God's Intent

Once again showing why I'm glad I live in a more rational state like Maryland, Oklahoma legislators have taken the first step to passing a law that will require abortion providers to advise women that they can hear the heartbeat of a fetus prior to the abortion (obviously not after).

The surprisingly sympathetic thing about this is that these purveyors of interference in the decisions of women and their health providers is that they didn't require that women hear the heartbeat prior to the abortion.

I swear, these guys, and they're almost all guys, are some kind of sanctimonious paragon. To quote state Senator Dan Newbury, "The heartbeat is the only way for a fetus to communicate that it wants to live. It can't say please don't kill me, it can't say I want to live. It can't say anything," he said.

So now an autonomic activity like a beating heart is equivalent to a statement of intent. There's a hell of a bit of reasoning. Of course, I see people posting on Facebook about how God's looking on them with favor because they're entire family woke up that morning. God's got a low bar for accomplishment on par with the Oklahoma Senate.

Look, people. The fact that you woke up just means that you didn't die. Believe me, you'll die eventually. Does that mean God no longer favors you when you die? If you're on God's side, doesn't your death mean you're going to spend the rest of eternity with It? Isn't that supposed to be a good thing? Seems to me that the logical conclusion of you waking in the morning is that God doesn't like you because you're still here with the rest of us.

Similarly, the logical conclusion to a beating heart being heard is that a bunch of cells have reached the point of a heartbeat. By Newbury's logic the beating heart should be used in criminal investigations to glean the intent of suspects. He's probably never read Poe, but The Telltale Heart wasn't an actual beating heart stating intent. It was the guilty mind of the killer.

Of course, that's what Newbury and his ilk are seeking. Instill guilt in women seeking abortions so that they won't have them. Anthropomorphize a collection of cells incapable of independent existence so that a woman won't want to terminate it. Ironically similar thinking to PETA and its equivalency of human and animal lives. Now there's some strange bedfellows.