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iTodd Central

Salon Calls Out Mississippi

In a story called http://www.salon.com/2011/12/29/todays_gop_females_have_more_rights_before_theyre_born/">Today's GOP Makes Mississippi Look Liberal, Salon.com editor Joan Walsh takes note of the fact that most of the GOP's 2012 contenders are signing up to support "Personhood" initiatives that are similar to the one that Mississippi just overturned.

Perry has already announced his support for the “personhood” movement, which declares that life begins the moment an egg is fertilized, a measure that was rejected by the deep-red state of Mississippi as too extreme. But Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum also back the personhood crusade. That’s your modern Republican Party: It makes Mississippi look liberal.

Walsh notes that the candidates are not just gunning for abortion, but contraception as well, including a fantastic and outright lie by Michelle Bachmann:

At Tuesday’s “tele-town hall,” Bachmann lied about President Obama’s Plan B stance, insisting the president is “putting abortion pills for young minors, girls as young as 8 years of age or 11 years of age, on [the] bubblegum aisle.

The truth, according to Walsh, is that Obama backed the decision to keep Plan B off drugstore shelves specifically because of the access young girls might have to it.

Perhaps most interesting about the piece is the focus it puts on the real issue here -- women's rights over their own bodies. Personhood gives a fertilized egg the same claim to a woman's body that the woman herself has, which is something no man faces. And yet all of these Republican men seem to have a strong opinion on it, even when they want "choice" is all other sorts of matters, like whether or not they should be taxed or buy a gun or support a public school or pay taxes.

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