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NationofChange / Op-Ed
Published: Thursday 16 August 2012
“Ryan is considered by many a champion of small government.”
Paul Ryan: A Man With a Plan, From the Fiscal to the Physical
The floundering Romney campaign was thrown a life ring of sorts last week, from aboard the USS Wisconsin, a decommissioned US Navy vessel based in Norfolk, Virginia. There, Mitt Romney introduced the man he said would be “the next president of the United States,” until he corrected himself. “Every now and then I’m known to make a mistake,” Romney confessed. “I did not make a mistake with this guy. But I can tell you this, he’s going to be the next vice president of the United States.” And with that, Paul Ryan became Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate, the man who, in the event of a Romney win in November, becomes a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Ryan is considered by many a champion of small government. For women, though, the federal government that Paul Ryan envisions is big, intrusive and controlling. Paul Ryan would ban all abortions, with no exceptions, even in cases of rape, incest or the health of the mother. In other words, the mother could die as a result of complications from the pregnancy.
The Planned Parenthood Action Fund highlighted several other issues, among them, “his budget plan to dismantle Medicaid, jeopardizing the basic health care millions of women rely on, [and] his vote last year to end funding to Planned Parenthood, putting at risk the cancer screenings, birth control, STD testing and treatment, and other preventive care that nearly three million Americans rely on each year.”
The anti-choice National Right to Life Committee stated, “Ryan has maintained a 100 percent pro-life voting record.” He is a co-sponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, what critics call the personhood bill, now in Congress, that would define in federal law that “the life of each human being begins with fertilization ... irrespective of sex, health, function or disability, defect, stage of biological development, or condition of dependency, at which time every human being shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.”
The law goes on, “a one-celled human embryo ... is a new unique human being.” As reported in Mother Jones, this law would make normal in vitro fertilization (IVF) practices illegal, as the process creates multiple fertilized eggs, one or two of which might be used to help a woman have a child. The others are frozen, used for research or destroyed, which, under this bill pushed by Ryan, would become murder. Mother Jones points out that at least three of Mitt Romney’s sons have relied on IVF to give birth to several of his 18 grandchildren. Likewise, the IUD, intrauterine device, which prevents the fertilized egg from implanting, would be illegal.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell introduced Mitt Romney at the Norfolk event. McDonnell was recently in the national spotlight for promoting a state law that would force women seeking an abortion to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound. Republicans, who accuse President Barack Obama of putting government bureaucrats between doctors and their patients, were trying to mandate a medically unnecessary procedure that required the insertion of a wand into a woman’s vagina. The provision was widely ridiculed, and may have been one of the reasons Gov. McDonnell himself was not standing next to Romney as his running mate. Yet Ryan, who was, co-sponsored a similar bill, the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act. It contains a bizarre provision that states nothing in the law will “prevent a pregnant woman from turning her eyes away from the ultrasound images.”
What we cannot do is turn our eyes away from just how radical Paul Ryan’s plans are for more than half of the U.S. population: women and girls. Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist famously called for a government small enough to “drown in the bathtub.” Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., told online news website Buzzfeed, “House Republicans—of which Paul Ryan is a leader—would shrink government so small it can only fit under the door of a woman’s doctor’s office.”
As the Romney-Ryan team stood beside the USS Wisconsin, it was clear that we are not all in the same boat. Corporations are people to be protected. One-celled human zygotes are people to be protected. But when it comes to the already born, flesh-and-blood people of this country, reeling from a massive recession, they would shred the social safety net. Sink or swim is not a plan.
© 2011 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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ABOUT Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of "Breaking the Sound Barrier," recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.
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By Aviva Shen
10 comments on "Paul Ryan: A Man With a Plan, From the Fiscal to the Physical"
August 16, 2012 10:44pm
It's too late in the day here in Sydney, very cold and windy, for me to read all the blogs. My quick comment is that Ryan's views about abortion, IVF, contraception, and other sex-related issues are Catholic. Imposing them on the nation violates bedrock teaching in the Catholic Church about civic virtue: teaching I have described in a book published for World Youth Day, Sydney, 2008, called THE LIVING WORD (published BAC Systems Australia). Its Imprimatur was granted by the Catholic Bishop of Parramatta, Anthony Fisher, the co-ordinator of World Youth Day (some 500,000 pilgrims!).
Civic virtue is anchored, among other things, in a sound definition of tolerance. This definition ensures that one religious group cannot impose its beliefs on other religious or non-religious groups in the community or nation. Many women and men, to cite one obvious example of a belief resulting in action, rely on contraception. Catholics, if they follow Magisterial teaching, don't. They do plan: re such bedrock sex-related issues as family size. Some Catholics have large families and others don't. That's what freedom of choice imposes. Medical science in today's world allows faithful Catholics to limit family size if they choose to do so. This CAN be successfully done without recourse to contraception OR long periods of abstinence. How many American voters, in percentage terms, KNOW this??!!!! How many KNOW that many good Catholics choose to limit family size???!!!!
I will be voting by absentee ballot for Mr Obama, since I am a dual citizen of the US (my native land) and Australia. Yes, we disagree about some key issues; but that is not the point when it comes to voting. The large point is simple: who would better govern the nation, Romney/Ryan or Obama/Biden? I get the horrors, reading about the public records of Romney/Ryan.
August 16, 2012 7:19pm
A one cell embryo has all the privileges and rights of personhood but apparently the mothers whose life or health might be at risk or the young people we use as cannon fodder do not??? Where is the logic in this?
August 16, 2012 9:28pm
REPLY: It's GopThink.
August 16, 2012 4:04pm
I really hate to say this but I really do hope Romney wins the presidency. The United States needs a big slap in the face--bigger than the Bush administration gave us.
I say this because virtually all lower middle class and even middle middle class people supporting far right agendas are the same people holding up signs that say "Keep Government Out of My Medicare!" With that mentality, nothing will ever get done.
August 16, 2012 6:46pm
We should've gotten a big slap in the face from W, but did we? Have we learned any lessons from the disaster known as the Bush presidency? I seriously doubt it.
A Romney-Ryan administration would just drive the final nail in the coffin that buries the American dream of a nation ruled by the people. The plutocrats will be so firmly entrenched that there would be no escape for a conscientious citizen except emigration.
August 16, 2012 12:35pm
Freudian mistake. It dawned on him he can't show his tax reports and win the WH nor win it if he don't. Catch-22.
August 16, 2012 11:46am
Nothing to add. Totally persuasive piece. Should be a paradigm on the subject for all.
[Curious as to why the copyright year is 2011.]
August 16, 2012 11:31am
We on the left know who Mr. Ryan is but the rest of the population is fed the lies and distortions. The media ignores these and fails to call them out. So unless we can find a way to get the word out that they are lying, it all falls on deaf ears.
August 16, 2012 10:53am
Obama's not perfect, yet I never thought he was. Some did, and now may hate him; but he's a helluva lot better - for "People Power" - than smiley-face Willard, a guy who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and now wants a government that will make him richer.
And Ryan? Not only did he want to destroy Medicare and ruin Social Security, you should see the many votes he cast AGAINST any programs or benefits for VETERANS!
They're not our friends, and we can't let them take over the government.
For those disappointed with Obama, I recommend a DVD called "Obama's Deal," a Frontline (PBS) presentation lasting 60 minutes. I came across it in the library, and maybe you can too. It's all about "Obamacare," so I thought it was worth viewing.
I was very disappointed that the "public option" was dropped, but now I understand why. Obama tried to get what he promised in his campaign, but he was lucky to get the little bit he did. He wasn't happy with the compromises he had to make, but decided something was better than nothing, and it was a step in the right direction.
He had many obstacles. For one thing, not all Democrats in Congress, especially the Senate, were liberals. In fact, some were conservatives from conservative states. He had to compromise to get their votes. One, he virtually had to bribe.
For another thing, he had to at least mollify the insurance industry, and most of all, Big Pharma. Why? Because if they hated what he asked for, they'd spend billions of dollars on media campaigns to turn the public against it. And such advertising WORKS (alas!), and helped to derail the Clinton proposals for health care reform.
Those are sad facts. Look, many of us would like Medicare for all, or Universal Health Care, but as long as the industries affected can launch media campaigns against it, we'll probably NEVER get it...no matter how many Americans originally wanted it. That's pretty depressing, isn't it?
We are, in fact, limited in what we can get through voting by the money and power of the corporations. How do we clip their wings? Can we ever get laws to prohibit corporations from advertising against government plans? And limit the contributions that ALL people can make to a political campaign? If we can do these things, we might have a chance of recovering "the power of the people," but if we can't, we're probably just whistling in the wind with all our protests. Corporations should have NO RIGHT to advertise on TV or radio for anything but their products or services, not for or against any government proposal. Their interests are not ours.
The deregulation of TV programming, or the changes made when we paid little attention, are really the cause of our present frustration. I remember when TV stations had to renew their licenses to broadcast, and they had to demonstrate their public service to the community to get it renewed; when presentation of one political view was given, equal time was required for opposing views. Now we have Fox News Channel, created by a wealthy Australian, with all of its male whores dispensing views favorable only to the rich, but completely disguised, of course. Yet it's everywhere, and you can't get cable without FNC.
How do we regain our own political power, stolen from us by rich individuals and the corporations? Perhaps we have to start with the Supreme Court, and Romney-Ryan won't make any appointments friendly to popular power. We can count on that.
But even I was shocked to see how many benefits Ryan voted to deny our Iraqi veterans. I wonder how he'll explain those votes away.
August 16, 2012 10:33pm
Typical liberal, thinks opposing views need equal time, but only when it benefits his side. Then turns right around and wants to get fox news removed from cable? Go watch liberal CNN bud!