Yes the dictators of conscience are at it again. Concern for the unborn right up unto the point where someone must foot the bill. Usually, right as the unborn draw their first breath as the born. Then it's OK to "let them die and decrease the surplus population." Why is it so rare to find anti-abortionists who also support legislation to increase the general welfare of the population when it involves a pooling and reassignment of society's resources to benefit the greatest good?

It's all about power, period.

I believe another goal is to have side issues that affect really effect a very small portion of people dominate public debate during elections. For many politicians, it is easier to garner votes and money on hot button issues such as abortion and gay rights, then on proposing legislation that will improve the quality of live for the majority of their constituents.

Notice on the healthcare debate, politicians are going to get more donations from lobbyists and corporations if they oppose improving healthcare than the money they'd get from the public if they improve healthcare.

This isn't new and has been ongoing for the past 20 years and counting. Having grown up in rural MO before I moved to St Louis, I witnessed the depopulating of small towns. Since the anti-abortion movement only got stronger as more depopulation in the rurals continued, I can only conclude that there has been a combination of restlessness, unhappiness, and greed. Like business and finance, the anti-abortion zealots took some pages on the wrong ideas in finance. Instead of having a population where more people aren't so angry, restless, grouchy, and abusive, just the opposite has occurred. Part of the problem is due to lack of pols representing the interests of the working class. "Free" trading and outsourcing everything to "cheap" labor and production all for the want of maximizing profits and having no regards for quality only puts the locals in unhappy and possibly unstable mood swings. In time, this could result in more people who think wacky and cause more trouble thereby making the monied elites "happy". The anti-abortion zealots are so used to pumping up the number of lives they think can be their potential future followers that they'll have no regards for the lives of women. Think of this as "payments receivable" at this "unborn" stage. To make matters worse, there is generally concern for those "unborn lives" once born. Most of these anti-abortion zealots will have strong opposition to single payer health care, alternative practitioners and medicine, medical marijuana, etc... Think of this as the ENRONization of life. The good news is that despite all this there are social conservatives out there who really do care about the quality of life. Reawakening them on that might weaken the anti-abortion movement significantly.

This legislation is as blatant an imposition of a religiously inspired position (that life begins at conception, which is a Christian concept) as making a particular denomination the official religion of the state.
This must be stopped dead in in tracks!

Are these laws going to make everyone 9 months older? Get a drivers license and drink alcohol 9 months earlier.

I wouldn't mind getting 9 months back pay on my Social Security.

The anti-abortion True Believers would buy clothing and toys for "pre-born persons" if there were a safe way to get such items into the womb.

I planned to include an excerpt from a recent comment to another article from a proponent of embryonic personhood. But it's been disappeared, along with my response. In it, the writer indeed refers to the wanton killing of "boys and girls".

I assume that they've eliminated "birthday" celebrations in favor of the more significant "conception day". I wonder if determining the correct Conception Day ever gets awkward?

· Yr Obd't Servant

We must first remove corporations from 'personhood.'

One wonders how sophist Antonin Scalia, a so-called "originalist" who claims to adhere in his decisions to the original intent of the drafters of the Constitution, would contort the document to bestow such embryonic and fetal rights, since nowhere is there mention of specific rights for women and slaves much less the unborn.

"These proposals would ban abortion in all cases, including incest and rape, and criminalize some forms of contraception."

Oh, but of course......lets "criminalize" contraception and abortion but let the rapist and incest perverts walk the streets so they can destroy the lives of more women; and let's not think twice about dropping bombs and killing those babies once they leave the womb.

Let me get this straight: Anti-abortion activists want to take-away a woman's right to choose - not to bring a "potential" life into this world, but yet they have no problem killing that life after full-term delivery through "collateral damage", starvation, lack of health care and the like.

With such a prevalent lack of critical thinking in this country, it should be more than obvious why corporations were granted and still hold the legal title of "personhood".

So, I wonder why these people are so blind to imagine conception to be the point where life originates? Don't they know that the unfertilized egg, and the sperm are alive? They are not dead things that when brought together make life, they are alive in their own right! I, for one, think that every time there is an ejaculation, there should be a memorial service for all the millions of sperm that gave their lives that an egg might be fertilized, and the same for when menstruation occurs; a memorial for the egg that once was, but alas died unfertilized; a spinster. Also,I believe that if abortion and contraception are wrong, tantamount to murder, then so is the "rhythm method. If a lie can be made by "omission" then so can murder by omission, by the timing of sexual intercourse to where the egg is not present when the sperm arrive. Or worse yet, by the pulling out of the male part before ejaculation occurs and launching the poor, pitiful sperm into virtual space, certainly not where our Good and Merciful God intended. What a horrible, horrible fate. I can hardly imagine the pain and suffering, and the carnage of those millions of sperm sent on a fools mission where there is NO objective but the pure and simple deviate pleasure the hellish gift of the "sinful" act itself. And, the unfortunate egg doomed to live her short life being "always the bridesmaid, never the bride. God help us all.....just sayin'

Conception needs to be removed entirely from the common people. Natural conception should be reserved for those few who govern and hold power of good mind, proper political affiliation and correct religious belief.

Conception centres should be established to maintain populations of workers and soldiers. All those borne of such places will of course be properly indoctrinated and know their place in society.

The illicit sale and black market trade of intimate conception material will need heavy policing with harsh punishments such as the death penalty.

Good breeding stock of people will need to be maintained, closely vetted and privately inspected on a continual basis by the governing few.

God makes life at conception and we are here to make sure it's used properly. It's the way of life the one true God told us is the right one.

This message brought to you by The Personhood Guild of America, in the year of our merciful Lord, 2010.

Over the decades I have read about the abortion debate while I cannot recall publishing anything on it. In my family there was general agreement that abortion should be available but to my knowledge no one actually got one or did one. Except my father, who said that he did a few extralegal abortions in the Kansas City area when he was short of money. (He had a Ph.D. in bacteriology and thus was one step removed from being an M.D. while given all the surgery he had done on mice and rats, he was probably better qualified to do abortions than most doctors.)

I have been unable to come to terms with the moral issues of the abortion debate. For example, it occurs to me that there may be something sacred about the joining of an egg and a sperm, while as someone like Norman Mailer might have said back in the day, there is probably also something sacred about the right of the two idiots who "conceived" their progeny in an act of passion that disregarded the needs of the Planet as well as their economic future, to undo the damage done.

Meanwhile, to the extent possible, what to do after the act of creation, it seems to me, is too intimate an issue to allow
bureaucrats whether from church or state to control the outcome.

***
Jennifer B: While I have also experienced the depopulation of small midwestern towns, one of which I live in, I see no necessary relationship between that and anti-abortion sentiment. There used to be a lot of small industry in the rural Midwest. But maybe I'm missing something...

***
Then there is the issue of what constitutes "personhood." I cannot imagine a "corporation" that listened to opera the way I did in my mother's womb in her third trimester. Turandot anyone?
What is the position of the anti-abortionists on the "personhood" of corporations. And can a two-day-old foetus make a political campaign contribution? If so, with whose money?

-30-

I heard today about a cemetery, that was separate from the consecrated ground where the baptized Catholics were buried. This cemetery was used to bury, in unconsecrated ground, the lifeless, sinful,embryo- persons delivered dead, aborted or miscarried from the wombs of women, without being baptized before death.A zygot, embryo, or body is not a person without a soul.The Catholic God infuses a sinful soul into the fertilized egg, that must be cleansed by baptism.
If the pregnancy risks the womans life, tough! Sinful and unbaptized souls cannot see God. The church previously taught that unbaptized babies went to Limbo( many religious leaders believe hell is never seeing God, which is what Limbo is)).The Catholic Church does not allow contraception or abortion for any reason even to save a woman's life, because their God is so evil and cruel He sends zygotes, embroys, fetuses and delivered, dead, unbaptized babies to hell and the women must sacrifice their lives to save them.

Perhaps they can pass more laws wherein women are to report once every 3 months to "Conception Monitoring Centers" where Doctors can inspect them to ensure they have not undergone abortions.

Any women that fail said inspections will be lashed 120 times and imprisoned for a period of 5 years.

These people are an entirely strange lot. On the one hand they whine about Government intruding on the lives of the Citizens and making moral decisions on the behalf of the Citizen. In the next breath they want laws that dictate Moral Choices to the Citizen.

They get on the phones and whine about "welfare mothers" who have "More children then they can support" then the very next day whine about Birth Control and how it an affront to God.

They diddle little boys in the back of churches, pay for prostitutes and have affairs with interns or their secretaries then whine about how Promiscous the people living in Ghettoes are.

They call for the Bombing of Iraq and iran and Pakistan and cheer when "100 insurgents killed" yet claim that life is sacred and it a grave sin to take it.

They line up on Bridges and shoot people down who try to escape a Hurricane then bitch and moan about the rights of the unborn.

Mairead has it right. It's all about power. How better to "put women back in their place" than taking control of their bodies. If I were a young woman and hadn't already done so, I'd be heading to the nearest clinic to have my tubes tied. Of course the day will come when these christians of satan will turn even that action into murder of the unborn.