I apologize for scaring you all with that dour, nasty visage. That’s Keith Kidwell, a North Carolina state legislator, looking like a giant angry cockroach wearing a skin suit, but I know I shouldn’t pick on his looks. Maybe he’s just sour because he recently lost his primary race, so he’s about to be ousted from the legislature. In revenge, though, he just dropped a stinky dooky on North Carolina, House Bill H1232, which has the absurd title AN ACT TO AMEND THE NORTH CAROLINA CONSTITUTION TO DECLARE THAT A DISTINCT AND SEPARATE HUMAN LIFE BEGINS AT THE MOMENT OF FERTILIZATION AND SHALL BE HELD INVIOLATE AS AN INDIVIDUAL PERSON AND PROTECTED BY THE LAWS OF THIS STATE FROM THE MOMENT OF FERTILIZATION UNTIL NATURAL DEATH, SO LONG AS THAT PERSON IS NOT CONVICTED OF A CAPITAL OFFENSE. Let’s take a look at this bill which starts out stupid and bad and quickly evolves into something evil and wicked.
It is a matter of indisputable scientific fact that a distinct and separate human life begins at the moment of fertilization.
This is a bill motivated by traditional, conservative, and religious ideology, so it’s dishonest and hypocritical to claim it’s about indisputable scientific fact
. It’s a fact that the conceptus is human, in the broadest possible sense of the word; it’s not an oppossum or a grasshopper. It is not a fact that a conceptus represents a full human life. My right pinky finger is definitely human, but that does not imply it is an autonomous person who must be protected independent of my whole self. This is a common gambit played by the anti-abortion fanatics, equating a cell with the totality of the multicellular being. A zygote, a blastula, a gastrula, a neurula, a pharyngula are all a long way from being a person.
I wish there was a way to educate people on the complexity of development — we are the product of a whole series of radical changes in our morphology, yet there are always these ignorant fools who want to reduce our existence to an array of black-and-white binary changes. You are either a full human or are non-existent. You are a man or a woman, no other options are possible. All life must be flattened to one thing or another. This is a familiar strategem by the life-begins-at-conception absolutists, and this reductionism is not an indisputable scientific fact
, it’s an ideological bias.
It’s about to get much worse. Remember from the title of this bill that the right to life only applies to those that are NOT CONVICTED OF A CAPITAL OFFENSE
. This is a curious loophole because the bill is trying to define abortion as a capital offense. The state must protect the life of its citizens…
As such, that new human life is recognized by the State as an individual person, entitled to the protection of the laws of this State from the moment of fertilization until the moment of natural death.
…EXCEPT…
Any person who willfully seeks to destroy the life of another person, by any means, at any stage of life, or succeeds in doing so, shall be held accountable for attempted murder or for first degree murder, respectively. Any person has the right to defend his or her own life or the life of another person, even by the use of deadly force if necessary, from willful destruction by another person.
The effect of this law is that if a woman seeks to get an abortion, she is guilty of attempted murder. If she gets an abortion, she is a murderer. And any person has the right to defend the conceptus with deadly force, which doesn’t make a lot of sense — killing the person trying to get an abortion kills the fetus, too, making you a murderer under this law, on top of being guilty of killing the mother. That last point doesn’t really matter, since the woman doesn’t count as a protected member of society.
Why not just call this law one that declares open season on pregnant women? This is a law that makes murdering abortion doctors a right, which would have been a useful justification for the guy that murdered George Tiller.
I hope that H1232 fails and makes Keith Kidwell’s face look even more nasty and mean. One promising sign is that he had an initial co-sponsor to the bill, Ben Moss, who has since withdrawn his support after considering the implications of a bill that strips the right to live from women who had an abortion, and empowers any citizen who wants to go harlot-hunting.
There will be more stupid laws trying to declare a zygote as a complete adult human being. They’ve been doing this for years.
I assume the deadly force is intended for health practitioners.
Some legislators should have failed to implant as zygotes.
Wait! Am I calling for murder? No, not even if the numpty bill passes. Jurisdiction. It’s not like I’m planning to visit the benighted US just to watch some ball games or anything.
It gets even worse.
Around 40% of those zygotes end up spontaneously aborting, often called a miscarriage.
Most of the time you can’t tell a miscarriage from a medically induced abortion.
Already women who miscarry are frequently accused of getting an abortion and sometimes indicted, convicted, and sent to prison.
So far at least 9 states have had laws proposed making getting an abortion first degree murder, a death penalty offense.
All Red states of course.
A lot of the christofascists really want to see women executed in public.
It is all about power. Nothing shows you have power like legally killing people.
Ask ICE how that works.
Towns in Texas have made it illegal for pregnant women to travel to Blue states for abortions.
Probably unconstitutional but it is the thought that counts, I guess.
One of the more creepy things the fundie xians do is stalk and monitor pregnant women in Red states.
One of their new tools are the Automatic License Plate Reader cameras, which are installed over much of the USA these days.
Here is one such case, from Texas, of course.
Some guy in Texas used the police license plate readers to stalk his girl friend, who had an abortion.
The company that actually owns and runs these cameras is called “Flock”.
Flock is a very dubious company.
Dozens of cities have gotten fed up with Flock not safeguarding their data and removed their cameras.
“There will be more stupid laws trying to declare a zygote as a complete adult human being. They’ve been doing this for years.”
A friendly commentary: There have been numerous efforts of this sort, but for some time now they have not tried to declare a zygote a complete adult human being. They are part of the “personhood” movement, which aims to attach the legal status of “Person” to the zygote/embryo/fetus. That is, the “scientific” status of the zygote/embryo/fetus is not the key issue: the legal status is the issue, and that is a function of personhood, the first right or privilege of which is the right not to be killed (except in a small number of cases such as enemies in warfare, etc.). My lawyer spouse tells me that efforts to claim that a embryo or fetus is a human being have routinely failed, not because an embryo or a fetus is not human, but because that is not the relevant concept in law. And these are laws, not science, that are being foisted on us….
I have noticed, as I suspect you have, that the people promoting these “scientific facts” generally know little or nothing about science.
In the case of identical twins, which one gets the legal protection resulting from their joint fertilization?
Cruel and stupid.
“Yes, your honor, I got an abortion, but it was an act of self defense since the fetus was depriving me of nutrients, putting my health and life at risk and therefore, according to HB 1232 which states: “Any person has the right to defend his or her own life or the life of another person, even by the use of deadly force if necessary, from willful destruction by another person”, I defended myself.
Granted, religious zealot Republican judges won’t accept this, being the hypocrites they are.
Once again Betty Bowers on abortion here udner 5 mins long.
Old but mor relevant than ever. Wonder if Keith Kidwell actually knows his Bible or just hates women.
OK I know there are several fundie f.wits on the Supreme Court but this could face an interesting constitutional challenge on religious freedom grounds. There is a general consensus among Muslim scholars that ensoulment of the foetus doesn’t occur for the first 120 days so abortion up to that time is legal. Of course there are restrictions around it but these are in no way as restrictive as this nasty numbnut’s. They even allow abortion post 120 days but additional rules are applied. It would be interesting to see the linguistic gymnastics of the Supreme Court to turn down a constitutional challenge along these lines. I know they won’t be mental gymnastics because there isn’t much in the way of higher cognitive function there. Maybe the Pastafarians or Satanists could have a go.
He felt his iron was hot.
I’m sorry.
Next up: If a man looks at a women with lust in his heart and she does not marry him and conceive, both are guilty of murder.
@11 — Unless the man is white, in which case he’s merely an innocent incel deserving of recompense.
“Distinct and separate human life?” It’s not “separate” at all — it’s inside another person’s body and is connected to it by many different physiological systems. Forget “science” — these morons don’t even understand basic anatomy.
This guy sounds like that “secular pro-life” twit named Turley, who used to come here years ago spouting the same rubbish. It basically amounted to a sort of essentialism, with “DNA” replacing “the soul” as the ineffable thing that makes a single cell into a full human being.
For me, rights are not part of the natural order but privileges which a society grants to its members, I would agree that the right to life should apply to the whole of a human being’s existence, from conception to death. If we conceive of a human life as a “pink worm”, not an object in three dimensions but an event extended through four in which the various stages of development are just waypoints along that path. then the point of conception is when the whole process starts and the point from which the right can be held to apply,
However the pro-lifer’s position misses three key points, The first is that pregnancy involves two individuals with rights, the fetus and the mother. The second is that no right is unlimited or without exceptions, There is a famous dictum which goes, “your right to swing your fist in any direction stops at the end of my nose”, In more general terms, the exercise of a right may be curtailed where it infringes on the rights of others. The third is that the state has no right to compel a woman to carry a child to term against her will. There is no duty recognized in law which compels us to save the life of another at any cost.
The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson argues this case at greater length in her paper A Defense Of Abortion. She posits the case of a famous violinist who is ill with deadly disease and can only be kept alive by a transfusion from a suitable donor. The musician’s fans find such a donor, kidnap him and hook him up to the musician to keep him alive. The moral conundrum lies in do the fans have the right to force the donor to keep the musician alive and can the donor disconnect himself from the musician’s life support knowing that it will result in the death of the violinist?
I believe that, while the vast majority o mothers are more than willing to do whatever they can to support the unborn child, in those cases where the mother is either unwilling or unable to carry the child to term for various legitimate reasons then the state has no legal right or moral interest in compelling them to carry the child to term which could involve an assault and breach of their right to personal autonomy
seversky, “the unborn child” is equivalent to ‘the undead person’.
Of course, any person is guaranteed to be dead some day, whereas a potential child need not be instantiated. Born, that is. Prolepsis is speculative.
Shorter version: if a child has not been born, then it is yet not a child.
It is a fetus at best. A potential child.
As PZ put it: “A zygote, a blastula, a gastrula, a neurula, a pharyngula are all a long way from being a person.’
(See, an unborn person is not a person)
(Semantics!)
@ Morales
Your conclusions are correct, but you are making a massive keap from “a zygote is not a person” to ” a child is instantiated at the precise moment of birth, being not a child 5 seconds before, and a child 5 seconds after”. The analogy to death obviously fails as the putative “unborn child” had heartbeat, brain function etc. before and after.
To be clear, no one should be compelled to be pregnant against their will. It’s just Morales’ reasoning, if one can call it such a thing, is fatuous.
Fascists will fash. They will push and push until someone pushes back.
.
BTW I see the honourable Democrats are laser-focused on beating their progressive challengers, while accepting donations from big business.
This is totally encouraging. I have no doubt the candidates they put forward will be super-motivated to fight for the poorest and the most marginalised.
And for the millonth time…the only time abortion is mentioned in the bible is in the old testament.
A man is allowed to make his wife/property miscarry by feeding her a potion if he suspects she became pregnant by another man.
I’ll be happy when PZ posts something new so that I’m not greeted with this scowling asshole every time I open Pharyngula.
Another right-wing nut pushing for the rights of a zygote/embryo/fetus. But when it becomes a full-blown human all their rights disappear. Nothing new here.
@21 robro, yes indeed! PZ should make that gruesome image safely hidden until it is deliberately clicked to view.
@21. Just think, Kidwell approved that photo.