Being a woman is tough, especially when living in a state whose conservative government is more concerned about what goes on between your legs than actually doing something socially proactive, like legislating to end poverty or extend human rights to people who are still treated as second-class citizens.
The state that has a crappy musical named after it has one of those governments. On Monday, Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Mary Fallin, one of those aforementioned conservatives, signed into law the cleverly named “Humanity of the Unborn Child Act,” a catchy title for a bill that “shall clearly and consistently teach that abortion kills a living human being.” I mean, who could ever criticize something called the “Humanity of the Unborn Child Act?” That person must be a monster!
The act, which was written by fellow Republicans, namely state Sen. A.J. Griffin and Rep. Ann Coody (that’s unfortunate), allows the state health department to develop a public information campaign highlighting the physical development of a fetus and pointing out the alternatives to abortion (one of which, this writer assumes, is keep it, give it a “please don’t drown me” baptism, and teach it to be a “warrior for the babies“). This campaign is aimed at high school students, so when they’re not learning about sexually-transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy, as sexual education is largely non-existent in Oklahoma, at least the government can rest assured that knocked-up 15-year-old’s with herpagonasyphilaids aren’t getting abortions.
You know, priorities and such.
Never before in the history of ever has abortion been the only means by which to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. If it were, Charles Dickens would not have been an author. There have always been plenty of alternatives, but if one were to listen to the religious vomit pouring from the mouths of the American Right, one would think women are having contests with their friends to see how many fetuses they can abort.
Some people are just staunchly against abortion, sure, and they have every right to be. What they don’t have the right to, however, is pushing their ideology on people who do not share it (there are people in Oklahoma who aren’t anti-choice like their government seems to be) and using bullshit arguments to justify their tyrannical methods of lawmaking. The “Humanity of the Unborn Act” is an act of tyranny by the Oklahoma government, but since it isn’t being signed into law by the “magic negro” whose been President these last eight years, good luck getting conservative lawmakers anywhere to see it that way.
But more important than politics and partisanship is that the “Humanity of the Unborn Act” is based on what can only be considered sheer idiocy. Over 91 percent of abortions take place before the 13th week of gestation, with the majority of those procedures being performed before eight weeks. At eight weeks, the fetus looks like a character from a David Lynch movie, has not yet developed the ability to feel pain, and can only survive attached to his mother. At this point, even at the 13th week when all of the aforementioned details still apply, the growing fetus has a life no different than that of a parasite or, you know, someone suffering the indignity of a feeding tube.
If we’re going to use “life” as a means to justify oppressing a group of people and forcefully taking away a right they have, even if they never use it, then we need to do a much better job at defining what the hell “life” actually is.
Featured image by Suparna Sinha, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
h/t KFOR
