Fearless on my breath...

TBogg points to this piece straight out of that bastion of morality, Utah:

Incest is no exception to a father's right to know what's going on in his daughter's life.
That was the message from Utah lawmakers who refused Monday to make an exception for incest victims in a proposed law that would require parental consent and notification before a girl's abortion.

"There is a life inside of this life. And how that life is taken care of is very important to me," said Sen. Darin Peterson, R-Nephi.

Current Utah law - which was adopted in 1974 - requires doctors to notify a girl's parents before ending her pregnancy. HB85, sponsored by Ogden Republican Rep. Kerry Gibson and Peterson, would change state code to require doctors to get at least one parent's permission 24 hours before the procedure. Doctors could proceed without consent in medical emergencies or to protect the health of the mother.

The bill would allow girls to ask a judge to bypass the parental consent requirement if she fears abuse or is pregnant as a result of incest. At the same time, the legislation still would require a doctor to notify a girl's parents of the abortion, effectively nullifying the judicial bypass.

[...]

Conservative senators said the legislation is a test of their morals.

West Jordan Republican Sen. Chris Buttars scoffed at McCoy's suggestion that the legislation might force teens to other states for abortions or into their bathrooms to attempt the procedure on themselves.

"Abortion isn't about women's rights. The rights they had were when they made the decision to have sex," Buttars said. "This is the consequences. The consequence is they should have to talk to their parents."

Yes you read that correctly, flat, straight out, no holds barred pregnancy is a punishment for being a dirty, dirty whore. And there, gentle readers, is the entire crux of the pro-life movement. Even if that sex was forced upon her by her father, the girl still needs to be punished...presumably for tempting the old guy into it with her filthy feminine wiles. Remind me again how these assholes differ from the Taliban?

Oh, speaking of which, check out this charming little story about a merry bunch of thugs calling themselves the Christians Lovingly Advocating Decency [CLAD] (the hypocrisy, it burns!). And check out how they "lovingly" harassed, vandalized and terrorized some women whose only crime was to not consider their own bodies steaming cesspits of sin and depravity.

I have to say I found Lance Mannion's latest post on the abortion debate both interesting and decidedly frustrating. I was trying to put my own ideas together to respond, but then Rana in the comments said it far better than I ever could:

I hate to say it, but for me the personhood of the fetus is beside the point. Presumably one of the rights of human beings is the right to control their own bodies. This is why we do not legally require people with O-negative blood to donate blood, why we do not legally require parents to donate kidneys to their children, why we do not legally require children to donate marrow to their parents, why we do not legally require anyone to give up any of their body in order to support someone else's.

It is true that a fetus, especially one that is more pre-term than one that is nearly ready to be born, lacks the ability to live without the biological contribution of the woman in whose womb it exists. So why should its need for a woman's uterus trump the woman's right to control her own body, given that a need of this kind carries no legal compulsion for any other category of person?

Now, there may be moral or ethical obligations that devolve upon the mother -- or the blood donor, or the organ donor, et al. -- in a situation like this, but those are the purview of churches and individuals, not government. I especially do not approve of the legal imposition of the moral code of a belief system I find to be vicious, rigid, and anti-woman, as if my own moral code was not good enough.

I personally would be reluctant to have an abortion if I became pregnant, because I _do_ believe in that fetuses are more than just clusters of cells, but that decision to give over my body and health to the support of another human being should be MINE. Not my partner's, not the fetus's, and certainly not that of judgemental, self-righteous people who know nothing about me or my life and couldn't care less about what happens to me during the pregnancy or either me or the child after birth.

So whether the fetus is a pre-baby or a clump of parasitic cells is not decisve to me. Either one believes that women have the same right as men, children, and fetuses to control their own bodies, in which case one must reject restrictions on abortion of any kind, or one is choosing to see women as legally inferior to the rest of humanity.

We may wish that adult female human beings behave in selfless ways, but I find it morally repugnant to single them out for legal coercion when they choose to exercise the same rights to bodily integrity that the rest of humanity can exercise unimpeded.

Yeah, that about sums it up for me.

But...
Women Who Make the World Worse is now at number 120 on the Amazon list, so from #29 just a few days ago to #120 today. All I can say is BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

Big fuckin' kudos to Jane at Firedoglake for putting the nails in the coffin of this one. Her response to the wingnuts swearing vengeance for poor little Katie-waitie:

They want to strike back? Bring it. Love to have the traffic. Because unlike the Corner where they apparently rescue people from eating lead-based paint off the walls, put them in front of a computer and subsidize their deep forays into Herbert Spencer scholarship, we have advertisers. I'm going to guess they will not be sending anyone with a book coming out. Nobody quite that brave.

Heh.