Okey-dokey. Remember the failed ballot initiative in Colorado that would have amended the state constitution to define 'person' as a freshly fertilized egg?
The wingnuts behind the 'personhood' movement have not just abortion in their sights but all kinds of contraception they consider -- without an iota of evidence -- to be abortifacients.
Well, it seems the smarter people down there had a notion to end-run any debate about contraception causing abortion by redefining 'contraception'.
During a hearing Monday on the Birth Control Protection Act, five anti-contraception witnesses spoke out as state House Health and Human Services Committee Chairman Jim Reisberg (D-Greeley) tried in vain to keep the hearing room focused on the bill at hand.
Eventually and apologetically, Reisburg succumbed to the committee members’ subtle urging to shut down rambling filibusters and indelicate public disclosures about their personal sexual histories.
Among the witnesses were a teenage girl (?) who pushed the notion that the urine of women on the pill was causing all kinds environmental damage and disease, and a fundy doctor for whom pregnancy begins at conception.
But what stood out was his off-kilter phrasing of a pre-implantation zygote in terms more reminiscent of a fund-raising plea for a homeless shelter: “All that this new human life needs is a place to live and food to eat.”
Then there was a member of the tinfoil chapeau crew, who
claimed that pharmaceutical lobbyists conspired with lawmakers to set the “arbitrary date of implantation” as the definition of pregnancy as a defensive tactic to avoid lawsuits for causing abortions in the years before the landmark Roe v. Wade case decriminalized the procedure.
(I'd never heard that one before.)
There was one sad and confused woman I'll spare you from. Then Pete and Marguerite (emphasis mine).
Natural family-planning advocates Pete and Marguerite Gormley went into deep detail about their fertility issues and how contraception could have destroyed their marriage. Marguerite Gormley, who counts Archbishop Charles J. Chaput as her hero on Facebook, told the committee, “I had been duped into believing that the pill was helping me [for painful menstrual cycles] for close to 10 years. … Being on birth control never triggered those discussions in our marriage,” she said blaming the convenience of the pill for the delay in starting her family.
Pete Gormley claimed, without any substantiation, that family-planning classes taught him that birth control is not healthy for women and doesn’t constitute medicine. “I never once even considered looking into it and learning what the drug was doing to my wife’s body and potentially to her fertility,” said Gormley, a pharmaceutical chemist by trade and the father of four boys.
Listen, smart Coloradoans or whatever you call yourselves, if this is what you're up against and you LOSE, you deserve it.
2 comments:
Archbishop Chaput is the one who pulls out when the tax-exempt status of the Church is threatened. What a guy.
Yes I know. Shrieeekkk!!! I'm toying with excommunication here. Or something like it.
Have the Gormleys started a 12-step program for recovering birth control victims? They sure sound quite zealous and earnest about this duplicity plot that contraception has wreaked upon unsuspecting couples.
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