Buy *prolife* propaganda or a doctor gets shot. In the head.

That is congruent with the violent ideology and vicious intolerance of organizations that have incited violence against healthcare professionals, as DJ! pointed out here.

But Holy Obfuscation Batman!

Jack Fonseca [...] a Campaign Life project manager and the author of the blog post in question, decided to wade into the comments section on his blog Tuesday afternoon to clear up any lingering confusion about the photo of a handgun pointed at a doctor.
His explanation? That's not a handgun pointed at the doctor; it's a proverbial handgun:
"In the graphic you referenced, the proverbial gun is clearly being held by the College of Physicians. The supporting graphic is a clear condemnation of the brute force that the CPSO is threatening to use against doctors. If a historical scholar were to publish an article in which he condemns the NAZI extermination of Jews, and includes in the article a photo of a mass grave filled with murdered Jews, it would be ludicrous to argue that he supports the killing of Jews. Clearly he's reinforcing the message that the Nazi actions were evil. Likewise, our blog post reinforces the message that the brute force being threatened by the CPSO against physicians (in the form of a policy of coercion) is evil."

This is a typical anti-choice sophism: If a credible academic writes a scholarly article, condemns the Shoah and uses verifiable photographs as documentation, then Campaign Life can claim with a disingenuous graphic that the CPSO might do the *same evil*.

(Never mind the decades of anti-abortion terrorism: clinics bombed, doctors and staff murdered or injured, women criminally harassed.) 

Who is this Jack Fonseca?  DJ! has posted articles about his tactics, here and here.

Fonseca's job is to organize rallies and spout the usual propaganda.  (This peer-reviewed article provides actual facts and scientific research about the cost of terminating a pregnancy.)

Besides being paid to campaign against women's reproductive rights, Fonseca has also mobilized the usual bigots against same-sex marriage, lobbied against a fundraising event in his home town because ... fundamental Catholicism, AND gotten quite testerical about Ontario's "Accepting Schools Act".

But enough about Fonseca the dissembler.  Juxtapose his slimy rhetoric with the actions of a real hero, Doctor Willie Parker.

Inspired by Gandhi's idea that the Gospel should appear to a hungry man in the form of bread, he went to work in a food pantry. But gradually, the steady stream of women with reproductive issues in his practice focused his mind. He thought about his mother and sisters and the grandmother who died in childbirth and began to read widely in the literature of civil rights and feminism. Eventually he came across the concept of "reproductive justice," developed by black feminists who argued that the best way to raise women out of poverty is to give them control of their reproductive decisions. Finally, he had his "come to Jesus" moment and the bell rang. This would be his civil-rights struggle. He would serve women in their darkest moment of need. "The protesters say they're opposed to abortion because they're Christian," Parker says. "It's hard for them to accept that I do abortions because I'm a Christian." He gave up obstetrics to become a full-time abortionist on the day, five years ago, that George Tiller was murdered in church.

[...]he grew up a few hours away in Birmingham, the second youngest son of a single mother who raised six children on food stamps and welfare, so poor that he taught himself to read by a kerosene lamp and went to the bathroom in an outhouse; that he was born again in his teenage years and did a stint as a boy preacher in Baptist churches; that he became the first black student-body president of a mostly white high school, went on to Harvard and a distinguished career as a college professor and obstetrician who delivered thousands of babies and refused to do abortions. They certainly don't know about the "come to Jesus" moment, as he pointedly describes it, when he decided to give up his fancy career to become an abortion provider. Or that, at fifty-one, having resigned a prestigious job as medical director of Planned Parenthood, he's preparing to move back south and take over a circuit roughly similar—for safety reasons, he won't be more specific—to the one traveled by Dr. David Gunn before an antiabortion fanatic assassinated him in 1993. Or that his name and home address have been published by an antiabortion Web site with the unmistakable intent of terrorizing doctors like him. Or that he receives threats that say, "You've been warned." Or that he refuses to wear a bulletproof vest, because he doesn't want to live in fear—"if I'm that anxious, they've already taken my life"[...]

He remembers what it's like to be terrorized. That fueled the search for social justice that led him, eventually, to theologians like Paul Tillich, Dr. King, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who wrestled with "Thou shalt not kill" before joining a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. "He said the kind of Christianity that does not radicalize you with regard to human suffering is inauthentic—cheap and easy grace."
His "come to Jesus" moment occurred in Hawaii. He was teaching at the university when a fundamentalist administrator began trying to ban abortions in the school clinic, throwing students with an unwanted pregnancy into a panic. One day, he was listening to a sermon by Dr. King on the theme of what made the Good Samaritan good. A member of his own community passed the injured traveler by, King said, because they asked, "What would happen to me if I stopped to help this guy?" The Good Samaritan was good because he reversed the question: "What would happen to this guy if I don't stop to help him?" So Parker looked in his soul and asked himself, "What happens to these women when abortion is not available?"

[Dr Willie Parker] knew the answer.

It's a long, informative article well worth the time spent reading it.

Misogynist lawmakers are the truly "depraved".

Rennie Taria Gibbs was 15 years old in 2006 when she got pregnant. When she miscarried at 36 weeks of gestation, prosecutors "discovered" Gibbs had a cocaine habit - which makes you wonder which antichoice busybody at the hospital violated her confidential medical records -and they charged her with murder under Mississipi's rarely used "depraved-heart" law.

Her trial - continued multiple times since 2006 - was scheduled to commence in February 2012.

Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.

Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. But her case is by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.

"Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws," said Lynn Paltrow of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW). "It's turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights."

She is not alone. Christian Sharia (state religious law) in the US exists, and it is used to punish women.

It should come as no surprise that Rennie Gibbs is Black, as repressive laws in the US mostly target, and are applied to, Latino and Afro-Americans.

The Dog Ate My Personhood Initiative. . .

After getting their collective ass handed to them in Mississippi, those persistent personhood peeps aren't giving up. They've got a raft of similar abortion-killing, birth-control-banning, miscarriage-criminalizing dealies rarin' to go.

All over the blogosphere and Twitter, fetus fetishists are advancing whacky reasons why their supposed slam-dunk failed so miserably. Here's some interesting speculation on what happened between the opinion polls -- that indicated it would pass easily -- and the voting booth by Amanda Marcotte. (Hint: secret ballots are excellent things in conformist conservative jerkwater places like Mississippi.)

But my favourite load of BS is by SUZYALLCAPSLOCK. This is a link to the tweet linking to HER post. Two clicks but no juvenile redirect to fetus pr0n.

Commenter lastchancetosee sums up HER increasingly desperate explanations of the fiasco:

So to recap:
a) even Pro-Lifers opposed it, preferring to actively pursue a humiliating defeat by voting against it than succeeding in passing it and thus stopping the "abortion holocaust" at least temporarily, not to mention the PR advantages, and precedent etc.*
b) if the Catholic Church with its negligible following in Mississippi had recommended voting for it, hundreds of thousands of non-Catholic voters would have marched to the polls for this, when their own convictions and religious leaders weren't enough to do so.
c) due to unspecified "circumstances" people decided to kill an initiative they supported
d) this is actually a huge win for the pro-life cause because a vote that was expected to be a close thing was a very clear knock-down, and that is a good thing.
e) this result still has absolutely nothing to do with 60% of the people, including many pro-lifers, opposing this measure.

The nile is not just a river in egypt.

* you do know what the purpose of all these initiatives for amendments, laws etc. is, do you? To get as many as them passed as possible, so that they get challenged in the courts, until you find one case where a court sides with you, thereby creating precedent. The people who push these things KNOW that they will be challenged. They WANT them to be challenged. Why do you think it is that most of these things have so very obvious constitutional issues?
This being challenged in the Supreme Court is a BONUS, not a drawback. But sure, pro-lifers opposed it because they feared it might be overturned ….

h/t for cartoon to @IAmDrTiller.

Link to original cartoon.

ADDED: The liars at LifeShite speak truth for once:

As pro-life political scientist and abortion law researcher Michael New explains, if the amendment can’t win in Mississippi, it’s likely not going to win anywhere in the current political climate.

“It is difficult to see where Personhood proponents go from here. Tuesday’s election offered Personhood supporters their best opportunity for electoral success. They qualified a citizen initiative in Mississippi — among the most pro-life states in the country — during a low-turnout election in which Democrats fielded relatively weak statewide candidates,” he explains. “In spite of all this, the Mississippi Personhood Amendment still lost by a double-digit margin.”

Knowing that the personhood amendment lost by a landslide twice in a swing state and a lopsided 17-point margin in arguably the most pro-life state in the nation, there’s little realistic expectation that the personhood amendment will be approved anywhere in the country. As the amendment continues to rack up defeats, support from pro-fie advocates willing to invest in what will almost assuredly be a losing proposition will wane. Media reports will continue focusing on the pro-life movement losing at the polls and the pro-abortion side will continue gloating that they are in the majority despite clear polling data showing America is pro-life.

The damage to the pro-life movement from suffering defeat after defeat in the polls will become more and more palpable as the losses mount.

LifeShite's strategy is to get more misogynist Supreme Court justices.

Humpty Dumpty Initiative in Mississippi

The Humpty Dumpty Initiative is up for a vote next week.

A fledgling movement that seeks to add fuel to the national debate over abortion appears poised to score its first major victory Nov. 8 in Mississippi, where a constitutional amendment would declare that human life begins the moment an egg is fertilized.

The so-called personhood proposal—also known as Amendment 26—is backed by both Republican and Democratic leaders in the conservative state and has substantially outraised its opposition in funding. Mississippi is considered favorable ground because it is dominated by socially conservative Republicans, already has some of the U.S.'s strictest abortion laws, and has only one abortion clinic serving its population of 2.9 million.

The proposed amendment, one paragraph long, says any reference to a person in the state constitution will be defined as "every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof."

It is intended to challenge Roe v. Wade, but its immediate effects will be devastating. There are no exceptions for conception resulting from rape or incest. It would ban common sorts of contraception -- the morning after pill, IUD, even the pill itself. It would deny abortion to women with life-threatening illnesses. It would open the door to the criminalization of miscarriage. It would threaten in vitro fertilization. It would necessitate every state law that contains the word 'person' being reviewed and perhaps rewritten.

And so on.

Here's Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for Choice for 25 years, on the irony that it may be the great state of Mississippi that inflicts this travesty on its people.

Mississippi is perhaps the last state with any standing to extend personhood to fetuses. A fertilized egg in Mississippi, should it be born, has one of the worst prognoses for a dignified life in the United States. What will that fertilized egg, once it is born, discover about how Mississippi treats persons?

The state ranks last among all states in health and third for the highest rate of diabetes and high blood pressure . It has the lowest per capita personal income and an unemployment rate of 10.6 percent. It is the last in academic achievement. More than 1 out of 5 people live in poverty. The state is second in the nation in terms of the imprisonment ratio (749 prisoners per 100,000 people.) If you are black, your chances of dying at birth or shortly thereafter are pretty high: fourteen out of every 1000 black infants ( 6.8 for whites) born die in childbirth or the first year of their lives. Your mother is more likely to die delivering you than mothers in 44 other states. If fertilized eggs could be afraid, surely the thought of being born in Mississippi would be traumatizing.

And now meet the nutbars men behind Mississippi's initiative.





More on the 'Conceived in Rape' tour.

On November 8, keep your fingers crossed, because there are at least 30 other USian states crafting or considering this kind of virulently misogynist legislation.

Update on the Humpty-Dumpty Initiative

Here we go again. Another 40 Days of Harassment begins, not that it ever ends. (Lard, I'm dim betimes. I just realized that there are two of these bun-fests a year. The persecution high is too intense for only once a year.)

So, over the next while, when you see tiny shivering groups of DUOPs (dried-up old prunes) holding tattered signs with the usual fetal pr0n, you'll know you must be near a women's health clinic.

I thought this might be an opportune moment to update the Egg as Person Initiative.

There are 31 USian states working on crafting legislation or amending their constitutions to redefine 'person' as a fertilized human egg.

But the campaign is not going too well.

First up, Colorado, where the fetus fetishists are banging their collective head against a wall trying again despite being clobbered by a 3 to 1 margin the last time they tried this.

On Friday, Personhood Colorado turned into the Secretary of State 79,817 signatures in support of its initiative – not even 4,000 more than the 76,047 needed to land its proposed anti-abortion “personhood” proposal on the ballot in November. Thousands of signatures are routinely thrown out in the process of validating initiative petitions. The group’s amendment seeks to grant fertilized human eggs the full spectrum of rights enjoyed by U.S. citizens. The difficulty its sponsors seem to have had gathering support suggests the idea they are promoting is no more attractive now to Coloradans than it was in 2008, when they defeated a similar proposal in a landslide vote.

Next, that free-wheeling state of Nevada.

The Personhood Nevada organization has filed a state Supreme Court appeal of a district judge's decision prohibiting the circulation of a petition aimed at ending abortion.

Kenneth Wilson, treasurer of the organization, said Monday the group hopes that justices will overturn District Judge James Todd Russell's decision and allow the circulation of the petition. Russell ruled the petition was too vague and violated a state law that limits a ballot question to one subject.

On to Mississippi, where, it seems, the entire exercise was a charade from the git-go.

It appears to be all over but the cryin' for supporters of the Mississippi "egg-as-a-person" initiative to ban abortion. RH Reality Check has discovered that a unique provision in the state's Constitution prohibits modifying the Bill of Rights by voter referendum.

A fact known by the Personhood campaign and ignored for political reasons.

Facts? Pish, say the fetus fetishists.

More Quixotic efforts in Montana.

Legislative efforts similar to CI-102 failed in Montana in 2007 and 2009 and another initiative in 2008 fell about 18,000 votes short of making the ballot.

And Iowa and 26 other benighted places.

So, while it's encouraging that the Humpty Dumpty Initiative is falling off the wall all over the place, what's depressing is that we -- the normal people -- have to keep fighting. There is so much work to be done to improve the lives of people in so many ways, but the fetus fetishists keep sucking us into this kind of idiocy.

And it must be fought. Every time. Everywhere.

With hard times facing individuals, organizations, and governments everywhere, precious time, energy, and money is spent countering this dippy delusion.

Leave aside the whole abortion/contraception bollocks and women's rights problem for a moment and consider this.

During the last Colorado battle, I read an argument against the amendment from a lawyer who did not declare her- or himself on either side. The argument was: The word 'person' occurs about 10,000 times in Colorado state law. If this measure passes, thousands and thousands of lawyer hours will be billed to the state to examine every instance of 'person', to determine how the new definition impacts that law and what should be done about it.

Property law, inheritance law, family law, criminal law. Every kind of law would have to be revisited with the new definition of person in mind.

What a colossal waste of time and money.

And the fetus fetishists have the gall to label us pro-choicers as 'selfish'.

(Isn't that a gorgeous illustration?)