One discussion that has emerged this week, as we watch women's rights be dismantled in Georgia and Alabama, is the hypocrisy pro-lifers
sometimes have about fertility clinics (i say "sometimes" because there has been some protest of the destruction of leftover IVF embryos, and the pro-lifers fought hard against stem cells, plus there was the whole
George W. Bush snowflake-baby photo op.)
Despite these caveats, it remains the case that you are more likely to see protesters outside planned parenthood than at the IVF place.
When we were tweeting about this over the weekend, my reply was "Because there’s no sex involved. No “sluts” to punish. Doctors created those embryos and lots of the doctors are men doing capitalism"
THEN, last night, I saw this, from a reporter who is covering the legislature's debate in Georgia:
@lyman_brian, reporter for Montgomery Advertiser, on Twitter
Chambliss, responding to the IVF argument from Smitherman, cites a part of the bill that says it applies to a pregnant woman. "The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant."
(I wish there was more than a tweet from a reporter, like an actual news article, but "Bryan Lyman" is identified by the paper as covering the legislature, and the
Montgomery Advertiser is a venerable paper with a 190-year history)
So, yeah. Someone said the quiet part loud. Life does not begin at conception unless that conception happens through sex. It is not about life, it is about sex.
It is about punishing women for having sex, which is STILL fucked up because they ALSO punish women for saying "no" to sex.
Like, men never stop trying to get you to have sex, and are total psychos when you resist, then they also want to go psycho on the women who do give in and give them what they want?
It just does not make sense. Like, the logical answer is that they are not penalizing women for having sex, they are penalizing women for having sex without giving up their independence. Like, what they are mad at is that women have sex with them but do not become their property by doing so?
That is the only thing that makes sense, BUT, they do not
want all of that property. A man is going to seek sex from exponentially more women than he can afford to support. They seek sex from women they would never
consider supporting, and they are especially not going to support all of those kids.
Men want LOTS of partners, but they are only going to take responsibility for one, then they want to limit the options of the non-primary partners who have to take responsibility for the results of their insistence on having lots of partners.
It's money, isn't it? Men want a variety of partners, but they would be broke if they had to support them. Best way to avoid that is to put women who could make claims on them in jail.