earlier this month, we gave a little bit of credit to a Republican
state lawmaker in south Carolina who showed some remorse after
voting in favor of an anti abortion bill in his state.
Now he showed remorse because it turned out that you know,
these restrictive measures are actually incredibly harmful to the health and
safety of girls and women in his state.
He realized that, but now it turns out that Neil Collins,
the republican lawmaker in question has decided to double down.
He has decided to vote in favor of yet another restrictive anti abortion bill.
Now, before I get to the details of what that new bill entails,
I do want to just refresh your memory about the short lived remorse.
This man felt okay, let's do a little rewind here.
So Neil Collins previously had voted for a six week abortion ban.
He voted for that last year after the repeal of roe v wade.
This bill that he voted for went into effect that this june.
Okay, so Supreme Court reverses roe immediately in south Carolina.
This restrictive anti abortion bill goes into effect.
The ban makes exceptions for cases of rape or
incest up until the fetus is about 20 weeks old.
The ban also supposedly makes exceptions to save the life of the mother,
but inserting the government between a woman and her doctor can get
super complicated, especially when there are certain health and
safety concerns for the woman carrying the fetus.
And so that's what Neil Collins found out shortly after the six
week ban was implemented.
Let's watch the second week that this,
that the fetal heartbeat bill became all.
A doctor called me out of Anderson.
I live in easily.
A 19 year old girl appeared at the she was 15 weeks pregnant,
her water broke and the fetus was unviable.
The standard of care was to advise her that they could extract or
she could go home.
The attorneys told the doctors that because of the fetal heartbeat bill,
because that 15 week old had a heartbeat, the doctors could not extract.
So their only choices were to Admit the 19
year old until that fetal heartbeat stopped.
I asked how long does it take to stop?
She said Seconds, minutes hours, maybe days or discharge.
They discharged that 19 year old.
The Doctor told me at that point, there's a 50% chance.
Well first she's gonna pass this fetus in the toilet.
She's gonna have to deal with that on her own.
There's a 50% chance greater than 50% chance that she's gonna lose her uterus.
There's a 10% chance that she will develop sepsis and herself die.
That weighs on me.
I voted for that bill.
These are affecting people that whole week.
I did not sleep that whole week.
He did not sleep.
And one of the things that I regret is that we had initially given
representative Neil Collins a little bit of credit for
showing some humanity some remorse for standing up to his colleagues in
the state legislature to make a point about how insanely cruel that bill is.
But then he decided to turn around and
vote in favor of another piece of anti abortion legislation.
That's actually even more extreme what happened Neil what happened?
Well, let's give you the details on this new bill that he voted in favor of
South Carolina.
Republicans have actually been working hard on this new,
more restrictive measure.
This ban started off as a total abortion ban with absolutely no exceptions,
no exceptions at all.
That was voted down.
Okay.
But since then, the ban has been revised and voted on multiple times.
And here's what the final bill looks like.
It has passed 67-38.
Here's what the garbage bill is.
The bill includes the extremely limited exception of allowing abortions for
pregnancies that result from rape and incest if the pregnancy is less than
12 weeks along and if the doctor reports the rape to law enforcement.
The bill also allows abortions to save a pregnant person's life, but
criminalizes doctors if they perform abortions for any other reason.
So the previous bill that this lawmaker voted in favor of and
then later regretted was actually less restrictive than this new one.
And what I love about this guy is the statement he released after deciding to
vote in favor of the more restrictive, anti abortion bill in south Carolina.
Here's what he said.
These are excerpts from the speech he gave today.
We live in a society now where we don't receive the same information.
We move from one faux outrage to the next with each news cycle.
We network on social media platforms instead of face to face and
we assign aside to every issue.
Even the Supreme Court, federal law enforcement agencies and
education are now partisan.
In short, we live in a state and nation of toxic tribalism.
Okay, so let's pause for a second.
I'm not really interested in hearing what he has to say about toxic
tribalism after voting for a restrictive anti abortion bill.
Okay.
That is fueled by manufactured culture wars in this country.
You look at the history of the anti abortion movement, you know,
jerry Falwell, that that theocratic zealot, you know, that he didn't say
a single negative thing about the roe v wade ruling until five years later,
when another fundamentalist named paul, weir IQ reached out to him and
said, you know, religious leaders and religious voters in this country
can accumulate a lot of power if we could just find the right wedge issue.
So it took Falwell five years to say anything
against the Supreme Court ruling in Roe V wade.
Not because he actually gave a damn about abortions, but
because he realized that he could exploit that health issue,
that women rely on for his own political gain for his own political purposes and
what religious leaders in this country were actually fired
up about the reason why they wanted to accumulate political power had.
I mean they wanted to do it to respond and reverse desegregation.
They were furious that schools were being integrated.
They were furious that Nixon did away with tax exempt status for
private schools that were still segregated and they knew they knew in
order to reverse all this we need to accumulate political power.
We just need an issue that doesn't scare our religious voters away from us.
Because if they were to be honest with religious voters,
then they would have to say listen,
we don't want black kids to go to school with white kids and believe it or not.
That wasn't very appetizing to a lot of religious voters at the time.
So they decided to send out flyers.
They actually threw a bunch of flyers in church parking lots with all of this
misinformation about abortions.
And that fired up religious voters that galvanized them and
that's how it came to be the right wing in America right wing leaders.
They never cared about abortion.
You think they care about human lives.
Humans die in their states every single day over the policies they
implement insanely cruel austerity measures that they implement.
I mean they care about lives really.
We know it's B.
S. Let me give you the last part of his
speech here.
He says I knew at the end no one would share a nuanced position.
What's your nuanced position bro, let tell us what your nuanced position is.
You go from telling us that you're up all night because you can't sleep over
how guilty you feel over voting for restrictive abortion measures and
then you turn around and you vote for even more restrictive abortion measures.
What where's the nuance?
Let me continue though.
I fully understand the comments are about to be all negative.
Yeah, that's right. Because you're garbage.
It's why I lead off with something more important than this issue where
we receive our information, how we communicate with each other and
can we return to being a community that knows one another?
Or do we just tweet insults at each other?
I'm trying to do my part to the best of my ability with that.
I'm now humbly.
Your punching bag o neal Collins everybody, everybody.
We should all give Neil Collins a massive hug, show him some empathy, right?
Because he just stripped rights away from every single female in his state.
But the real victim Neil Collins Neil Collins.
Poor guy, a person in a position of power who gets to play with people's lives.
He's the real victim now, he's apparently trying to preempt any
possibility of someone telling him exactly what he is and he's garbage.
That's it. End of story.
All right, Well, let's talk about some other domestic terrorists in this country