Has Virginia been taken over by loons?

[elfs]

First, I read that Virginia is considering a bill that would create a new personalized license plate with the phrase "traditional marriage" and a pair of interlocked gold wedding bands on the plate. Virginia already has a law that bans "any contract or arrangement" between same-sex couples, and is considering writing the ban into the constitution.

In the same week, a bill entered the legislature making it a crime, punishable by up to a year in prison or a $2500 fine, if a woman has a miscarriage and fails to inform the police within 12 hours. Everyone got that? As PZ Meyers puts it: "Failure to carry a fetus to term, for whatever reason, is a crime, and must be reported to the appropriate authorities within 12 hours, or you can be sent to jail for up to a year or fined $2500. You may be crying your eyes out at an unwanted miscarriage, but you will pick your butt up and turn yourself in to the police immediately. You are a bad person."

Ick

For a giggle, though, you think the editors were having a bit of fun with this headline?

Comments

[wyrdone.livejournal.com]

Yes the VA legislature is a buch of cracked loons. Unfortunately I also still live here in VA.

Terminology questions

[jenkitty.livejournal.com]

So, if I'm on a medication which prevents implantation of a fertilized egg, does that mean I have to report my possible miscarriages every month?

And when is conception, anyway? Fertilization or implantation?

Heh. Maybe women on birth control should report their possible miscarriages every month, just to show how insane this law really is.

Re: Terminology questions

[rapier.livejournal.com]

Mmm, spam. I like that idea.

Re: Terminology questions

[mundens.livejournal.com]

I think that's the sort of protest that really should be publicized more widely.

Unfortunately, (and you can see I'm pessimistic these days) though it's likely just to lead to the state charging you money to report to them.

[rkda.livejournal.com]

...Virginia already has a law that bans "any contract or arrangement" between same-sex couples...

So you are telling me that in Virginia that a man can not legally hire a male gardner? Or butler? Those would be contractual arrangements between two people of the same gender. I wonder if the law really is written that poorly? Might be able to have some fun there if it is. *evil grin*

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Good taste in music, BTW.

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

It's entirely possible to miscarry and not be sure of that until several days later; it happened to me once.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

Tracking miscarriages isn't something new for Virginia; I remember seeing my sister's birth certificate -- she was born in Norfolk in 1964 -- and there was a field on the birth certificate labelled 'Fetal Deaths'. Which, on her certificate, had '3' in the field.

Considering that, according to what I've read about pregnancies, it is believed that somewhere between 40% and 80% of all conceptions do not go to term, with the vast majority of these terminating before the woman even knows she's pregnant, it's going to create classes of enforcement, with it being a crime in all cases, but only effectively prosecutable after a woman's pregnancy has come to official notice, either governmental or medical. Suppose a woman takes one of the in-home pregnancy tests, it comes back positive, and a week later, she spontaneously aborts? How is the government going to know, unless the woman tells someone else, and that person finks her out later? What's the government going to do? Institute 'pregnancy checkpoints' and conduct random tests to make sure women aren't concealing their pregnancies to make sure that they can be placed under official scrutiny as soon as they become pregnant?

Yes but

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, a decent portion of the VA Assembly are loons. However, they aren't the problem so much as the idiots (most of the non-loons). I think the goal of this law was to get a medical database (not personally identifiable) of all miscarriages (note the use of fetus rather than embryo--standard medical usage puts that line at 8 weeks) and all induced abortions for statistical use--both of which statistics would be useful. The drafting was very poor, but I'm uncertain that the intention was particularly evil--I'm inclined to think idiocy, rather than lunacy, is the problem here.

SamChevre