In Ohio, the Republicans tried to get that impractical and impossible “let’s just reimplant ectopic pregnancies in the uterus!” ideas enshrined in a law. The problem with that plan is that implantation is a complex biological process that entangles delicate maternal capillaries with equally delicate capillaries in the embryonic placenta — it’s like proposing to stitch two sponges together in perfect alignment. This isn’t a plumbing problem, where you couple a few pipes together and voila, the flow is restored, and further, interruption of the exchange of nutrients between mother and embryo is fatal to the embryo.
Awareness of the scope of the problem isn’t a concern for Republicans, though. Let’s see how the sausage is made.
An Ohio lawmaker who proposed legislation extending insurance coverage to a procedure considered medically impossible as a way of fighting abortion worked closely on the bill with a conservative lobbyist, according to newly released emails.
State Rep. John Becker, a southwestern Ohio Republican, got help from Barry Sheets, a lobbyist for the Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio, as he crafted a measure that’s since drawn international scrutiny for its questionable medical grounding, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported Wednesday.
The bill prohibits insurers from covering abortion services, but provides an exception for a procedure “intended to reimplant” an ectopic pregnancy in a woman’s uterus.
Becker told the newspaper he never researched whether re-implanting an ectopic pregnancy into a woman’s uterus was a viable medical procedure before including it in the bill. Sheets declined comment.
“I heard about it over the years,” Becker said. “I never questioned it or gave it a lot of thought.”
First step: partner up with a fanatical anti-abortion zealot who writes the bill for you.
Second step: Don’t question what they say. You don’t need to understand what the lobbyist wants, and thinking about it is just awkward.
Presto! You have a law legislating the impossible! It sure makes your ignorant electorate happy, though.
I wish I could say we should require better education in biology, and science in general, before lawmakers are allowed to write laws dictating how reproductive biology works, except that there sure seem to be a lot of anti-choice doctors who run for Republican positions. They ought to know better, but they don’t.
These ideological abominations enrage me. Having stood vigil with her husband by the ICU bedside of a young friend dying from internal hemorrhaging induced by an ectopic pregnancy, I know the potential horror inherent in unrecognized complications. The enshrinement of such ignorance in state law is just one more example (as if any were needed) of the cruel confidence of the farcically self-labeled “pro-life” movement. My contempt overflows.
The next step is, any intervention with a fetus or embryo that fails is an abortion and the practitioner is sentenced to death.
Perfecting the US in joining developing nations, thereby not failing with peers.
For the religious, “provoking God into acting”, despite numerous biblical tales that strongly suggest against such idiocy, due to predictable results.
Well, at least he didn’t try to dictate that π be exactly 3.
Not surprising. After all, conservatives are the ones who constantly advocate for poor people to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, a phrase denoting a physically impossible task. Reality has never been an impediment to conservatives advocating oppression. And, sadly, why would it, considering how successful they’ve been doing so?
They ought to know better, but don’t, except when they do know better, but don’t care.
They don’t care, they just want another way to control women.
It’s not an abortion. It was just a failed re-implantation. I expect that insurance companies will cover that without question. /sarcasm
Ignorance is bad enough, but that can be solved by reading and learning. But clowns like Becker are flat out incurious and disinterested about what they don’t know. It’s not just that they don’t think, they don’t want to think.
I’m OK with the ectopic pregnancy law just so long as the legislators first deal with other more important problems.
First, set the value of pi at 3, to save all those children who struggle with math from getting humiliating F’s in school. I noticed someone else had the same thought. That makes 2 people, which is enough of a constituency that Republicans will listen to us because we’re not like those liberal mathematicians who are just pushing liberalism. The bill should also allow students to say 2 plus 2 equals 3 or 5, because it’s liberalism to expect math to be based upon reality by saying 2 plus 2 equal only 4.
Next, mandate that all copies of the Jewish and Christian scriptures used in the state must be printed in the original language – English. And make all historians read an announcement, or show a film stating, at the beginning of each class that the Bible was written in English, only English copies are valid, and copies written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek are lies straight from the pit of Hell. Not only will students learn the truth but it will trigger all the liberals who claim to be for “free speech” but then censor brave conservatives who try to preach the truth about the original Bible language, English.
The unofficial motto of the Republican Party: “I never questioned it or gave it a lot of thought.”