Thursday, June 27, 2013

Rick Perry, For the Egg-Americans


The Governor of Texas preached to Senator Wendy Davis,  who filibustered the proposed Texas abortion law which will  make abortion available to only the wealthy and might also put birth control out of the reach of poor women.  Because Davis used her reproductive choice one way, Perry thinks she should make sure that no other woman can do otherwise.

Perry also states:

It is just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters.

It looks to me like lives only matter for the Texas Republicans until they leave the uterus.  After that it's tough luck.  And Texas just executed a woman whose life obviously no longer mattered.

Is Governor Perry a vegan, by the way?  If he is not, then he limits his concerns to human lives, at least as long as they can be viewed as not-yet-born.  Egg-Americans, in short.

The Texans will get their law making reproductive choices much harder for most Texas women.  That, in turn, will cause a greater number of unplanned pregnancies and possibly more abortions carried out elsewhere than within the health care system, with the associated extra health risks.  None of this makes any difference to the wealthier Texans who can travel for abortions, and all of this makes a much larger difference to the poorest Texans. 

I would dearly like to see one forced-birther write a long and careful treatise on the question how the rights of people-inside-people could be judged and compared in the world they wish to create. 

As every fertile woman is a potential home for an egg-American,  would the protection of the latter require that all fertile women  be given pregnancy tests before they can go downhill skiing or before they can have a glass of wine and so on, just in case they are endangering a minor?  All miscarriages should certainly result in police investigations.

The legal complications with the "human-life-begins-at-conception" are tremendous, and even if my examples sound extreme they would be relevant in the forced-birth world.  Indeed, given the extremist view which would ban abortion even in the case of rape, women could be theoretically stripped  of any choice over their own fertility.  All that would be needed is a rapist who decides to pass his genes on and succeeds in achieving conception.

That is the sense which I get from some pro-lifers:  That what they ultimately desire is to remove all control of fertility from women.  It's probably not an accident that it is the female-controlled contraceptives which the pro-lifers regard as abortifacients.