MO Rep. Stacey Newman Proposes Bill to Restrict Vasectomies

RFT ^ | March 2, 2012 | Paul Friswold

[NYer]

Representative Stacey Newman.

​Well, well, well. The birth control debate has finally come to our swimsuit areas, gentlemen. Yesterday Missouri State Representative Stacey Newman (D-St. Louis County) filed HB1853, which would only allow a man to have a vasectomy when doing so would protect him from serious injury or prevent his death.

Ah, the legislation's on the other set of genitalia now.
Rep. Newman -- whom I'd like to nominate for Hero Squad right here and now -- has been frustrated with the recent political debates over birth control access and reproductive health. The legislation is her pointed way of combating the idea that family planning is something only women have to worry about.

If passed, HB1853 will insure that vasectomies will only be performed in medical facilities licensed by the Department of Health and Senior Services, such as a hospital, ambulatory surgery center or similarly designated health facility. Vasectomies will be legal and safe, and the back-alley ballsnipper that so many indigent men are forced to seek out when they want to get their junk switched off will become a thing of the past. For too long, men have butchered themselves using weed-whackers, small chainsaws and footballs to the groin so that they could no longer father children they didn't want to be a father to. HB1853 will bring us to a more enlightened age.

Also, it could conceivably cause one of those right-wing bible-fondlers who are so certain that they have the authority to dictate what women can do with their bodies to choke on both indignation and irony. Bitter, bitter irony.

Rep. Stacey Newman, you got a great big pair of brass balls. Never change.

[VeniVidiVici]

Vasectomies will be legal and safe, and the back-alley ballsnipper that so many indigent men are forced to seek out when they want to get their junk switched off will become a thing of the past. For too long, men have butchered themselves using weed-whackers, small chainsaws and footballs to the groin so that they could no longer father children they didn't want to be a father to. HB1853 will bring us to a more enlightened age.

You know you're an idiot when your irony is lost even on yourself.

[Hostage]

Perfect response.

[butterdezillion]

Brilliant! That should be the companion bill to this dingbat’s bill banning vasectomies.

The government is required to buy guns for every citizen of the USA because failure to do so would be a violation of the 2nd Amendment. Or maybe just to make it sting a little more, all members of anti-gun lobby groups are required to pay for guns for everybody. Or maybe we could compromise and just require them to buy gun insurance from, say, Remington, and then Remington would provide the guns directly instead of the anti-gun group having to be tainted by providing the guns...

Who can we get to put this as a companion to her bill, or who will amend it to add that measure as well?

[DoughtyOne]

I was telling folks on another thread, that I have a male family member that has three kids, and doesn’t plan on having more. He and his wife have agreed he will get an vasectomy.

He approached his physician to get one, and was told he needed his wife’s sign-off on it.

This bitch Newman doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. She thinks women have it bad in our nation? what a clueless skank.

[HiTech RedNeck]

To be parallel she should be trying to ban PUBLIC SUBSIDY of vasectomies. Any guy who can pony up the dough or who has a private plan covering it, is physically able to get one.

[HiTech RedNeck]

I don’t think the doctor needs that according to any regulation, but he is trying to keep from getting sued by an angry wife who claimed she wanted kids but her hubby went off on the sneak and had a semi-permanent sterilization done. (It’s possible to rejoin vasectomies, but success rates are far from total.)

[DoughtyOne]

Whichever the case, and you may be right, if a physician said that to me, I would stand up, walk out of that office, and return the next morning bright and early with an attorney of my own, and ask that Doctor if he would care to repeat what he said the day before.

Call me whatever you want, a statement like that from a physician is a violation of a man’s civil rights.

Sure enough I could go to another physician, but along would come another guy, and the physician would do the same thing.

This would be a great test case, and put that to bed for all time.

When my wife gets sign off on my carcass, it’s going to be room temperature, and not a damned second before.

[butterdezillion]

Have Catholics objected to providing vasectomies as well as other forms of contraceptives? If this gal is trying to claim that Catholics just have it in for contraceptives that women use, she’s totally nuts. As far as I know, the Catholic Church wants to be free to follow their own belief, which prohibits all birth control except natural family planning - which, incidentally, is just as much a burden on the husband as on the wife. It is a mutually-shared responsibility.

So if this gal is claiming sexism by Catholics, she’s nuts.

But then, it seems like she’s really convoluting everything. This is about whether the government can force non-Muslim organizations to pay for birth control and abortions, while not requiring the same thing of Muslims who claim that any insurance at all is gambling. And she’s trying to make it equivalent to the government saying no guy can ever get a vasectomy.

There are more leaps in that logic than in a whole rendition of “Swan Lake”. lol. But she apparently hasn’t figured that out yet.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Don’t blow your top but what the doctor is asking is in fact biblical. 1 Corinthians, the wife has authority over the body of the husband and vice versa. Whether this can be abrogated by certain sins isn’t discussed, but asking about the marital situation is what any ethical doctor would do. For you to be an @$$h0l3 about it is unfitting. Just go see another doctor.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Pretty sure that Catholics would frown on that as a sin, but they are not asking government to “ban” it at all. That would be unsuitable for a country that isn’t all Catholic.

[Protect the Bill of Rights]

No Reproductive Justice for men?
Someone call Slut Fluke!

[DoughtyOne]

I’m not going to blow my top. It’s my body. End of story!

Do you think a doctor is going to demand sign off from the boy-friend or husband if a woman wants an abortion, even though there’s a life involved? Not a chance!

Why the (far in excess of a) double standard?

[HiTech RedNeck]

It’s God’s body, he lent it to you. TRUE END OF STORY!

[DoughtyOne]

Then brother, I suggest you never have heart surgery. No heart bypass for you...

[HiTech RedNeck]

What sort of snide remark this is, I do not know.

[HiTech RedNeck]

I think I see the reason for the snide remark, and it’s an invalid reason, especially if you subscribe to a Catholic model of sexual morality. (I don’t, but I had understood that you did, and unless you’re purposely doubting their teachings you ought to abide by them.) Doing something to impair personal fertility is a well known no-no under that big tent. Surgical repairs to body functions are not no-nos.

[DoughtyOne]

I’m not Catholic, and I don’t subscribe to the idea that having a vasectomy is a sin. So one sort of surgical remedy weighs the same as any other to me.

When a couple has reached the number of children they can support reasonably, and do not wish to bring more children into the world, I view it as a responsible mature decision to either have the husband get a vasectomy or the wife to get her tubes tied.

You may have determined that I am a Catholic, because I will enter threads about government negetivism against it, and address it for what it is.

Personally, I don’t look upon Catholicism favorably, but it’s not my duty to frequent Free Republic threads saying so. I do view an attack on one religion, to be an attack on all religions, and I won’t stand for it.

Watching the Left in the U. S. sing the song of Separation of Church and State non-stop when it comes to trappings of Christianity in our schools, then claim the government has every right to dictate to religions what their dogma will be, is totally unacceptable, and I’ll step in to defend any church on the wrong end of government tyranny.

[HiTech RedNeck]

My bad for the misidentification.

Anyhow, it still seems... unnatural. It would be like having your coronary arteries plugged instead of getting a bypass.

And even under a looser evangelical standard, if you’re married and there is no biblical reason to regard the marriage as dissolved, to do this without the wife’s agreement would also seem, well, against the nature of marriage. I could not countenance anything so crass or defiant before God as to carry out your “bright and early” scenario.

[DoughtyOne]

We probably agree on far too many things for this disagreement to be taken as a bellweather token of the compatability concerning our overall outlook on things.

Like you, I don’t think a man should have a vasectomy without agreement from his spouse, but limiting his ability to have one on the signed permission of his wife is ridiculous. Once again I must remind you that no man will ever get sign-off rights when a viable life exists and the female desires an abortion.

I also note the general default position when it comes to the custody of children upon divorce. Unless the guy is financially ably to spend tens of thousands of dollars, he has very little chance of shared custody.

I think it is also instructional to take note that I as a husband can’t even have access to information on credit accounts my wife may have, even though if something happens to her, I will immediately become responsible for paying off the debt.

I see these as glaring inequities in the rights of men, even though the last one probably does go both ways. It’s still an untenable situation.

[HiTech RedNeck]

What bugs me most is the idea of doing one wrong thing as a protest of another arguably wrong thing.

It sounds like the protocol of that particular physician’s practice was probably put in place (peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers too) in order to satisfy the doctor that the wife’s assent isn’t just a whim. That this is nothing something forced upon his practice by the government. I say fine for the physician for being so ethical about it, and this does not stop other physicians from having looser policies. You don’t know what this physician thinks about spousal rights. It might be that if he were a gynecologist he’d also want the consent of a husband of a married woman in order to tie her tubes if it was not an emergency.