2011 was a banner year for anti-choice activists who succeeded in pushing through a record number of abortion restrictions. But it’s a new year, and it appears the GOP is dead set on outdoing itself. Republicans in Congress and across the country are introducing a variety pack of extreme anti-abortion bills — including personhood initiatives, heartbeat bills, and fetal pain bills — that saw some success last year. Here is a run-down of the abortion restrictions American women across the country are already facing in the first month of 2012:

– PERSONHOOD: The Virginia General Assembly’s very first bill, House Bill 1, is a “personhood” measure that defines life as beginning at conception and would essentially outlaw abortions. Modeling it on Mississippi’s failed measure, Virginia Republicans threaten to outlaw birth control and in vitro fertilization for couples trying to have a baby. Anti-choice activists hope to push similar measures in at least 11 other states, including Ohio and Kansas.

– RACE-BASED ABORTIONS: Following in Arizona’s footsteps, Florida Republicans introduced a bill that would “require abortion providers to sign an affidavit stating they’re not performing the procedure because the woman did not want a child of a particular gender or race.” Despite a complete lack of evidence, they insist that minority women are seeking abortions, or have a higher abortion rate in their communities, because they loathe the race of the fetus.

– FETAL PAIN: Florida Republicans are simultaneously pushing a bill that prohibits abortion after 20 weeks based on the unfounded idea that fetuses can feel pain. “They suck their thumbs,” said state sponsor Rep. Daniel Davis (R). “They get hiccups. They get excited when their mom talks. They feel pain.” The medical community, however, insists that it is highly unlikely the fetus registers pain as its brain is not developed enough. U.S. Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) introduced the same measure to ban post-20 week abortions for women in Washington, D.C in order to protect a fetus from “the agonizing process of being aborted.”

– HEARTBEAT BILL: While a more radical heartbeat bill is slowly proceeding in Ohio, another kind of “heartbeat” bill is also gaining a foothold in the Oklahoma legislature. State Sen. Dan Newberry (R) and state Rep. Pam Peterson (R) filed companion measures that “require abortion providers to use a fetal heart rate monitor on the fetus of a woman who is at least eight weeks pregnant and make the heartbeat of the unborn child audible before an abortion is performed.” The heartbeat can often be detected as early as “six to seven weeks,” before a women even knows she is pregnant.

House GOP Reps. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) are also pushing their own anti-abortion bills in Congress. Duncan’s bill would “require abortion providers to obtain written certification from a woman seeking an abortion, then to wait 24 hours after that certification before performing the abortion.” Jordan’s bill would “require women seeking an abortion to be given the chance to view an ultrasound of their unborn child before obtaining the abortion.”

In a substantial victory for women’s health last week, President Obama approved a new rule that requires most employers to cover birth control in their health insurance plans, without additional cost-sharing. Naturally, Republicans were quick to object on “moral” grounds, calling it “coercive actions to force people to abandon their religious principles.”

Despite the fact that the new rule maintains a religious exemption for religious institutions and non-profits, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) introduced the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act to ensure that all providers can back out of contraception coverage if they claim religious objection. Promoting his bill on the Janet Mefferd Show yesterday, Fortenberry decried Obama’s decision as “a bailout for Planned Parenthood” that is “politically and ideologically driven” because, somehow, birth control “is unrelated to the basic needs of health care”:

FORTENBERRY: Fundamentally, I believe this is a bailout for Planned Parenthood because what it does is provide a number of electives that are now free and it is ideologically and politically driven because it is unrelated to the basic needs of health care, most of which is driven by the onset of chronic illness — that’s about 74 to 75 percent of where the costs come from. So if we were serious about trying to get underneath the underlying factors that are driving up health care costs and really worry about prevention, we’d focus on health and wellness and chronic disease prevention. That just leads me to conclude that this was politically and ideologically driven...It’s a bailout for Planned Parenthood, it’s a direct subsidy to the abortion industry, who is entangled with these services, that’s their political agenda.

Listen here:

As Right Wing Watch notes, contraception actually plays a vital role in a woman’s reproductive health. Increased access to birth control helps reduce the number of abortions because it helps prevent the leading cause of abortions: unwanted pregnancies. But as one study noted, greater access to birth control in the U.S. “has been hampered by barriers including costs, lack of provider training, and misconceptions held by both patients and providers.”

Obama’s decision to ensure greater access is about ensuring women can manage their own reproductive health. It is not a “bailout” of Planned Parenthood, which focuses 97 percent of its work on services for “health and wellness and chronic disease prevention.” The only “politically and ideologically driven” act here is Fortenberry’s outrage.

Rick Santorum criticized the Obama administration for reducing federal funding to abstinence-only programs during a town hall in Florida this morning, and claimed that the president’s decision to de-emphasize the initiatives suggests that Obama wants “people to be in poverty.” “What is this president doing,” Santorum asked, “he is deliberately misinforming the most vulnerable people in our society and targeting them toward a life that has economic potential.” Watch it:

The Department of Health and Human Services did change its policy for grant awardees, limiting how programs that receive federal dollars can teach abstinence. But those groups can continue preaching abstinence in non-federally funded initiatives, even though the evidence suggests that such programs are ineffective or “even harmful and have negative consequences by not providing adequate information for those teens who do become sexually active.” Studies have not found that abstinence-only programs cut pregnancy rates, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), or even the age when sexual activity begins.

Gov. Mitch Daniels’ (R-IN) Republican response to the State of the Union address faulted President Obama for failing to admit the “grave” state of the nation and urged lawmakers to “trust Americans enough to tell them the plain truth about the fix we are in, and to lay before them a specific, credible program of change big enough to meet the emergency we are facing.” Daniels highlighted the sorry state of America’s safety-net programs — Medicare and Social Security — and warned that unless “we…save” these initiatives, “these proud programs” will “implode”:

“There is a second item on our national must-do list: we must unite to save the safety net. Medicare and Social Security have served us well, and that must continue. But after half and three quarters of a century respectively, it’s not surprising that they need some repairs. We can preserve them unchanged and untouched for those now in or near retirement, but we must fashion a new, affordable safety net so future Americans are protected, too. [...]

“The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing Listening to them much longer will mean that these proud programs implode, and take the American economy with them. It will mean that coming generations are denied the jobs they need in their youth and the protection they deserve in their later years.

Watch the speech:

The comments were meant to lay the groundwork for the GOP’s renewed push for Medicare privatization, a rebranded effort — hinted at last week by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) — to cloak Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) “premium support” plans in bipartisan colors and tout more moderate initiatives that would add more legitimacy to the GOP approach. In reality, Daniels’ rhetoric about Medicare’s impending demise is greatly exaggerated.

As Maggie Mahar has points out, according to the program’s trustees, by 2024 Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) won’t be exhausted, but rather “insolvent” — which simply means that dedicated revenues will not be sufficient to pay all of its bills. The hospital fund will meet 90 percent of its commitments and in the succeeding years that shortfall will slowly widen and then contract, so that in 2085, Medicare could pay out 88 percent of its obligations.

That’s hardly an implosion, but it also doesn’t mean that we can allow the program to grow at its current rate. Fortunately, the Affordable Care Act will reduce Medicare spending by $86.4 billion from previous projections and lower the average annual Medicare spending growth by 1.4 percentage points between 2012 and 2019. “By 2019, it is projected to grow 7.7 percent—0.9 percentage point more slowly than we projected in February 2010,” a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) report has concluded.

In fact, far from misleading Americans that “we should change nothing,” Obama has proposed to accelerating those savings by expanding the authority of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — a 15-member commission that would make recommendations for lowering Medicare spending to Congress if costs increase beyond a certain point — and finding more savings in the Medicare program.

Republicans, however, reject these measures or other reforms that would actually slow Medicare’s growth rate. After all, the success of any of these changes would undermine the political argument for privatization.