“Pro Life” Republicans Trying to Kill 70,000 Children

At the same time as Republicans are trying to force the IRS to audit abortions (even while forbidding use of the word “uterus”), they are trying to cut Obama’s request for international aid by 16%. Doing so, USAID Rajiv Shah testified yesterday, would kill 70,000 children.

“We estimate, and I believe these are very conservative estimates, that H.R. 1 would lead to 70,000 kids dying,” USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah testified before the House Appropriations State and Foreign Ops subcommittee.

“Of that 70,000, 30,000 would come from malaria control programs that would have to be scaled back specifically. The other 40,000 is broken out as 24,000 would die because of a lack of support for immunizations and other investments and 16,000 would be because of a lack of skilled attendants at birth,” he said.

Check out that last one: the Republicans want to kill 16,000 children by cutting the money for childbirth attendants.

I guess according to the GOP moral code, it’s okay to cause the death of children at childbirth, but letting a woman terminate a pregnancy before that point is a mortal sin.

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  1. ffein says:

    I’ve always thought the term “Pro-Life” was incorrect — it should be “Pro-Birth” — and then usually they’re the same people who support the death penalty.

    • coral says:

      I call them “Pro-death”. They are pro-death for women needing abortions, pro-death for women needing pre-natal care, pro-death for women and children needing food during early years of infancy (anti WIC), pro-death for anyone needing food stamps or public assistance or unemployed, and pro-death for anyone accused of a crime, including innocent people wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death.

      And that leaves out all of the innuendo and implications of their very violent rhetoric against Democrats, public officials, government workers, etc.

      This is an extremely dangerous movement, and I am absolutely astonished that there are no mainstream Democrats (Obama, please phone home!) who are willing to vigorously articulate an pro-life argument against them.

  2. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Childbirth freed of witchcraft and lethal puerperal fever (caused by the unwashed hands of doctors and attendants). Childhood unmarred by routine deaths due to pertussis, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, tuberculosis, polio, and the marvelously hideous deaths due to cholera and the common tetanus bacillus. Anti-malarial programs that over the course of the last fifty years have saved millions.

    Those are the discoveries and programs – routine antisepsis, antibiotics, vaccinations – that catapulted medicine from bloodletting to science. For the first time public health was not an oxymoron.

    Seventy thousand will see their medical care revert to bloodletting and leeches. That is a third more than the number of American names engraved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It is nearly 25 times the death toll from 9/11. To prevent its recurrence, we’ve spent a trillion dollars on wars and “enhanced security”. Republicans and Democrats alike will spend a billion dollars to contest a single presidential election. They make war across the Middle East and North Africa because they “can’t afford not to.”

    To save a fraction of those amounts, Republicans and willing Democrats will deprive tens of thousands of routine medical care. It will directly cause their deaths. Why is that choice not a surprise? Their health “reform” policies do the same here, and those affect millions.

  3. orionATL says:

    i like seeing the republican party’s pandering, emotionally exploitative, logic and rhetoric turned against them.

  4. liberaldem says:

    The Repubs only care about fetuses, specifically white, evangelical fetuses. Those 70,000 children would be largely brown/black, and egads, they probably wouldn’t be Christians-ergo, of no interest to the Republican stalwarts.