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.