Twitterfall is a pretty cool thing. If you want to search hashtags while still seeing your normal timeline it’s just what you need. Plus I like that you don’t have to click anything or press a button to see new tweets, they just drop down periodically. Wish it had a better way to track conversations like Twitter proper does.

So once I hooked that up to my Twitter account, I tossed a few searches I thought might be interesting on it. Last night I added #AFPcountdown to keep up with the festivities over Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter party, and that was pretty cool.

Today, on a whim, really, I added #WarOnWomen. This was probably a mistake. So far it’s led to a lot of anger and depression.

I have no doubt there’s a war on women going on, in practice at least. I know this because for the first time in my life birth control is being treated as a controversial subject. I know this because we have emergency room doctors refusing to care for rape victims. I know this because there are people making propaganda videos to portray Planned Parenthood as “targeting baby girls” with their evil, evil abortions.

That last one is really outrageously dishonest by the way, not only in how it was edited, but in the way people are referring to it as though this was some deliberate attempt to reduce the number of girls born rather than a social worker being very understanding with her client, trying to be informative and helpful without judging. Seriously, watch that video and then explain to me how Planned Parenthood is “targeting baby girls”.

Women’s health care centers are being burned, and there are people saying that Obama is behind the real war on women because of unemployment statistics. Deliberately cutting access to rape kits, defunding medical providers who specialize in women’s health services, holding panels on women’s health care with no women on them, trying to force people to pay for birth control out of pocket while retaining insurance coverage for viagra, blocking abortions and bragging about how it will make the poor suffer, these are just business as usual. The fact that women have been hit slightly harder than man by the economic recession? War!

I don’t want to talk about these things anymore. I’m tired. But it’s still going on.

There’s a lot of talk about stopping people from having abortions based on the sex of the fetus. Frankly I really doubt this is a serious issue, after seeing the dishonesty involved in the promotion of it, but I’m just too sick of this to look it up now. Here’s a question I have on the subject, though. How do you know why someone is getting an abortion?

People keep adding laws to make abortion as invasive and frustrating and painful as possible, apparently for no other reason than because they enjoy human suffering, so it wouldn’t surprise me if you’re required to be interrogated as to your reasons for seeking one in many places. But if their reason for getting an abortion isn’t medical, then how do you know what it really is? Do you hook them up to a polygraph? Have an inquisitor investigate their life? Call in a psychic?

Since I first really started to think about the abortion debate it’s become very clear to me that there shouldn’t be any questions like that. There are no thought police, and there should never, ever be such a thing as thoughtcrime. Simply put a woman should be able to terminate a pregnancy no questions asked. It’s her body, not the government’s, not the embryo’s, not God’s.

Sick of this. Here’s a site with far more info than you’ll want to read.