Great. South Dakota's governor Matt Rounds has signed the execrable bill banning all abortions except to save the woman's life. From the governor's statement:If we are pro-life, we must recognize the need to take care of women who are faced with a difficult pregnancy. Regardless of the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy, we cannot protect the innocent child, unless we protect and care for the mother. We must help each mother to see the value of the gift that is a child, and nurture the mother for her own sake and for the sake of her child.
Yes. If a woman is raped by a stranger, if a girl is raped by her father, and a pregnancy results, well, hell, our most sacred duty is to get those females to see the blastocyte, the embryo, the fetus, not as an unwanted and unwelcome lifetime souvenir from the most fundamental violation anyone can experience, but as... a gift! Thank you! ThankyouJesus! For this Gift! This gift of a baby I will have to carry to term, deliver, and then raise and nurture for the next eighteen years because some bastard decided to make me the subject of his own personal power play! Yes, because South Dakota is so very concerned about nurturing women and caring for them and their compulsory children. This is sick. This is just completely fucking sick.
Some of the commentary has been unbelievable (if you haven't read Digby's rundown yet, you must, and this from Briopia). So much vitriol directed at hypothetical selfish women who want all the fun of sex but none of the responsibility. The tut-tutting of the righteous who remind women that if they don't want to get pregnant, they should not fuck. They. Should. Not. Fuck.
As if women's sex lives are conducted in a vacuum, perhaps through trips to a vending machine where they pop in a couple of quarters, Sex drops into the slot, and boom, they somehow end up pregnant. When was the last time anyone heard a conservative commentator admonishing men to Not Fuck unless they are prepared to raise the resulting child to adulthood? Hmmm, roughly.... never?
Where on their conveniently disjointed continuum between Virgin (good) and Whore (bad) does the married woman fall? Say, the married woman who already has three or four kids AND a job AND a working husband and cannot afford another child? I don't recall seeing admonishments for married couples to abstain from their Biblically-mandated marital obligations... so if their birth control fails, as can happen, where are they left? Sigh.
What a deliciously black-and-white world that must be to live in. No independent thought required. If you don't want to get pregnant, woman, don't fuck. It's so simple. While you're at it not fucking, if your existing kids are hungry, well, why don't you just go buy them some food? What's that? You don't have enough money to feed them? Well, then, why don't you just demonstrate some industry and go get a job? What? You can't afford child care while you're at work? Well, you should have thought about that before you decided to have sex with your husband. Anyone could have told you he'd leave sooner or later; you should have seen it coming. Stupid bitch. It's all your own fault.
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