I’ve been trying really really hard not to blog about politics of late. But I just cannot stay silent any longer. Did Todd Akins skip every history class, every current-events reading (hello conquests of South America by Europeans, hello Serbia/Slovenia)? His screamingly screwball ideas on biology: women can’t get pregnant when they get raped, and if they did it’s because they secretly wanted to because otherwise their magic powers would “shut the whole thing down”?
This is one of the men who writes our national laws?
Dang.
And he and Paul Ryan are likethis on this personhood thing.
Their bill would convict me of manslaughter for having had a miscarriage at nearly four months. There’s no getting around that, no explaining it away. Every baby conceived via in-vitro? The new illegals. Raped? Too bad.
If you haven’t read my old neighbor’s story, please, please do. She faced the consequences of exactly what they’re trying to do.
Laws are not intentions: laws are laws and you can’t wave away the part you don’t like–if it’s wrong, or some part of it is not quite what you meant, regardless of political expediency you don’t write much less pass that law. Period.
Can you picture a rapist suing for custody? I guarantee you that scenario will happen under that bill, and note that the very first thing announced out of Tampa as the Republicans get ready for their convention is that their plank includes a personhood declaration: all life, beginning with a single cell, has the full rights of a walking breathing human being. A potential person trumps a real one. No exceptions, not to save the life of the mother. Have an ectopic pregnancy? Catholic hospitals statistically already treat them surgically rather than medically so as not to directly harm the never-viable fetus, despite the fact that doing so can render the woman unable to ever carry another child and is often medical malpractice.
But our hopes and our families, they don’t matter there.
They cannot cry religious freedom when they are accepting money from the government of all the people, for all the people.
The Republicans put that plank in their platform despite all the states where the voters rejected that very thing. Including Todd Akin’s own Missouri.
Mitt Romney is not a Catholic and the Mormon Church knows that life is messy and that there may be circumstances we may be forced to factor in while grieving our loss. So why does Romney go along with this?
Why does the Republican party want government to stay away from regulating their guns, their Wall Street, their polluting corporations and their rich but demand that that same government be right there between every woman’s uturus and her doctor? I understand not liking abortion, I fervently don’t like abortion either. I also understand that we live in a multicultural, diverse nation that prides itself on its tolerance.
And on its justice.