I suppose you might get half-hearted help from a church so long as you joined that church and agreed to embrace whatever dogma they sell.

Yep, that’s the HINT HINT part.

It’s as if some are destroying the world, with warfare, global-warming-denial, peak-oil-denial, overfishing, etc. … And the rest of us are left with no rational response.

One, I’ve been saying for a lot of years that people who say “a fetus is a person with full human rights” mostly don’t mean it, and you can tell, because they don’t act like it.

Two, on the other hand, some of them actually do believe it, and you can tell, because this IS how you act if you believe that anything that kills a fetus is murder, manslaughter, or negligent homicide. If you truly believe “abortion is murder!” then you don’t say “abortion is murder! but murder is okay in this circumstance, or in that circumstance, or …”

What we’re reaping here is the consequences of our failure to engage the religious right on a false scientific assertion of theirs: the decades out of date assertion that once the sperm cell fuses with the egg cell, what you have right there and then is a fully formed human being that just needs to grow up. It’s a scientific assertion that grows out of Watson and Crick’s misleading and downright false claim that the DNA molecule is “the blueprint for life.”

It is, in fact, no such thing, which is why you can’t fertilize an embryo in vitro and grow a person in a petri dish. If you try it, as soon as the embryo reaches the point where cell differentiation should begin, it dies, for lack of the chemical signals that tell it how to grow into a human being. Look up “epigenetics.” DNA is not a blueprint for life, it is a random-number seed, or at best the #include file that defines a couple of variables, leaving out all of the constants and the code.

But we let them have that point, and now we have a steadily increasing number of voters who think that IUDs and hormonal birth control kill babies, because they think that an unimplanted fertilized egg is a baby. And we do not have time to educate them out of it. Which leaves us looking, to them, like we are arguing just what I said above, that sometimes killing babies is better than not killing babies, an argument so repulsive that it practically invites the comparison to 19th century African-American slavery. And that’s why we’re going to lose.

The dollar amounts will sound trivially small to most foreign ears, but NZ has a pretty small population :D

It is not our fault we cut sex education out of the schools to appease a vocal group and then our teen birthrate jumped.  It is the parents job to teach these things!  Except parents expect everyone else to raise their children now, unless you want to mention condoms.

It is not our fault we gave tax cuts to a corporation who polluted our land and water because we cut regulation to, but as a tax payer you have to pay more to get the water safe to drink again.  If we go after the corporation they will leave and take their tax money away!  (Ignoring how many of them pay rates under 5%).

Same with the required vaginal ultrasound. Not only could the procedure possibly cause problems, it serves no purpose other than making anti-choicers cackle with glee. Women are not stupid. They know what a pregnancy is, and they know what an abortion is. Forcing them to have an ultrasound (that they must pay for) is nothing less than a violation of the right to bodily sovereignty when it comes to medical decisions. This is a right that should be inviolate for ALL individuals (and it is, for everyone except pregnant women).

Whether or not the zygote/embryo/fetus is “a person” is irrelevant. I am a person. You are a person. Yet I cannot demand that you donate so much as a drop of blood to me, even if in doing so, you would save my life. That’s because everyone has the right to make medical decisions for and about their own bodies, including what risks they are willing to take.

People (including children) on the UNOS list die every day because they do not receive a donor organ in time. However, just because these people will die without a donated organ does not mean that they can demand or require another person to donate that organ. Again, that is because each of us has the right to make medical decisions for and about our own bodies, and to decide what risks we are willing to take. We cannot even be required to donate any part of our body after our deaths. This is called bodily autonomy. Each individual is allowed to make their decisions based on their own personal code of ethics and beliefs. I don’t want someone else having the right to make decisions about MY body and MY health based on THEIR personal code of ethics and beliefs. Do you?

So why should a woman be required to donate the whole of her body for nine months, especially if in doing so, she endangers her own life? Even in the US, pregnancy and childbirth represent very real risk to the woman. If she CHOOSES to continue the pregnancy, that’s her right. If she CHOOSES not to do so, that is also her right. As no PERSON can require any other PERSON to risk their health/life in order to save their own life, why should a fetus – which some people insist is “a person” – have that right?

And of course, the fetus wouldn’t really be the one making the demands; rather, the demands would come from people who have absolutely ZERO risk or responsibility in the pregnancy and ZERO risk or responsibility once the pregnancy comes to term. Would you want a stranger making medical decisions about YOUR body? About YOUR health? I know I wouldn’t. In fact, we have many laws that protect the right to bodily autonomy in relation to medical decisions. Would you want to see those laws struck down? Would you want someone else to have the right to insist that you donate your blood; or part of your liver; or a kidney? Would you want someone else to decide that one of your loved ones should be required to do so?

An egg is not a chicken. An acorn is not a tree. A fetus is not an autonomous person. Certainly all of these things have the POTENTIAL to become an egg, a tree, an autonomous person, but POTENTIAL is not the same thing as REALIZATION.

I would NOT want a HCP to make the decision whether or not to tell me I have cancer if s/he is doing so based on his/her personally code of ethics and beliefs. They should not have that right. I do not want a pharmacist to have the “right” to refuse to fill a legally written Rx from a licensed HCP based solely upon their personally CHOSEN code of ethics or beliefs.

Where would this stop? Would firefighters and cops have the right to deny help to people if the beliefs of the people that needed their help were against their personal code of ethics or beliefs? Would teachers have the right to decline to educate people who did not share their beliefs? Would we have to have separate buses, planes, etc., each driven or piloted by people of certain beliefs solely for the people who shared their beliefs? Separate dining establishments, supermarkets, etc., so no one would have to serve people they didn’t agree with?

Do you see how this could get very ridiculous very quickly?

I lived during the 60s and well remember the civil unrest, based on the belief of some that people with different colored skin were unequal. I do not want to see a return to those times, and I worry about anyone who does.

Just keep in mind that while you might agree with those that want to curtail the rights of others, you may not always be immune to this discrimination.

First they came for the communists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me

and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I suppose you might get half-hearted help from a church so long as you joined that church and agreed to embrace whatever dogma they sell.