Friday, November 29, 2019

Every Sperm Is Sacred. And Each Ectopic Pregnancy, Too.


In the great state of Ohio a bill introduced in the state legislature doesn't just want to ban abortion completely.  It also wants ectopic pregnancies to be re-implanted in the pregnant woman's uterus.

There is no medical procedure that could achieve that, but never mind, because the point of these proposals is to pull and tug our public discourse toward the far-right edge of pure misogyny*. 

Thus, it's not only abortions our wannabe forced-birth overlords and overladies work to control; it's the whole pregnancy and every stage in it that could go wrong.  And at each of those stages the only focus is on the fetus.  It's utterly irrelevant for those who wrote this bit of lunacy that an ectopic pregnancy can be a life-threatening medical emergency** for that aquarium presumably existing only for the purpose of letting fetuses swim in it.  Because it's only an aquarium in the forced-birth world, not an actual human being.

The proposal also includes other nice bits:

In addition to ordering doctors to do the impossible or face criminal charges, House Bill 413 bans abortion outright and defines a fertilized egg as an “unborn child”.
It also appears to punish doctors, women and children as young as 13 with “abortion murder” if they “perform or have an abortion”. This crime is punishable by life in prison. Another new crime, “aggravated abortion murder”, is punishable by death, according to the bill.

It's common for pro-choice writers to muse about the reasons for such extreme forced-birth views and it's also equally common for them to offer various theories about the impact of retrogressive religions and so on.  But whatever the underlying explanations might be, they are clearly linked with viewing women as tools (aquaria for fetuses) which should be under the control of those who keep writing such bills, not as full human beings.

(For the every sperm is sacred reference, watch this YouTube video.)
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*  I doubt the proposal will pass.  Its real purpose is that changing of the goalposts in what is deemed acceptable compromises when it comes to abortions.

On the impossibility of the reimplanting procedure:

There is no procedure to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy,” said Dr Chris Zahn, vice-president of practice activities at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. “It is not possible to move an ectopic pregnancy from a fallopian tube, or anywhere else it might have implanted, to the uterus,” he said.
“Reimplantation is not physiologically possible. Women with ectopic pregnancies are at risk for catastrophic hemorrhage and death in the setting of an ectopic pregnancy, and treating the ectopic pregnancy can certainly save a mom’s life,” said Zahn.

**  I know two cases where an ectopic pregnancy happened, one with a good ending.  The last thing the medical providers, working feverishly to save a life, should worry about in such crisis situations is going to prison because of not managing to perform a nonexistent medical procedure.