Anti-Abortion Crackers In GA, AL Put American Women In Their Sights With Draconian 'Life-in-Prison' Laws

Idiotic flyer circulated by the Right's zombie anti-abortionists in 2015 after Cecil the lion was butchered by renegade hunters.

Many likely recall 4 years ago when the Right's febrile reactionaries got so worked up over "Cecil the Lion" they decried the world's  grief at his butchering by renegade hunters.  The outcry from the Right's wackos was: "So what when  hundreds of human babies are being annihilated every day?"  Leave aside for the moment the fact that no sane person in his or her right mind can possibly regard a "zygote" as a person, or a fetus as an (already born) "baby". There is simply no standard by which that passes even elemental laws or tests of logic, or science.  A child cannot be "unborn" because by definition it is already born!  Thus, we send the 'child' to school, get him to do his homework, to take his medicine, cross streets safely, respect his elders and so on. If unborn, it's a fetus, not a "child" and not a "baby",   so all those activities are preposterous. They also show the entity is not a person. Don't these ignorant twits know any better?  Did they even take basic high school biology?

A person, a human person, must have at least minimal capacity for basic cognition and rudimentary choice. It must possess a brain, at the very least, which evinces definite brain waves. Anything that doesn't is a proto-human entity, but clearly not a person. The logical error made is called the "genetic fallacy" as first described by Antony Flew ('Thinking About Thinking'). That is, arguing that because a thing is going to become something, it IS something. It would be like me picking up an acorn and claiming it's an oak tree. Nope. No way. Only an insane person would assert that!

No, not when they're on their zealot bandwagons, now trying to get anti-abortion legislation before Trump's Supreme Court in the hope of overturning Roe.  Thus, millions of women who've felt secure they could access abortion services the past 4 decades now have reason to worry. 

Last Tuesday,  the inbred crackers in the state house of Georgia passed a so-called “heartbeat” bill, scheduled to take effect in January 2020.  This egregious law would ban abortions as early as the sixth week of pregnancy, when, as anti-abortion activists argue, a fetal heartbeat can be detected. It’s a time before many women realize they are pregnant. Brian Kemp is the fourth governor to sign such a law in 2019, and the sixth overall, including the governors of Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, Iowa and North Dakota.

Georgia’s law, HB481, or the Living Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, is particularly extreme because it requires that the state “recognize unborn children as natural persons,” and that they “shall be included in population based determinations.” As Mark Joseph Stern writes in Slate, because Georgia is a death-penalty state, absent any added limitations, the law “would subject women who get illegal abortions to life imprisonment and the death penalty.”

Think this is odious?    The Reepo State crackers of Alabama have a near-total abortion ban in the works. Last week, that state’s House of Representatives passed HB 344, the Human Life Protection Act, by a vote of 74-3. The bill would make abortion a Class A felony, meaning Alabama doctors who perform abortions could face up to 99 years in prison.   Worse, this misbegotten law passed the AL  House without an exemption for cases of rape, although 28 representatives refused to vote. Thursday morning, the Senate also rejected the exemption, but delayed the vote on the bill until next week, according to The New York Times.

Democratic state Senator Bobby Singleton tagged this pathological travesty disguised as a "law" correctly:  (WSJ, May 10, p. A3):

"This is just a red meat kind of bill for the Republican party nationally.  Think about what we're about to do here in this state, and how we're going to deal with the ability of a woman to make her own choice,"

Or have sovereignty over her own body, even in cases of rape and incest.   I mean, no exemptions? Only a  gaggle of madmen could craft such a degenerate law and think they've done the pro-life crowd proud.  I mean what are these forlorn crackers going to do, prosecute nature for her even more frequent aborting of fetuses?   Recall ethicist Cheryl Mendelson's point ('The Good Life', p. 159):

"Nature sloughs off early pregnancies at a high rate and we do not hold funerals for these embryos and early fetuses.  As many as 60 to 70 percent of fertilized eggs are lost overall, usually silently - without anyone ever knowing fertilization took place. Up to 15 percent of known pregnancies miscarry in the first trimester. Were we to take seriously the morbid pseudo-moralism of the fundamentalist Right, we would recognize these countless millions of miscarried embryos and fetuses as lost lives and be sunk in a vast and permanent sea of endless mourning for the unending deaths of innocents."

My argument is that if nature-biology is an even worse offender it is senseless for the Alabama or Georgia crackers to carry on their Jacobin crusade against women if they don't address that. 

The good new is that Pro-choice activists are already gearing up for legal challenges in Georgia. In a statement after Brian Kemp signed the Georgia bill, Elisabeth Smith, chief counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the law “bafflingly unconstitutional.” She added, “Bans like this have always been blocked by courts. We will be suing Georgia to make sure this law has the same fate.”

Let's even go beyond all these bullshit laws and say outright that the  Right's minions don't really give a crap about life, by which I mean fully developed life - as in the already born child.

  If they were genuinely serious in their respect and extraordinary concern for the unborn - they'd show lots more concern as well as action on behalf of the already born!   Logically, on a putative  continuum of care, if one is judicious in ensuring the nurture and survival of the unborn one continues for the born.  But these sanctimonious, hypocritical assholes do not.

Truth be told,  all those screeching loudest in Alabama, Georgia and the other states mounting these vile challenges to Roe,  are happy to turn a blind eye to the needs of the already born. Thus, they are near sighted in vociferously defending unborn life be preserved but failing to stretch that concern to supporting life of actual real life humans- already born.  Thus, their hand-wringing over the "value of life in the womb"   comes up hollow. One could then ask them what they are doing:

- To provide affordable health care and proper nutrition benefits to the baby-child. (If against Obamacare and specifically contraception then they are enablers of the abortions they complain about)

- To provide state-run and paid for child care to a mom trying to get off welfare, or to be able to work.

- To provide PAID family leave for a working mom (or dad) to spend time caring for actual newborns - as opposed to fretting about using up paid sick leave or vacation time.  This contrasted with Bulgaria where 59 weeks of maternity leave is assured at 90 percent of salary.

- To provide free schooling, right through university, as Barbados and other progressive nations have done. 

If you're only pro-life to birth and not beyond, then you're a damned hypocrite, and don’t truly believe lives matter at all.  If you’re an anti-higher tax clone of Grover Norquist – or believe taxes are only for military defense and not social support, ditto.

If you're truly pro-life you have to take civic, community ownership for the child's welfare -after it is born as much as before, via appropriate legislation- enabling it, not impeding it. And further this has to be effective  all the way through that child’s dependent years.  This is unequivocally what being REALLY pro-life means.  If one is not committed to spend the tax commons for further support of the already born  then all their squawking and protests against abortion ring hollow. It's all political posturing, a big charade based more on ego, narcissism and grandstanding than moral sincerity.

In the meantime, there are some payback options that have been proposed. One, by actress Alyssa Milano, advocates women go on a "sex strike" until the crackers in those states pull those offensive anti-abortion bills.  In addition, a number of major Hollywood production companies now plan to boycott Georgia.  One hopes that AMC - which produces 'The Walking Dead' - will join that contingent and find another state to produce its top rated series.

See also:

• I guess GA will also outlaw all prenatal testing since women must give birth no matter what