Amie Newman has a comical post at the RHReality Check blog claiming birth control pills, IUDs and Plan B "are in danger of being outlawed should" a presidential candidate who believes life begins at conception be elected. I submit you have to be insane or very close to it to actually believe the election of someone like Mike Huckabee in 2008 would put the above contraceptives in danger of being outlawed. For goodness sake, Plan B was approved for over-the-counter sales during President Bush's stay in the White House.
Republicans presidents who are prolife haven't come anywhere near banning abortion so how on earth can a sane individual think it would be possible for a prolife Republican president to ban birth control pills or come anywhere near such a thing? Is there a single presidential candidate or member of congress who has even submitted legislation or has a position in favor of doing such a thing?
Newman also links to this post by Garance Franke-Ruta at the American Prospect blog TAPPED which supposedly "decode(s)" what "life begins at conception" means.
"Life begins at conception" is code for the extremist anti-choice position that wants hormonal birth control pills, the morning after pill, and intrauterine devices to be outlawed as abortion-inducing agents, or "abortifacients." All these methods prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg in a woman's uterus. They prevent pregnancy, but not conception.Not a single link to any kind of evidence to back up the statement that birth control pills don't prevent conception. Or any statement from any prolife organization saying birth control pills never prevent conception.
What's so sad here is how paranoid and delusional these people are. They can't understand that saying, "life beings at conception" (short for: "the life of an individual human being begins at conception") isn't a code for anything. It's a scientific fact. They don't want to argue whether this statement is true or not (because they lose that argument). They'd prefer to take that statement asserting something as true and make into some kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge, I'm-going-to-ban-contraceptives, political posturing. I guess it's much easier to create "he wants to ban birth control" strawmen than honestly wrestle with the reality that abortion intentionally ends the life of a developing human being.
In the comments section, some of Garance's readers take exception with her broad generalized statements and she eventually says, "The pill's primary mechanism of action is to prevent ovulation, not implantaion. As I said, there can be break-through ovulation -- as, for example, was experienced by a friend who got pregnant while on the pill. The odds are low but some women are just extremely fertile, it seems."
I like this response from torourke:
This is one of the more unintentionally hilarious items I've read in a while. In other words, "Mike Huckabee definitely opposes some forms of contraception, and his line at the debate was code to the Christo-fascist underground movement that he is really on their side, but then again I have no idea what I am talking about, so yeah, maybe somebody should ask what his position actually is on contraception."
Solid analysis there Garance. Gee, how about looking at his record while he was Governor of Arkansas? Did he support legislation that would restrict the use of any kind of contraception?
Nope.
If you look at his website, he supports run-of-the-mill pro-life positions and the refunding of abstinence education (which I think is a bad idea). But nowhere does he mention that he would like to ban any kind of contraception.
'Life begins at conception' is an utterly banal observation that can found in your average embryology textbook, or is that a coded-message as well?
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