What the heck is up with pro-lifers lately? Someone please call the GOP and remind these people that we are talking about human beings.
New Mexico this week saw the opening of a new session at the state legislature, inaugurating freshman representatives and senators to their newly elected seats. The headlines from this week have been primarily about the President's proposals on gun control, but one veteran representative from Carlsbad is focusing on the "tampering of criminal evidence" in rape victims.
Representative Cathrynn Brown has introduced legislation that would make it a crime for a woman to abort a baby conceived through a (presumably "legitimate") rape, on the grounds that the woman would be "tampering with evidence." House Bill 206 would make felons out of any rape victim who tried to abort her unborn baby. Brown has responded to her critics by stating, "[The bill's] intent is solely to deter rape and cases of incest. The rapist - not the victim - would be charged with tampering of evidence."
Really?!?!
I am a staunch pro-lifer and I've actually found that the libertarian case for life is stronger than any other pro-life argument out there, and the things coming out of the mouth's of Republican politicians have me shaking my head in embarrassment. From comments about "legitimate rape" to rape being within "God's plan," I've been continually shocked by the fallacies the prolife lobby has been putting forth as arguments against legal abortion.
Even the notion of so-called "personhood" laws, which prop open a back door for eugenics proponents to walk through, is enough to make me distance myself from "those" kinds of prolifers. It's sad really, as the prolife movement should not have to be splintered, but when prolifers have all the necessary evidence to have a real intellectual debate about the merits of life beginning at conception, intellectual prolifers like libertarians have no choice but distinguish themselves.
So here's my message to the Republican politicians:
Dear Republican Prolifers,
I appreciate your creatively in an attempt at curtailing the number of unborn deaths in America, but would you please refrain from the ridiculous suggestions made as of late? We have science on our side; every medical school in the country already teaches that life begins at conception. Our founding documents already guarantee that the most basic human rights - including the right to life - begins the moment a human being comes into existence.
There is no need to talk about what a "legitimate" rape is, as if a woman must not be a legitimate victim if her body decided to not shut down after being attacked, or to talk about God's plan for those who neither understand nor believe in such a thing, or even to go as far as denigrating unborn human life to mere "criminal evidence." Instead, you can win rights for the unborn simply by having an intellectual debate on the scientific characteristics of a distinctly new human individual and the philosophy of the origins of human rights.
Please stop making the movement look like a bunch anti-intellectuals with these ridiculous comments which only do a disservice to unborn babies everywhere.
Thank you.
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