So, the Republicans continue on their quest to define a pregnancy as beginning when a sperm fertilizes an egg, thus making any woman who’s every had sex a potential baby killer, since fertilized eggs get flushed out of our systems unnoticed all the time.
Will they collect all our used tampons and examine each of them for evidence?
Will they start shouting and carrying signs outside of churches protesting the fact that, if pregnancy begins when an egg is fertilized, then the biggest abortionist in the land is God?
I can’t wait.
Filed under: Politics and Other Nonsense, abortion
I find this far too frightening to make fun of. We have no recourse against the unilateral, unconstitutional imposition of this policy — none.
God is the biggest pregnancy terminator around if you believe in God the decider.
I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that if you took a poll about babymaking, most people don’t know the details of ‘fertilize egg, then zygote is implanted in wall of uterus.’
Especially when asking ‘Does life begin at conception?’
This Just In:
Holy Ghost Indicted For Statutory Rape of Young Jewish Girl.
‘I just want to get on with my life now’, claims the victim known only as Mary Roe. ‘I’m uncomfortable with all this attention and a afraid that people will turn me into some kind of icon.’
If convicted, the Holy Spirit faces up to fifteen years in prison and will be registered as a Sex Offender in the State of Tennessee.
Maybe I’m just being prejudiced, but I don’t want people who don’t know “fertilize egg, then zygote is implanted” providing my gynecological care or running Health and Human Services. It’s sort of like letting “most people” design bridges — something we don’t do on the basis of poll results.
Isn’t it a kick in the ass that the very folks who freak about about relativism in any other discipline use relativism (and mislabel it liberty of conscience)?
Is it honestly relativism, though? From where I sit, it looks like yet another step towards enshrining a particular brand of Christianity as the state religion. Because, you know, no one is out there writing position papers on my right to get hired at a seafood house so that I can kick anyone who orders shrimp, crab, or lobster out of the place.
I love dictionaries, but they very explicitly give the same weight to dictionaries as to leading medical organizations (you know, people who know things) in the proposed rule when they explain that different people have “different” interpretations of what pregnancy is. They also cite a Zogby poll as evidence that because some people *think* a “human being” is in existence when sperm meets egg, that this should be allowed to be true for your healthcare provider, who make take it into consideration when you go to your community clinic seeking contraception. They’re legitimizing public opinion as scientific and medical definition, and that so chaps my ass.
[I should note that I don't always agree with those medical organizations on other issues, but the idea of making rules based on what random, non-trained people *think* makes me kind of crazy.]
I would not, strictly speaking, call it relativism. However, in my working life (and I’m sure you see the same thing), students who don’t have an empirical leg to stand on but can’t bear to let go of their misconceptions about genetically based racial inferiority (or whatever…yes, we get some doozies) retreat to “well, this is what I think.” On my evaluations, they tell me that it’s mean of me to continue to show them that they are wrong, like I’m really rude for denying them the right to their opinion and grade them down for their “beliefs.” I don’t think they could do that if there hadn’t been a couple of generations of thinkers trying to usefully demonstrate that “objectivity” isn’t really objective in the slightest. Maybe I’m wrong, but I see the same stupidity — you can’t make me accept empirical data because I just don’t believe it — at work in this section of Code.
With, as you say, the ultimate objective being an enshrinement of a particular strain of Christian thought into our reproductive health care system.
I’ve been called mean for a lot of reasons, but not for that one. Perhaps it’s just subsumed into my general meanness. For some reason, though, the biggest arguments of that type I get are from students who have had a military history course or watched a lot of the History Channel, who want to know things like why the Carolingians didn’t just put a big army together, invade the Viking homeland, and crush the threat before it became so devastating. And you can talk material and organizational resources and medieval theories of war at them until you are blue in the face and they just keep saying how they would have done it better. This particular incident occurred before our most recent war; I’d love to be able to go back to that student and ask him what he thought of it now.
For me, the “relativism” issue comes up more in students simply rejecting any good thing a primary source has to say about a particular ruler or institution. (They are willing to accept any criticisms as objective, though. Funny how that goes.) Because obviously the writers were biassed.
This seems a propos:
“Is Heaven Populated Chiefly by the Souls of Embryos?“
Thanks, Rian. That’s a great article and I hadn’t seen it before. It kind of pulls into stark relief just how much of this is religiously motivated and, as such, should be a clear Constitutional problem.