Meet Jane Crow

A while back, I did a post walking myself towards the logical extremes we can expect by re-criminalizing abortion.

I imagined the scenario of a chance encounter with a female acquaintance, noticing she was pregnant, hearing a certain negativity in her conversation about the prospects of having her 4th child, and then wondering what my responsibilities would be if I met her again much later, and it turned out she'd "miscarried", tho' she didn't seem awfully upset about it, which would then make me wonder if she'd taken some kind of illegal action to terminate her pregnancy.

As a loyal subject of The American Empire, am I expected to report my suspicions to the police?

Well well well.  Turns out my little imaginings weren't nearly as goofy as I tho't.



Politics and Salesmanship are practically the same - they're both about getting somebody to go along with your idea; or to do something voluntarily that they're not actually obliged to do.

If you wanna get anywhere in Sales, you have to learn a technique called the Turnaround.  It's where you take a perceived negative and turn it into a positive.  In the video above, Lynn Paltrow nails a great Turnaround by saying (paraphrasing here) that when you Person-ize the fetus, the effect is that you've de-Person-ized the mother.  You can't raise the fetus to Full-Fledged Citizen unless you downgrade the woman.

(paraphrasing again): We hear lotsa noise about the point when a blob of cells becomes a person, but we never hear anything about the point in her pregnancy that a woman can be legally required to stop being a person.

Fucking brilliant is all that is.

So we have the very powerful argument that you can't possibly support Criminalized Abortion from the position of Small Limited-Power Government.

We also have the 1st Amendment argument that says you may have strong feelings about the "sanctity of life", or about the "moment of conception", but here in this country we don't take anybody's spiritual teachings and turn them into law

And now we have a couple of points from an Equal Protection angle - in order to confer rights on the Unborn, you have to take them away from the mother.  And you don't get to enact laws that apply only to women but not to men.