I want it all!

No, not “career and kids” all. I’m talking about both equal rights AND equal representation.

Right now, the energy in feminism seems to be going towards equal representation, which is great. From the Women’s Media Center, to E.V.E., to the New Agenda and many more, women everywhere are getting together to form new organizations and work towards that elusive 51%.

But since Barack Obama (that feminist superhero) took charge of the White House, it doesn’t seem like there’s much going on in the area of equal rights. NOW is the lone, and often weak, voice crying in the wilderness. Why? After all the anti-choice things the Democrats have done and UNdone, is there any doubt that our rights to control our own bodies are slipping away day by day?

If anyone needs yet MORE proof of the backwards direction we’re going in, let’s just take a look at what happened this week in Nebraska.

On Tuesday morning, Nebraska passed a bill outlawing abortions at 20 weeks based on the belief that fetuses begin to feel pain at that stage. By the afternoon, Gov. Dave Heineman signed it into law, along with a separate bill requiring a mental health screening before terminating a pregnancy. The former marks a dramatic legal shift: abortion restrictions in the state are now based on fetal pain as opposed to viability. Don’t doubt for a minute that activists are hoping to effect the same change nationwide. As Nebraska Right to Life director Julie Schmit-Albin told the Times: “What we didn’t know in 1973 in Roe versus Wade … we know now.”

But what, exactly, do we know now? Anti-abortion activists claim that fetuses feel pain at five months gestation, but, as the Times reports, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists “says it knows of no legitimate evidence that fetuses experience pain.” The paper also quotes Caitlin Borgmann, a law professor at The City University of New York, as saying: “There is certainly no solid scientific evidence establishing that a fetus can perceive pain at these earlier stages, so any court decisions to uphold such broader laws could only do so by disregarding the importance of good scientific evidence.”

Okay, so laws regarding my medical rights are being passed based on “belief” rather than science. Quelle surprise! These so-called “right-to-life” activists are the same people who want to declare a fetus to be a person, but are perfectly happy to declare LGBT unpersons.

But let’s not pass over the even more unbelievable part of this story, which is, to my mind, the real “win” for the anti-feminist forces: Women who want to terminate their pregnancies in Nebraska must now pass a mental health exam. In other words, some man has to determine that they aren’t doing so, as Barack Obama would say in a landmark moment in the 2008 campaign, ”just because they’re feeling blue.” From the fabulous Marie Cocco:

One thing is certain: Obama has backhandedly given credibility to the right-wing narrative that women who have abortions — even those who go through the physically and mentally wrenching experience of a late-term abortion — are frivolous and selfish creatures who might perhaps undergo this ordeal because they are “feeling blue.”

The wordplay began when Obama, in an interview with the religious magazine Relevant, said he believes late-term abortions can be banned except in cases where “a serious physical issue … arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems with the mother carrying that child to term.” In other words, a woman’s emotional and psychological health would not be considered factors. Obama said he doesn’t think “‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother.”

Since this contradicts the landmark Roe v. Wade decision and subsequent court rulings that have upheld mental health exceptions to abortion bans, the campaign had to flip back from the flop. Obama spoke to reporters on his campaign plane and gave a definition of a mental health exception that goes like this: “It can be defined by serious, clinical mental health diseases. It is not just a matter of feeling blue.” He noted that neither abortion-rights supporters nor the courts have ever interpreted a mental health exception that way.

They have not. Because this sort of language — that women might have late-term abortions just because they feel “blue” — is that of the anti-abortion lobby. As part of its campaign to ban the procedure, anti-abortion activists have consistently depicted women who have abortions as doing so for convenience, to get themselves out of an uncomfortable jam of their own making.

Yes, Obama tacitly endorsed the right-wing language on women and their civil rights, and ever since his election, the right-wing narrative on choice has been empowered and is running forward at full speed. And the anti-choice members of the Democratic Party, like Bart Stupak, are being given precedence over the vastly more populous and popular pro-choice members. Meanwhile, the equal rights crowd, which promotes the ERA and full equality for women, has been whimpering along and hoping for crumbs from the Democrats’ table.

This sad state of affairs is the reason why I don’t spend much time talking about equal representation. I don’t have to - many others are doing that, and very well indeed. But I do intend to keep talking about equal rights and the right to choose my own reproductive destiny, because hardly anyone else is.

Yes, dammit, I want it all. I hope someday, other women will band together and realize that equal representation without equal rights, is only half the battle.

This is an open thread.