Maddow: GOP anti-choice crusade will affect women for generations

On Wednesday night's edition of "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow discussed how the Republican anti-women's health agenda and how it bears no relation to the will of the people, does nothing to help the economy or create jobs, and endangers the lives and well-being of women.

First, Maddow produced some sobering numbers. Under Republican legislators, the number of clinics available to women who need abortions and other women's health services is dropping from 42 to 5. In Wisconsin, the number of clinics is dropping from 4 to 2. In Mississippi, from one to none. Similar initiatives are underway in North Dakota, Alabama, Ohio and North Carolina.

"It's a pretty dramatic thing that's happening to American women right now," Maddow said. "If, instead of covering it state by state, you put it all on the same map, look at what Republicans have set in motion just since the November election."

"Don't let anybody tell you that governing doesn't matter," she said. "Where Republicans have taken the reins of state power across the country, they have used it single-mindedly to shut down women's health clinics."

It is an extension, she explained, of the national GOP platform in the last election, in which the vice presidential candidate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), said that there should be no exceptions in anti-abortion laws for victims of rape or incest and the presidential candidate, former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), ran on a platform of overturning Roe v. Wade and defunding Planned Parenthood.

"Nationally, in the last election, Republicans lost," said Maddow, "and Democrats won, but, national isn't everything. If Republicans are in control of your state, this is what they have decided to do with state governance now."

"I know it's not a beltway story," she continued. "It doesn't feel like a national story because nobody adds up what happens in the individual states to see how it affects American women, to see how it affects American rights in an aggregate sense when we do Beltway reporting in this country? But this is a national story that is significant in terms of how it's going to affect women's health, women's lives and American families for generation to come. This is a national story."

Watch the clip, embedded via MSNBC, below:

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