Sam Brownback. What a guy. A guy with, it appears, a uterus, so he feels it--really, really feels it--when the subject of abortion is raised. Please, he pleads, this time thankfully without the child-drawn poster of embryos shrieking don't kill me, but with unfortunate repeated embracing-hands gestures toward his midsection, please don't allow rape/incest exceptions to abortion prohibitions!
This is callous enough toward women who are pregnant as the result of sexual violence. But when the rape or incest victim is a child herself (see Angry Black Bitch for an infuriating example), it is completely beyond the pale. Because here a week-old cluster of cells is not merely equated to the established, breathing woman who is its unwilling host; the embryo is raised up to a position superior to that of the woman. Of the child who has been raped. Brownback, for all his sanctimonious carping about the lives of innocent children, would gleefully destroy the life of the existing child in favor of the blastocyst stuck to her uterine wall, forcing her to carry the product of her rape to term and deliver it. Emotional and psychological devastation aside, she's expected to welcome this baby and care for it for the next 18 years, raising it up to be a productive citizen despite having been violated in the most basic, soul-shattering way possible. Despite maybe living in poverty herself and, oh yeah, being fourteen fucking years old and utterly unprepared for either the physical or emotional demands of parenthood.
He'd do that to a child because of the twinges he gets in his pretend uterus when he thinks about a precious pink perfectly-formed baby being aborted. The fact that daddy is also grandpa and mommy is still a child don't ameliorate his twinges, and Sam Brownback feels it here, in the womb, goddammit.
This is beyond the bizarre apparent fundamentalist desire to punish women for having sex outside of marriage, or for any reason other than procreation. This is the absolute elevation of the fertilized egg over any other state of human existence. This is the mindset that brings us conscience clauses for fundamentalist pharmacists and emergency room doctors who refuse to inform rape victims about emergency contraception. It brings us politicians who repeat that emergency contraception causes abortions, and repeat that over and over and over until the slack-jawed public accepts it as reality and newspapers don't bother to counter such statements with the truth. It brings us an entire new generation seeing men make the definitive pronouncements and laws regarding women's lives and bodies. It makes me sick.