Women tired of being the whipping boy of Evangelicals and Right Wing Politicians and fighting back.
As an increasing number of conservative lawmakers attempt to insert politics into women’s personal reproductive choices, more and more of their female peers are fighting back with satirical legislation.
The latest came last week, when a Kentucky lawmaker introduced a new bill that would regulate access to erectile dysfunction drugs using restrictions similar to what many women currently face when trying to get an abortion in the state. Rep. Mary Lou Marzian (D) penned the bill to emphasize the unnecessary hoops women in her state (and others) have to jump through to make a private decision about their body. And she certainly wasn’t the first to do so. Over the past five years, liberal women lawmakers have crafted a variety of tongue-in-cheek bills to respond to their GOP counterparts’ anti-abortion legislation. None of the bills made it far — but that wasn’t their intention. Here’s a few of the highlights:
Defining masturbation as an act violence against the unborn
Oklahoma State Sen. Constance Johnson (D) submitted an amendment to an Oklahoma Personhood bill in 2012 in which: “Any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.” Johnson said she tacked on this amendment to express her frustration in the state’s interest in policing women’s eggs while ignoring male involvement in conception.
Banning vasectomies
In response to a Georgia bill that would incriminate women who had an abortion 20 weeks into a pregnancy, State Rep. Yasmin Neal (D) filed a bill in 2012 outright banning vasectomies using similar language.
“It is patently unfair that men avoid the rewards of unwanted fatherhood by presuming that their judgment over such matters is more valid than the judgment of the General Assembly,” the bill read. Neal stressed that her legislation was pure satire, and said that “even if it were proposed as a serious issue, it’s still not my place as a woman to tell a man what to do with his body.”
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