According to some of our elected leaders, it's a good idea to threaten to bomb important Muslim holy sites, like Mecca and Medina, as a deterrent to Muslim extremists bombing us. When in doubt, escalate. This seems to me not all that different from suggesting that we pro-choicers should threaten to blow up the Vatican just because a few pro-life extremists would like to blow up abortion clinics.
Which brings me to my second topic of the day, and not the first time mentioned on this blog, nor probably unfortunately the last. Abortion. As in, who gets to decide. As in, Ohio Representative John Adams and his proposed legislation that would bring potential fathers into the decision-making process. Representative Adams has decided that men should have more of a say in determining whether a pregnancy should end in abortion or not. As he explains, "This is important because there are always two parents and fathers should have a say in the birth or the destruction of that child."
I have no problem with this, on its surface, because in an ideal world, women and their partners would be making this difficult decision together.
But in the real world, of course, this is often not the case.
And in Adams' bizarre and twisted world, men should not be given more of a say, but rather should have the only say. In Adams' world, women would basically need permission slips from the fathers of their fetuses in order to obtain an abortion. The bill itself lists all the possibilities that would be forbidden, i.e. the woman cannot lie about the identity of the father, the woman cannot claim the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest without submitting court or police documents attesting to the rape or incest, the woman cannot claim that she does not know the identity of the father but must submit a list of her sexual partners in order for paternity tests to be performed, etc. But the clincher, the main point of the whole bill, is this:
When the fetus that is the subject of the procedure is viable, no person shall perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman without the written informed consent of the father of the fetus.
Didn't we already deal with this concept when the Supreme Court shot down spousal notification restrictions in Planned Parenthood v. Casey fifteen years ago? If women don't need to inform their husbands, how in the world is it feasible to even imagine requiring them to get permission from a one-night stand?
To quote the text-messaging generation, wtf?!?
Which brings me to my second topic of the day, and not the first time mentioned on this blog, nor probably unfortunately the last. Abortion. As in, who gets to decide. As in, Ohio Representative John Adams and his proposed legislation that would bring potential fathers into the decision-making process. Representative Adams has decided that men should have more of a say in determining whether a pregnancy should end in abortion or not. As he explains, "This is important because there are always two parents and fathers should have a say in the birth or the destruction of that child."
I have no problem with this, on its surface, because in an ideal world, women and their partners would be making this difficult decision together.
But in the real world, of course, this is often not the case.
And in Adams' bizarre and twisted world, men should not be given more of a say, but rather should have the only say. In Adams' world, women would basically need permission slips from the fathers of their fetuses in order to obtain an abortion. The bill itself lists all the possibilities that would be forbidden, i.e. the woman cannot lie about the identity of the father, the woman cannot claim the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest without submitting court or police documents attesting to the rape or incest, the woman cannot claim that she does not know the identity of the father but must submit a list of her sexual partners in order for paternity tests to be performed, etc. But the clincher, the main point of the whole bill, is this:
When the fetus that is the subject of the procedure is viable, no person shall perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman without the written informed consent of the father of the fetus.
Didn't we already deal with this concept when the Supreme Court shot down spousal notification restrictions in Planned Parenthood v. Casey fifteen years ago? If women don't need to inform their husbands, how in the world is it feasible to even imagine requiring them to get permission from a one-night stand?
To quote the text-messaging generation, wtf?!?
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