1
        27 June 2013 at 10:33 am

        True, but having to stand for 13 hours straight is pretty extreme, and something possible only for certain kind of body abilities.

  5. Puddleglum 5
    27 June 2013 at 10:58 am

    An amazing feat.

    Another aspect to this is the way in which the proposed bill tried to shut-down abortion clinics indirectly rather than having the honesty simply to propose to outlaw them. Reminds me of political tactics closer to home.

    Well done Wendy Davis. That performance could only have come from personal commitment – something that is so often lacking.

  6. Brett Dale 6
    27 June 2013 at 11:06 am

    Wendy Davis is what a real politician should be. Hats off to her.

  7. RareBit 7
    27 June 2013 at 1:14 pm

    You seem to have omitted the categories *freedom and *liberty. Or do you not have those categories?

    • One Anonymous Knucklehead 7.1
      27 June 2013 at 5:24 pm

      If you were going to have them you’d have one or the other, not both, and you’d also have to justify having such a vacuous, asinine category, too: most people who use them in the same sentence only ever pay lip service to either.

      I’m sure you aren’t like that, of course. After all, you’re pro-freedom. Just like me.

    • QoT 7.2
      27 June 2013 at 9:40 pm

      Dammit, I also missed “post with words in” and “thing about political stuff”.

  8. pictishmonster 8
    27 June 2013 at 4:48 pm

    Check this out for an animated version of the story of Wendy’s filibuster:

    http://jezebel.com/the-taiwanese-rendering-of-last-nights-filibuster-is-p-590518576

    It is to celebrate!

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