Now that the far-right states are making laws to criminalize abortion the moment Roe is overturned, it occurs to me that a new constitutional challenge to the anti-choice agenda is worth pursuing: Equal protection.
If abortion is murder, then so is the Pill and so are fertility clinics. My fantasy is to force into public debate this logical extension of the anti-choice agenda, while there is still time and hope to attract the attention of a middle America blind to the dangers of the coming theocracy.
If precious human life** begins at conception, as some of these bills would proclaim into law, then surely it is as much murder (or aiding and abetting) to take, prescribe, dispense, indeed to manufacture or sell the Pill. (Like the morning after pill, the Pill sometimes operates as an abortifacient, by preventing implantation of a fertilized egg. Really committed fundie pharmacists won't dispense the Pill.)
And it is even more obviously murder for fertility clinics to destroy surplus embryos, and for infertile couples and their doctors to deliberately create multiple embryos, intending to destroy any not used. I say, make those scarlet women implant and carry each one of them to term, throw the fertility doctors in jail, and harass the clinics.
Is there not an equal protection challenge to be brought here? Why is one precious zygote more deserving than another? Why is an abortion doctor a criminal, and a fertility doctor a swell guy? Why is a knocked up teenager a wicked slut, and an infertile couple godly and good? Isn't murder murder?
And we all know how very devoted this Supreme Court is to the constitutional principle of equal protection--see Bush v. Gore. If a hanging chad is worthy of equal protection, how can it be denied to a cuddly blastocyst?
(Going after the Pill and fertility clinics has the added advantage of putting Big Business on the opposite side of a core issue from their Rabid Religious partners in crime. Imagine how thrilled Big Pharma would be to lose Pill sales; how enchanted the insurance industry would be to have to pay for multiple fertility treatments.
(But as a sop to Big Pharma, criminalizing the Pill will make sales of Viagra take off: Fess up, guys. How many of you can really maintain an erection with a condom? That's gotta hurt the aging Nascar dads.)
[**My apologies to those who sincerely anguish over abortion. I'm in the no-brainer camp: "Whom does abortion hurt?" "Why, it hurts the unborn baby! It's murder!" "Does a zygote, or blastocyst, or embryo, or pre-third-trimester fetus have feelings? It has no brain/cerebral cortex. No brain [cortex], no feelings. So how can it hurt? No feelings, no right to my empathy. No right to my empathy, no murder."
[It [empathy] is what the Golden Rule is all about, and the Golden Rule (as the learned rabbi said) is the whole law, the rest is commentary.]