Ohio man finds pregnancy easy to legislate, impossible to understand
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Photo by Caroline Attwood on Unsplash
Remember the Ohio anti-abortion bills that would require doctors to commit Dead Ringers-esque acts on women who were treated for an ectopic pregnancy?
Yes, it was based on studied ignorance of how pregnancy does — and does not — work.
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.
To be absolutely clear: Implanting an ectopic pregnancy in a uterus isn’t questionable, it’s impossible. Even the Catholic News Agency couldn’t find a zygotephilic Ob/Gyn who was willing go farther than a little hmming and haaing about research on animals.
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.
Becker is married and has two children. I assume he was in the vicinity while his wife was growing a human being that would have to go through life with half of his DNA inside her body. This means he’s aware of obstetricians, but for some reason decided he wouldn’t bother to call one or two to say Hey Doc, is this possible?
“I heard about it over the years,” Becker said. “I never questioned it or gave it a lot of thought.”
Behold, the motto of men with their heads jammed up their asses!
“I dunno, I heard it somewhere and I didn’t think about it. Beyond deciding to put it in a law that wasn’t going to affect me at all.”
Another bill that’s since been introduced in Ohio’s Republican-led House subjects doctors to potential murder charges who don’t try everything to save the life of a mother and fetus, “including attempting to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy into the woman’s uterus.”
Expect the Republicans to do something sensible in response to this inconvenient truth. Like pass a law making it illegal to harbor an ectopic pregnancy. Or at least set aside a few million dollars towards ectopic pregnancy implantation research. The money will wind up in the pockets of the people who drafted the bill.
