Sleeping With The Enemy

 Lara Bassett:

North Dakota lawmakers passed a Personhood Constitutional Amendment initiative … that would amend the state’s constitution to give legal rights and protections to human embryos.  If the ballot initiative passes the House, North Dakota voters will decide on it during the 2014 elections.

“We are intending that it be a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, since Scalia said that the Supreme Court is waiting for states to raise a case,” state Sen. Margaret Sitte (R), the sponsor of the personhood initiative, told HuffPost. …

Sitte said that while the bill could effectively end abortion in North Dakota, she supports the bill because it would protect women who experience medical complications after the procedure. “Yes, this bill could possibly close the abortion clinic [in Fargo],” she said. “I’m not saying that’s the intention of the law [even though it is]. The intention of the law is to ensure that women have adequate health care [except for the kind we don’t want them to have] and the follow-up care that they need.”

The State Senate rejected a second personhood bill introduced by Sitte that would have made it difficult for women to use in vitro fertilization. The bill would have prohibited doctors from disposing of unused embryos after an in vitro cycle, which would force families to pay hundreds of dollars each year to keep the embryos frozen indefinitely. It would have also prevented women with cancer or other illnesses from using a sperm or egg donor to conceive through in vitro fertilization.

“It’s like a bad episode of the twilight zone,” said Rania Batrice, communications director the North Dakota Democratic Party. “These bills just open the door for every other state in the country to interject themselves into everybody’s bedroom.”

Excuse me. There were no “bad episodes of the twilight zone,” Ms Batrice.  And really— who doesn’t want to have some over-blown self-important pasty-white fundamentalist douche-bag Republican mucking about with their private parts in their own bed.

Sitte said she fully expects North Dakotans to pass the personhood measure in 2014, which declares “the inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development must be recognized and defended.”

Come again?  “…any stage of development”?  So a zygote— the initial cell formed when a sperm and an egg get together— the earliest developmental stage of an embryo— is a person??  That’s an awfully slippery slope, isn’t it?  Soon you’ll be singing…

That’s right, your scrotum is full of tiny persons, Homer.

“We know North Dakotans are pro-life,” she said. “This just puts a statement of fact into the Constitution.”

A majority of “North Dakotans” may well indeed be pro-life. But if they’re going to insist all North Dakotans must treat every zygote like a real person, they had better be prepared to go a whole lot further than just getting into bed with a bunch of their randy neighbors;  in fact, they’d better be prepared to go “all the way”— up their vaginas, and into their ball sacks.

A child has been in existence about nine months when it experiences birth.  But is it a person?  All our concepts of reality are based on the assumption of the actuality of human personality.  But when and where does a zygote get a personality?  It is not a “fact” that Personality has been shown by science, or religion, to be a part of the physical brain.  That’s because personality— and indeed, the unity of selfhood— are endowments of the supermaterial world;  they are not inherent in matter.  

But I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess the North Dakotan pro-lifers don’t really care when a zygote actually becomes a person.  They don’t really care that you can’t legislate morality.  And it is their theological arrogance that makes them the enemies of science, and society.

Batrice is right when she says these bills will force open the doors to our bedrooms in every other state in the country.  But the rational majority doesn’t have to let them in.