Personhood, the undead movement, marches on
It failed to restrict women’s rights in Mississippi and Colorado, but Personhood USA won’t quit. Next up: Oklahoma
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/27/personhood_the_undead_movement_marches_on/singleton/
First, a caveat: I am ‘pro-abortion’ because I am ‘anti-human’ and attach little value to human life whether they be adult or zygote. I see the planet as containing way too many humans (though way less than what I calculate is feasible, see my post on One Trillion People) and there are already many, many, many unwanted children and children who are born into situations that make it nearly impossible for them to realize their potential and the thought of adding even one to that number is a problem to me.
Additionally, I am very pro-woman and get quite frustrated when anyone seeks to reduce or otherwise negatively impact the relatively few rights that women in the US already have. As I have said before (see previous link if necessary), the anti-abortion GOP line has been revealed as a play to push women out of the workplace and the idea of saving lives has been revealed to be a lie. Reducing abortions is most effective by increasing contraception, but these jokers want to _reduce_ contraception, which, as a natural consequence, is going to increase conceptions leading to increased unwanted babies and almost certainly increased abortions. Maybe some of these people have actually deluded themselves into thinking that a zygote really should have more rights than the woman bearing it, as I am sure there are plenty of people convinced that cats and dogs (and whales and dolphins) deserve more rights than humans (zygote or otherwise), but I believe those people are a tiny minority of the population (though they occasionally turn to terrorist activities, thus have an outsized impact) and could otherwise be safely ignored.
However, since only women can bear children, hence harbor zygotes, this sort of legislation is finely targeted toward women. I guaranteed that if men were threatened with legislation that made it illegal to have sex (or, of course, masturbate) without the intent to produce children (such as Santorum clearly believes) there would be such huge outrage that nearly every man would be marching in protest. Yet, because this only applies toward women there is muted (if one cares to dignify the response with that level of description) from men and we are left with a few squeaky wheel women trying to stand up to this wave of ultra-conservative nut jobs trying to push them damn uppity women back into the kitchen.
It is really this simple and basic: those who support zygote rights are really saying that any sex without the intent to produce a child should be illegal. The natural extension of this, of course, is any sex that is unsuccessful at producing children must be investigated for signs of foul play. So, instead of sex and family planning being intensely personal acts, these become something to be minutely monitored by the State to ensure compliance. It boggles my mind that these are the _exact_ same people who purport to be against any restrictions on guns, are totally against taxes and strenuously object to any sort of aid to the downtrodden.
So, absolutely no government interference in anything _except_ for sex and family planning!
