27 Bills in Missouri Attacking Women’s Health and Some Outrageous Statements
By | March 11, 2014, 5:10 p.m.
Category: Birth Control, State Attacks
“You go into a clothing store, and they can stock whatever they want to. I just want to make sure that pharmacies have the same right to do that… It’s a freedom of doing business,” said State Sen. David Sater last year, a Republican pharmacist who sponsored a bill that allows pharmacists in Missouri to not stock certain drugs, such as emergency contraception like Plan B One-Step. Access to this perfectly legal drug would be limited for women in the state.
One could assume Sater is anti-Plan B One-Step since he sponsored this bill. But this week, another dangerous bill is making its way to the Senate, sponsored by the lawmaker that would triple the mandatory waiting period for a woman seeking a safe, legal abortion from 24 hours to 72.
When asked about an exception to this 72 waiting period, Sater offered, “If a woman decides not to go to the hospital and not get the ‘Plan B,’ they’re making a decision to keep that child if they get pregnant,” Sater said, according to PoliticMo. “If the woman found out she was pregnant three or four weeks down the line, they had made the decision not to do some preventative things like Plan B.”
So now he’s pro-Plan B One-Step? Which is it?
Sater is effectively blaming women for getting pregnant for not taking the drug he’s limited access to. But the context for his statement was his objection to including an exception to tripling the waiting period for women who had been victims of rape. His rationale? If they didn’t want to continue a pregnancy, they should have thought about that within a few days after the assault.
Unfortunately, Sater’s broader beliefs (and actions) as a state legislator are a snapshot of what’s happening in Missouri’s capital. In fact, Missouri legislators have introduced 27 bills this year that would restrict access to safe and legal abortion and women’s health. Meanwhile, they refused to consider actual legislation that could EXPAND health care for 260,000 Missourians.
Missourians deserve better from their legislature than a truckload of bills intended to make access to reproductive health care harder with none to make it more available.
Tags: State Fights, Missouri, Waiting Period, Plan B, birth control
