Ohio's "Heartbeat Bill" Bad News For Women

Faith2Action's religious dominatrix-activist Janet Porter and her coterie of womb controllers insist that the Ohio Senate will soon pass their anti-choice "heartbeat bill," the harshest in the nation, which has already sailed through the state's House of Representatives.  Heartbeat bills are exactly what you would think.  They make abortion a criminal offense (even when a woman's health is threatened by pregnancy) from the moment a fetal heartbeat is discernible in the first trimester. 

Robin Marty on AlterNet:  "For most women, that would provide a window of two weeks or less in order to learn she was pregnant, make her decision about the pregnancy, arrange for an appointment, gather money for an abortion, obtain the mandatory counseling and sit through the required 24 hour waiting period. For a woman with irregular menstrual cycles, by the time she realizes she is pregnant it likely would already be too late to do anything but continue the pregnancy."

Brian Tasshman reports for Right Wing Watch:  Porter’s prized legislation would “eliminate virtually all abortion,” and has won the support of leading Republicans such as Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann. After it passed the House, she organized an ad campaign and a prayer rally to urge the Republican-controlled Senate to allow a vote on the bill, telling Senate leaders that “when the Heartbeat bill becomes law” America “will be once again in a position where God can bless us.”  (Well, except for those pesky hellbound homosexuals, deranged transgender individuals, Satanic Muslims, and less-than-human undocumented workers that Porter and her cohorts are determined to eradicate.)  The blatantly unconstitutional legislation has created divisions in Ohio’s anti-choice lobby – the Ohio Right to Life Society refuses to back Porter, and the Republican State Senate president has yet to say whether the bill will be assigned to a committee.

At the fundie rally, after much preening and self-congratulation, Janet Porter announced, "When your children and your grandchildren ask you:  Where were you when they were killing babies?  You can answer: We were the ones who stopped the killing."  (There was a video posted but the Faith2Action goons had it pulled from YouTube.)

Acorns are not oak trees and embryos are not babies.  How would Janet respond to the young victims of rape and incest - prepubescent girls - who become nothing but brood mares in the eyes of the law?  How would she respond to little children whose mothers' health prevent them from carrying a fetus to term?  When their moms suffer and die in the delivery room, would she then pray with them that this is all "God's will?"

The pretentious piety of "pro-lifers" is somewhat remindful of that self-absorbed, shallow, Jew-hating prioress in Geoffrey Chaucer's classic The Canterbury Tales, who seldom expressed genuine Christian charity but ...

"She wolde wepe, if that she sawe a mous,
Caught in a trap, if it were deed or bledde."