Verizon Bars NARAL's Texting

This is highly controversial:

Verizon Wireless is refusing to carry text messages from a prominent abortion-rights group, citing its internal restrictions on content that is "highly controversial," the carrier said.

Naral Pro-Choice America requested that Verizon Wireless and other carriers distribute its text messages that users sign up for by sending a message to a five- or six-digit number called a "short code." The program is used by many companies and other groups to distribute short text messages for marketing and other purposes.

Verizon Wireless -- owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and the United Kingdom's Vodafone Group PLC -- rejected Naral's request, citing the carrier's "code of content," which prohibits controversial content.

The move sparked outrage from Naral. "Regardless of people's political views, Verizon customers should be able to decide how to use their phones for political action," said Ted Miller, a Naral spokesman. "Verizon shouldn't make that choice for them. Verizon shouldn't be allowed to arbitrarily censor their activities."

Verizon should not have the right to do this. As long as NARAL isn't inconveniencing anyone with their texts - they're not, you have to sign up here to receive them - and subscribers are paying for them, Verizon should not be able to have a say in the content that's transmitted over their service. All NARAL is doing is keeping its members up-to-date on abortion-related news and encouraging activism.

Corporations should not be allowed to be unfettered entities. When they run up against democracy they must be restrained. This is no different from a restaurant refusing to serve someone because of the color of his skin. If Verizon can do this legally we need to rush to pass common carrier standards.

Let's not even get started on the blatant hypocrisy. Do you think Verizon would be in such a rush if these were pro-forced childbirth texts? Furthermore, the women's rights activists aren't the ones who are setting up billboards and other graphic demonstrations that might offend people.

Update: look like they've had enough:

But the company reversed course this morning, saying it had made a mistake.

“The decision to not allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect, and we have fixed the process that led to this isolated incident,” Jeffrey Nelson, a company spokesman, said in a statement.

Support net neutrality.

A Dark Day

Indeed.

Louisiana became the first U.S. state to outlaw a late-term abortion procedure Friday, when the governor approved legislation allowing doctors to be prosecuted for performing the surgery.

The new law allows so-called "partial birth" abortions in only one situation: when failure to perform it would endanger the mother's life. The procedure would be a crime in all other cases, even if the pregnancy is expected to cause health problems for the mother.

Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco signed into law criminal penalties for doctors who perform the surgery: fines of between $1,000 and $10,000, and jail terms of between one and 10 years.

Making it illegal for women to make their own decisions about their own bodies.

The term "partial birth" is a complete misnomer. There is no birth, partial birth, or any birth involved. I am so glad our media continues to accurately characterize things.

Poop

Domestic terrorism-style.

Domestic Terrorism

Fundamentalist-style:

A package found Wednesday in the parking lot of a South Austin women's clinic
that performs abortions contained a bomb that could have seriously injured or
killed people had it not been spotted by a clinic employee, officials said
Thursday.

Sorry, David Broder, the left and the right are not the same. Let us get something straight right now. The enemy, inasmuch as one exists, are people who commit acts based on their faith that have no grounding in reality. They ignore the universal principle of the Golden Rule and act towards people without empathy. These people, irrespective of their race, creed or country, must be stopped.

Right to Whose Life?

Amanda:

Late term abortions are performed for maternal health reasons, full stop. Sometimes it’s a fetal health issue, that it’s dead or will die as soon as it’s born, but in the end, it’s still about not forcing a woman to go through labor and delivery, which are dangerous, for no reason. And sometimes they are performed because the mother will die, be crippled, or have serious mental health problems if she delivers. The concept of “choice” isn’t really part of this discussion so much. This is about the concept that women deserve to be treated as full human beings who deserve proper medical care despite their current situation of being in a state only women can be in. That is what was on trial and the answer is no.

It’s a strike at the concept that women have independent value. If you reduce a woman to a baby factory, then one who needs a late term abortion is malfunctioning in her purpose somehow, so if she dies, she’s scrap metal, I suppose. Or scrap blood and tissue, as it were. I hate to be blunt like this, but there it is. They skipped over the preliminaries about what kind of rights women should have and attacked the idea that our very existence and health matters if we’ve failed in our duties as fetal incubators.

This is about treating women unequally and making them subservient to others and damn the cost that they may bear. Our fight is for the living, breathing and feeling women in this world, not the imaginary fetus soul.

Justice(s) Matter

Wingnuts in robes:

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling written by swing vote Justice Anthony Kennedy, upheld a federal ban on late-term abortion procedures.

It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how -- not whether -- to perform an abortion. The decision reverses lower court rulings that had held the federal law was unconstitutional because it lacked a health exception for the mother, as required by earlier Supreme Court precedents. Congress approved the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban in 2003, placing new federal restrictions on some late-term abortion procedures.

Not Kennedy, mind you, but our new hacktacular Justices along with the old ones.

I thought we stopped telling people what they could and could not do with their bodies when we got rid of slavery...