From the candidate:

“I think it’s just and I think it’s proper to have Pro-Life on the ballot,” he told the Idaho Press-Tribune of Nampa. “If I save one baby’s life, it’s worth it.”

Yes, putting the slogan “pro-life” on the ballot box is going to make young potential mothers between the ages of 18-29, who as a voting bloc are notorious for their 100% attendance at the polls, think twice before they decide to hobble themselves with a pregnancy that they don’t want or can’t handle because a strawberry farmer from Backwater Idaho’s all-loving invisible friend in the sky will send you to hell for destroying a fertilized egg.

Pro-Life doesn’t stop the crazy there, however:

He says he will run for the highest state office on the ballot every two years for the rest of his life, advocating murder charges for doctors who perform abortions and for women who obtain the procedure.

Why stop there?  If we’re going to go down the road of religiously mandated murder charges then we might as well round up every guy who has ever masturbated.  That’s billions of potential humans who are being killed according to the narrow religious definition of life.  We should probably also grab any woman who uses birth control or anyone who purchases a condom, because it’s a well known fact that Trojan brand and Ortho Tri-cyclen are long-running government-sanctioned mass murderers that would make Hitler and Stalin look like kittens in comparison.  And it goes without saying that anyone who uses the morning after pill should probably just be sentenced to death on the spot so we can stop the moral threat that birth control poses to society as a whole.

Technorati Tags: pro-life, Idaho senate, abortion debate, Idaho politics, Idaho, religion

These Christian groups are trying to turn this into a complicated morality debate, but the entire situation can be boiled down to two conflicting views about when life starts: Science tells us that a high dosage of chemicals from the morning after pill prevents a fertilized egg from implanting itself on the wall of the uterus therefore preventing a pregnancy from ever happening. Religious leaders believe that a fertilized egg, a single cell that hasn’t even begun dividing and doesn’t have anything approaching consciousness, should be afforded the full rights that living humans who have had their cells divide a few billion times enjoy.

The usual histrionics are put into the article to try and make the plight of this single-celled potential human seem more endearing:

It is a medical fact that the morning-after pill (a high dosage of the birth control pill) and most, if not all, birth control drugs and devices including the intrauterine device (IUD), Depo Provera, Norplant, the Patch, and the Pill can act to terminate a pregnancy by chemically altering the lining of the uterus (endometrium) so that a newly conceived child is unable to implant in the womb, thus starving and dying.

It is a medical fact that a cell doesn’t implant in the uterus. That cell probably wasn’t going to implant anyways. Cells are regularly fertilized and then fail to implant all on their own without any help from pills, but you don’t see any crazy fundamentalist Christians shooting up the local church because of those millions of natural abortions God performs every day. The thing making its way through the woman’s body is not a child. It cannot feel pain. It can’t starve because it doesn’t even require nutrition unless it implants, which it won’t because of the contraceptive. It will just disappear into the body along with thousands of its fertilized brethren who are similarly fated to never enjoy the thrills of cellular mitosis.

So my question is simple, where is the definition of human life going to stop? Abortion rights activists were once happy to reserve their ire for abortionists who were going after fetuses that were well along in their development in the womb. There is even a certain point in fetal development when I’m willing to concede that abortion leans more towards killing a potential human, but that point definitely isn’t when a fertilized egg is floating around a woman’s body possibly getting ready to implant itself. The egg can’t feel anything. The egg is probably going to fall victim to God, nature’s most prolific abortionist, and fail to implant all on its own without the morning after pill stepping in and upping the odds.

The religious groups have come up with several other arguments that no doubt sounded compelling in their own minds when they were thinking them up. Pharmacists object because of health concerns, pharmacists object because of conscience, pharmacists have a free speech right to prevent people from using contraceptives. Here’s a hint for these groups since they haven’t caught on quite yet: if you have to rephrase your ludicrous religious belief system into equally ludicrous rational-sounding arguments then it’s probably time for you to realize that you’re siding with a lost cause and it’s time to give up. The bait-and-switch tactic of trying to preach religion in secular terms might work for your congregations that are well practiced in doublethink, but it isn’t fooling anyone else.

I think this quote from Wisconsin pro-life activist Peggy Hamill sums up the religious position quite nicely, though not in the way she likely intended:

Simply wishing something to be true does not make it so.

You might want to sit and think long and hard about your advice, Peggy. The morning after pill and birth control don’t cause abortions. You can’t abort something that was never there to begin with. Even if it was an abortion (which it isn’t, legally or biologically, I can’t emphasize this enough), abortions are perfectly legal in the United States and the argument could be made that the law is broken if someone is prevented access to perfectly legal medications.

Pharmacists aren’t exercising any sort of freedom of speech when they refuse to prescribe said pill. What they are doing is violating their professional obligation and imposing their irrational religious beliefs about life and sexuality on other people. Leave it to the church to oppose a bill that clarifies and forces them to obey the law of the land and claim that their freedom of speech and freedom of choice is being infringed when they’re the ones actively trying to do it to everyone else around them.

Technorati Tags: morning after pill, pharmacists, birth control, abortion, religion, christian groups, pro-life, pro-choice