You read that title correctly. You are not hallucinating:
Two fetuses will be presented as witnesses before an Ohio legislative committee that is hearing a bill to outlaw abortions after the first heartbeat can be detected inside a woman’s womb.
The fetuses will appear live and in color before the committee on a video screen projecting ultrasound images taken from their pregnant mothers’ bodies. Janet Folger Porter, head of Faith2Action, an anti-abortion group, said the fetuses will be the youngest witnesses to ever testify when they come in front of the House Health and Aging Committee Wednesday morning.
“Lawmakers are going to be able to see as well as hear the babies’ heartbeats,” said Porter. “We think this is going to do a lot to keep other babies’ heartbeats going in Ohio.” She said two Ohio women — one nine weeks and the other 11 weeks pregnant — have agreed to be scanned with ultrasound machines for the hearing.
Taylor Marsh, whose guest posts are a welcome addition to TMV, writes at her own blog:
This would be a good science fiction screenplay, maybe even an episode of ABC’s “V.”
Undoubtedly, Janet Folger Porter is a delusional fanatic. But in the Republican Party today this means she’s got the power to put one life over something that isn’t equal, which is playing out in John Kasich’s Ohio. It’s similar to what the Taliban and Islamists do by contending women have less right to be free than men.
States can inhibit women’s freedoms regardless of the privacy we’ve won through the Supreme Court. So-called “heartbeat laws” are meant to shame, coerce and trap male legislators into denying women their freedoms, because of what’s inside a woman’s belly that cannot live without her life.
The so-called “heartbeat” bill is the first of its type introduced in the nation, and it seeks to ban the procedure as early as six weeks after conception — the first moment a fetus’ heartbeat can be detected. If it becomes law in Ohio — and it appears to have the votes in the Republican-dominated legislature — it would be among the earliest stages that a state has tried to ban abortions.
Who came first the fetus or the woman? Of course, it is the woman. Can a fetus live without the woman’s life? Of course not, so the fetus is dependent, not equal, not human. But Faith 2 Action is attempting to make the case that a heartbeat is a person and equal to the woman on which it depends.
An “unborn human individual” is not a person. “An individual organism of the species homo sapiens from fertilization until live birth” ignores the woman completely. The Taliban could make this argument, as would many religious extreme, which have a lot in common with the current crop of anti-women Republicans.
Think for a moment about the concept of a fetus “testifying” from inside the womb about the fate and the future of the flesh-and-blood incubator woman inside which it resides. How sick does one have to be — how depraved, how beyond any possibility of reason or rationality — to simultaneously personify a fetus inside a womb with the fiction that a fetus can serve as a “witness” and give “testimony”; and de-personify the pregnant woman who owns that womb by denying her the right every person has to bodily autonomy?
Nauseating, indeed.
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