Menstruation is Murder!

[elfs]

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

Comments

[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.