If only these fanatics put this amount of energy into providing care and protection for the “born”

I’d like to start by making them attend, and pass, human biology classes, so they learn about miscarriages and the time between fertilization and implantation, and the imprecision of their idea of conception.

There’s an element of punishment in the way these people think. It’s as if they think getting pregnant is sinful, even if married, and by golly, you are going to carry that baby to term. Very sick people.

What’s ironic is that the courts already consider a corporation as a person being granted rights instead of privileges. That decision is doing more harm to the people advocating this nonsense about whether to consider a fetus as a person when they should be demanding that the courts reject corporate personhood.

Could god then be arrested and charged with murder following a miscarriage? Makes sense to me (assuming god exists, an assumption I happily leave to others).

Would women taking the morning after pill be charged with murder and their pharmacists as acccessories?

At the risk of feeding Arlen Spectre’s attacks on Dawn Johnson, forcing women to carry a pregnancy they don’t want is the very essence of involetary servitude.

It reduces women from being persons themsleves, to merely a womb with legs. Preganancy places a strain on every major organ on a woman’s body and can take years off her life.

Women literally “give life”, that is a piece of their own life, to create the new life that will be born.

I willingly gave up a piece of my life to bring forth my wonderful daughter, But thatis the whole point.

I was willing to do it. It was MY CHOICE to do it. Nobody ofroced me to do it.

I had may comlications in my preganacy and was ill for long time after. I bore those consequences because they were the result of MY CHOICE. If they had been forced upon me, I don’t think I could have withstood it.

It was knowing that if things got too rough that I had an escape hatch that helped me to hang in there and carry to term.

Got that?

Knowing I could get a medically necessity abortion helped me to hang in ther and endure more hardhip than I would have believed myself capaable of.

The right to an abortion,specifally the right to a late term mdeically necessay abortion, helped me find the strength to carry to term, during a very scary preganacy.

I also believe that the psychologal effect, the comfort of knowing that I had options, gave me the physical strength to make to the finish line.

Had I felt trapped an forced, I think I would have lost the will to live, and there would have been two lives that would not be here today.

The people who do stuff like this have no respect for families. I’ve always assumed that they figure the rules somehow won’t apply to them or their families.

Cartoonist Al Capp, circa 1968: “What I want to know is where were the liberal abortion laws when we needed them?”

Of course not.

It’s always about controlling Other People.

“My little girl will never have sex before marriage . . . My wife will never have serious health problems during pregnancy . . .”

Sorry but YOYO at that point

THe ultimate goal of the religious crackpots is to get rid of birth control. That way people would be abstaining more.

I don’t know about abstaining more, but it would certainly result in more women being in what the TheoCons see as a woman’s proper condition: at home in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. Enough of them being out in the workplace taking jobs away from men and ignoring their true place in life.

A large percentage of the girls in my niece’s (late 1980s) Oklahoma high school had one or two kids before graduation. Their parents typically opposed sex-ed and were strongly against making contraception available to teens. The point is, they didn’t have any delusions about the likelihood of their daughters becoming pregnant… at least not after the first time. When the grandkids were born they raised them as their own.

In their view contraception was apparently a greater sin than unnecessary and unintended conception.

Richard Ziser (the last Republican tomato can who was put up against Senator Harry Reid) is trying the same thing in Nevada.

Of course, his defines “everyone possessing a human genome” as a “person” and therefore entitled to due process.

The fact that I’m linking to a non-Nevada source is because the local press have been flooded with Beckians and Dittoheads.

Not only murder, but premeditated.
Fundies! Harumph. Thinking they get to decide what other people feel is proper. Humbug.
And, that’s me being nice about it.

I believe that the wingers have the idea deep in their minds that sex is wrong and dirty and that they indulge only for having children. Prim and ignorant to the core. I think that’s why so many of the men are caught playing away from home.

They’re also working on CA — according to their website, they’ve submitted proposed ballot language to the CA AG’s office, and are waiting for approval so they can start gathering signatures.

The other states they want to target (beyond MO, NV, and CA) are AL, CO, OR, MT, AZ, AR, FL, OK, MI, ND, SD, OH, NE, and MA.

If locals in these states are aware of the status of any petitions there, please drop the info (and a link) into the comments!

But I thought that FREEDOM was the big issue with these teabagger types.

Yahoo! It means that kind of law could be passed in Utah, a very likely occurance given the Mormon monopoly in the state legislature. those ‘persons’ could then be counted in the 2010 Census, giving Utah enough ‘population’ to get the 4th seat in the House of Representatives they’ve been trying for. Whoopee, the chance for another Repug in the House, I can hardly wait!/s

The freedoms that they permit us. Anything that makes you happy is not permitted.

I agree with PJEvans. This is another case, like creationism and intelligent design, where pseudo-science or a deliberate misreading of current scientific knowledge is used, in violation of the Establishment clause, to foster religion. Only those bits and pieces are kept which accord with their religious views. Everything inconvenient or contradictory to them is discarded or ignored.

They are working on my last good nerve. And, then what?

I live in Missouri and I think the general population is too freedom-minded to pass such an initiative. On the other hand, they banned gay marriage. On the other hand, the need for safe abortion services strikes close to home for a lot more people than the perceived need for gay marital unions. On the other hand, your Right-to-Lifers seem more than willing to push their agenda hard and harder and harder until someone like Phil Kline or the Oklahoma legislature tries to make make government into an extremely invasive Big Brother. I wouldn’t place a bet either way on this issue.

Happiness is mandatory, citizen! Unhappiness is treason. Treason is punishable by execution. Glory to Alpha Complex.

Government control of Healthcare = BAD!!!

Government control of your womb = GOOD!!!

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot???!?!?!

They are consistent in their inconsistency. I will give them that.

I tend to agree, but those who oppose this kind of stuff will have to stand up and make the case for it.

Back in the early 90s, there was a push in MO to enshrine in the state constitution legalized discrimination against LGBTs. The fundies started circulating petitions to put this on the ballot, and sold it as “the Christian thing to do.” When word of this got to more mainline people, a group of clergy in St. Louis and KC started organizing against it. They said “We have different views on the morality of homosexuality, but we are united in saying that discrimination against LGBTs in jobs and housing and public accommodations is not just bad civil policy, but immoral. All people deserve equal treatment by society.” The fundies were stunned that pastors would oppose them, and never filed their petitions at all. They figured it would be a walk in the park, and they were wrong.

All in all, I’d like the same to happen again with this.

You would think after accusing people of being Marxists, sooner or later they would realize that they are the proletariots.

Freedom is not for women. What are you thinking? Women don’t count. They’re incubators.

These people don’t care about the babies when they’re born, either. My county in Ohio had a tax levy on the ballot a year or so ago to provide money for child-abuse prevention, which we need very badly, and it failed.

Yet we have “pro-life” zealots write letters to the editor all the time.
This is so they can say they’re “pro-life” and get their ticket to heaven stamped, that’s all they care about, everyone else can go hang.

As the U.S. ranks nearly last (29th in August figures) among industrialized nations in its rate of infant mortality, will this apply to the born infants whom the insurance companies, and gov’t, fail as well?

http://patriciashannon.blogspot.com/2009/08/infant-mortality-ranking-shows-us-at.html

the bizarre thing here is that historically the rethugs have led the charge to prevent and block legislative attempts to expand the definition of personhood. In fact, their behavior on this issue appears to define personhood (requiring Federal protection) as a state of being between 270 days prior to birth and between 30 and 90 days prior to birth (depending on state law). Personhood as a protected state seems to cease at that point for roughly 18 and a quarter years give or take (and indefinitely for gays and brown people).

I remember the ad nauseum fights in the ’90s over US ratification of Hague 33 and 34 where the rethugs were concerned that proposed measures to protect children from horrors like child selling might undermine religious proscriptions and parental choice (up to and including the AEI’s open endorsement of child trafficking in the name of free markets). Then there are the endless and still unresolved attempts by rethugs to block US ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for many of the same reasons – because they feared expansion of legal recognition of the definition of personhood as it related to American children as entities separate from their parents and
communities (we are still the only country on the face of the planet than hasn’t ratified that treaty, for exactly this reason). Finally there is the bizarre and ongoing rethug attempts to block Sen Levin’s innocuous NVMRR legislation, which the poor senator repeatedly introduces every year to no avail for well over a decade, again precisely because they don’t want to extend the legal definition of personhood. Rethugs confuse me.

You’re better off than me.

They’ve burned through my last good nerve. I simply hate the fuckers, and would like nothing better than if they just….. disappeared.

Always wanting to tell other people how to live their lives instead of just minding their own is just so goddammed old, dam I’m tired of it.

Government not allowing you to choose your doctor = BAD

State government not allowing you to choose your insurance option = GOOD.

Opt-out is a cop-out.

And to think, twenty some states (22 IIRC, sorry no link) don’t even require maternity care be part of health insurance, and as such, more and more insurance companies are refusing to cover it in those states calling it “selective” or voluntary, and not medically necessary.

I read it, and can’t remember where, so sorry no link.

“Pre-birth police” is an excellent meme.

Silver lining? I wonder if in those States that in part define person hood as biological, the law of unknown consequences could be a suit that Corporations therefore have no rights as persons. That effectively reverses the SCUS non-dision in Santa Clara vs Southern Pacific. That’d go a long ways in reestablishing the Republic

it’s worse than that. The rethug position on personhood appears to be, ‘we support Federal Intervention in the right of personhood only when it is politically and, in respect of our lobbyists, financially convenient for us to do so.” In terms of their legislative history, this logic appears to apply even with regards to the rights of the pre-born.

Should the pre-born be protected from harmful medications and tainted food and other toxins? No, cause our corporate donors might object. We’ll fight against that bill. Should parents be prevented from entering into contracts with respect to unborn children even where those contracts might lead to an abortion? Nope. Should medical records be legally linked to the pre-born and infants so that they might get lifesaving care? Nope.. cause the Mormons and some other fundie groups object. This is just a small sample of recent rethug confusion on this issue (see my #32 above).

These people are just despicable.

Here’s an obvious and fatal flaw in this kind of Christian “thinking”: WHAT ABOUT IDENTICAL TWINS?

If “personhood”, whatever that means, starts at conception, then identical twins share a single personhood. Does that mean that one of the twins can be killed later without committing murder? Can they have their own distinct bank accounts?

The implications are many, laughable, and obvious to anybody who’s not a complete fucking godtard.

A three-day-old embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst.

From IVF: There are for the sake of comparison, more then 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed do not have brains or even neurones. Consequently there’s no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction at all it is worth remembering in this context that when a person’s brain has died we currently deem it acceptable to harvest their organs, provided they have donated them for this purpose and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a human whose brain has died as less then a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such.

http://www.eubios.info/ABC4/abc4058.htm

Fertility clinics would immediately go out of business, unable to operate since their staff would all be in the state pen. Likewise university researchers into causes of and cures for infertility. Of course, all abortions would be illegal, no matter the rape, the incest, the mental or physical or economic capacity of the mother or family.

Even big pharma’s at home pregnancy testing business would be immolated. Who would buy a kit, confirming the knowledge that they were pregnant, and thus expose themselves to criminal penalties for that last drink, that last swim or volley ball game?

Perhaps of greatest importance to Villagers who still have sex with fertile wives, which of them would dare have intercourse with a pregnant wife on the off chance that a subsequent miscarriage could be attributed to their nighttime domestic debauchery?

The ranks of the nation’s detective forces charged with investigating such crimes would swell to bursting with Kenneth Starrs and Monica Goodlings and Junior Schlaflys, while whole personalities departed it in droves. Police work itself would be simultaneously disdained and raised to a priesthood. The law itself would fall into greater disrespect, as it had when legislators attempted to ban liquor consumption. Next up on the agenda will be a resurgence of blasphemy laws and the banning of sex outside of “procreation in marriage, in the missionary position”. If “successful”, these troglodytes will create a wave of Mr. Hydes, one for each newly reverent Dr. Jekyll they legislate into existence.

Methinks this is not simply about stopping all abortions. It is about sending women and their liberation back to the Bronze Age from whence came our dominant Middle Eastern-based religions. Never mind the occasional scientific progress we’ve made since Aristotle, or the occasional enlightenment since Moses, since the peasant Jew usurped his authority, since the caravan administrator usurped his.

To backers of such legislation, women are furniture. They are work and pleasure slaves, idyllic matrons and, embarrassingly for them, necessary co-producers of family wealth. They have to be kept in their place dontchyaknow, because men have to be kept in theirs. Why is it that declining empires always seem to be such fertile ground for the violently desperate?

Personhood is protected from conception to birth. After that, kid, you are on your own.

Can’t get a good education? It’s your fault, kid, you should have choosen better parents.

Birth?

The new universal pre-existing condition for universal health insurance denial.

How many hands do you have?

Well there’s the way to defeat such bills…once the corporations realize that such bills will strip them of the “personhood” (and realize that such challenges will occur) they’ll throw the full weight behind defeating these efforts. It would be ironic for a progressive to sue a corporation in these states for claiming privilege as a person using this law. Maybe sue some rightwing church, or group, or big Oklahoma corporation that is run by the very conservatives pushing this law (Wendy’s Restaurants, Dominos Pizza, Olive Garden, Outback).

I am flexible about the number of hands required to make a particular argument. Sometimes, I throw in both feet and a prehensile tail. It’s quite a sight.

If this nonsense becomes the law of the land, the morning after pill will become the new contraband. It will be smuggled into the country and the most unsavory types will be meeting up with our sisters and daughters and girlfriends and wives to sell them the means to de-personify their bodies. They will get rich at it.

Okay, just reading this has made me furious. This issue was settled 36 years ago, and we STILL have people who refuse to accept that women are not the property of the Almighty Government! I thought the Party of Lincoln is supposed to believe in things like individual liberty, equality under the Law, and limited government. So how is it “limited government” when a State (or the Feds) commandeers a sovereign free person’s body and forces its will upon her?

The “pro-life” position is in direct violation of the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery in all of the States, plus federal territories, like DC. Forcing a woman to provide physical servitude, nourishment, blood, and forms of service to something/someone is a form of slavery!! Not to mention privacy and property rights (see 4th and 5th Amendments). Any and all “pro-life” laws are by definition unConstitutional.

The sad thing is, I live in MO, and our State government is heavily dominated by extremist wingnuts :(. If they succeed in putting it on the ballot (yeah, let’s just put women’s rights to a popular vote), sadly it will likely pass. DISGUSTING.