Menstruation is Murder!

[elfs]

Huckabee endorses personhood for fertilized eggs. Yeah, uh, good luck with that whole campaign thing, Huck.

Comments

[erisiansaint]

I'm very, very tired of only being an incubator, not a person in my own right. But oh, wait. I was born female, what was I THINKING?

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

Clearly you forgot about the superior needs of the homunculus (http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~canessa/images/Homunculus%20by%20Nicolaus%20Hartsoeker%201694.jpg)carried in the head of the sperm. We'll forgive you this time.

what was I THINKING?

[amberite2112.livejournal.com]

the question is "why" were you thinking.

Re: what was I THINKING?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The question from Huck would be more along the lines of "What man allowed you to think in the first place?"

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Murder? Mmm, more like reckless exposure to drowning, I suspect..... (are there unwanted children growing up in the Brooklyn sewers, too?)

Oh, BTW your writing came up as happy topic of conversation at dinner out here in deepest darkest central Massachusetts last night -- bravo for the wide span of the Intertubes!

in the sewers of Brooklyn

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

Of course! They form tribes, riding giant mutated rats and hunting the radioactive alligators.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Perhaps he would like to prosecute for the 40 odd percent of all pregnancies that end in miscarriage.

That'll fill up the prison system fer shure!

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

40%? I've run across some studies that suggest that more than 80% of fertilized ova never go to term, the majority failing to implant in the womb or dying because of reinforced recessives. It would be interesting to see how fast the police departments would get buried under the investigations that would be required after every miscarriage to determine whether the woman had done something to cause the miscarriage, which would make it murder. As a relevant side note, I remember from seeing my younger sister's birth certificate many years ago that there was a space on the form marked 'Fetal Deaths' with the number '3' typed in it; that would, according to Huckabee's intention, potentially make my mother a murderer three times over.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Funny, I heard that 66%-75% of all fertilized eggs don't make it to 9 months.

As it should be.


That's why we don't reproduce using buds or by fissioning in two: cross-combine genetic information, and throw out the combos that contain too many damaged pieces. The ones that endure are the ones that combined the least-damaged strands from both parents.

But don't take my word for it. Read about a successful, nonbiological, human-designed version of this: Genetic Algorithms. ^_^

[rarkrarkrark.livejournal.com]

Okay, with the disclaimer that I absolutely believe that abortion must remain legal and abortion rights should, in fact, be expanded.

How does this logically follow from the pro-life argument? We don't prosecute for stillbirths or crib death or other infant deaths due to natural causes, only for the ones where a human caused the death of an infant. Why would we suddenly start prosecuting for bastocystic/embryonic/fetal deaths (or "deaths" if you prefer) from natural causes.

This isn't to say that I don't think that later term miscarriages wouldn't be very closely investigated if abortion were made illegal, but the argument that pro-lifers would or want to prosecute women whose fertilized eggs failed to implant (something that is impossible to even know without very pricey and difficult monitoring of each individual woman) makes us look rather stupid.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

If a fertilized ova is "human", entitled to all the rights and protections that people have now, then a fetal death may be, depending on the circumstances of the miscarriage, murder. Some deaths are procedurally benign -- a death from old age or disease, for example, requires only a valid death certificate. However, given the "nanny state" progression, a developing fetus is in the unique position of being threatened by the daily activities of the woman carrying it. It's easy to rule that a miscarriage as a result of the woman stabbing herself in the belly is deliberate; it's less clear if the woman engages in actions known to increase the risk of miscarriage. But since the fetus clearly cannot protect itself, it therefore falls upon the obligations of society to interfere with the woman's conduct of her life in order to prevent her from taking actions that could cause miscarriage -- and, since the actions are known to increase the risk of miscarriage, engaging in those actions could be taken as evidence of intent to cause a miscarriage, which would be murder. Hence the need for an investigation.

Yes, the reasoning is convoluted and stretched, but having seen premises twisted into higher dimensions in order to create justification for laws, I can easily see the "pre-born" acquiring greater rights than the women carrying them.

[rarkrarkrark.livejournal.com]

Absolutely agreed, for any pregnancy far enough along to trip a pregnancy test. But it's not going to affect the legal status of the n% of fertilized ova that fail to implant for no cause within human control. Those things within human control that do affect implantation would likely also be controlled and whether they'd stop at IUDs or drinking coffee is anyone's guess. But that's still not the same as prosecuting people for failed implantations beyond their control. That n% (which is a fairly high percentage, by anyone's count) of fertilized ova do not implant has no bearing on the personhood argument. People don't lose personhood just because they develop a disease with an 80% mortality rate. The pro-lifers are not looking for excuses to prosecute people for failure to implant. Excuses to outlaw birth control, to control women's reproductive lives, yes. But they aren't so unreasonable to actually be planning on punishing women for fertility failures beyond their control. They recognize failure to implant as God killing a baby, and God can do no wrong, so... (hey, it's not my worldview)

The personhood argument is a red herring. Even if life does begin at conception in no other circumstance (except, not coincidently, when discussing women's sexual "obligations") in this society do people regularly argue that a person must offer up their body for the use of another person. Courts cannot order a parent to give their child blood or an organ, even if not doing so means certain death for the child. Nor can the law compel a person to give blood or another part of their body to another even if they caused the injury that led to the need of that tissue in order to preserve life. Nobody argues that this is because the child or the injured party isn't a person. It's because failure to provide the use of your body to another to preserve their life isn't legally murder, however one may look at it morally. They *do* want special rights for the "pre-born" (or special status for women as "the group people who can be forced to provide their bodies for other's use"). Getting people in the middle to see this is probably a lot more useful than pretending that the fact that the majority of fertilized ova never make it to embryohood has any bearing on pro-life arguments or plans.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

I agree that, if the conception and miscarriage is undetected, there would be nothing that would give reason to conduct an investigation. Referring to the percentage of zygote mortality was merely to illustrate how severe the natural culling of fertilized ova is, without any external 'assistance', and how many newly-defined 'people' could be used as leverage for more restrictions if such legislation were enacted.

Depending on which religious belief you hold, though, a 'person' failing to implant after conception is, by definition, consigned to Purgatory for having died unbaptized and bearing the Original Sin, which makes that occurrence being an act of God prima facie evidence that God is a child abuser -- and an omniscient deity would have known that the child was to be consigned to Purgatory before its conception, which renders it malice aforethought... but that's just one more of the internal contradictions that make it difficult for me to swallow Christian theology.

However, I can easily see the steady progression of 'expanded concern' for the unborn moving from making abortion murder to 'willful contribution to miscarriage' to outlawing things like smoking and drinking for pregnant women to requiring doctors to report all pregnancies among their patients so that the 'children' can be protected to, if the citizenry allow the usurpation of a woman's right to her own body to continue to an extreme, mandatory monthly pregnancy tests to ensure that the unborn are identified and protected as early in their life as possible.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Okay, you're right. In which case, there would have to be a coroner's inquest as to the cause of death for every person, even those just fertilized days before.

When it comes to abortion and the human rights of a fetus (or even a zygote!), the old phrase "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched" becomes very, very, very relevent.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Damn right it is!

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

Oh wait, you're talking politics, not monthly pain.

"natural death"

[(Anonymous)]

Hrm. Personhood from fertilisation until "natural death". That use of the word "natural" would imply no medical interference? So Huckabee doesn't accept treatment with antibiotics in case it would ruin his natural death? He'd be a "do not resuscitate", I'd guess...