Thursday, May 01, 2014

Rand Paul's Abortion Views


I get letters from all sorts of people, including a recent one from Rand Paul (probably from his minions).  It asks for money, in support of the egg-Murkans-human-rights initiative* (justifying it like this (quote from the email)):

Dear Ms.,

For over 40 years, nine unelected men and women on the Supreme Court have played God with innocent human life.

They have invented laws that condemned to painful deaths without trial more than 56 million babies for the crime of being "inconvenient."

There ya go!  It's all about convenience, nothing else, and the painful  baby deaths can be assumed to take place, even if science disagrees about whether zygotes, say, can feel pain.

Just to make sure that I understood that "inconvenience" argument correctly, I checked what Rand Paul himself thinks about when abortions should be banned:

Paul is opposed to abortion, even in cases of rape or incest.

Which sorta clashes with the idea that abortions are all about "inconvenience."

Then to the politics behind this:  Paul has angered forced-birthers by seemingly showing some ambivalence about abortion.  Hence the firm correction towards the right edge.

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*This initiative means that a fertilized egg has all the legal rights not-pregnant already-born people have,  but pregnant people have far fewer rights, given that they are also the aquaria for the fertilized eggs.