While many Americans are either mesmerized over another wealthy celebrity entertainer contemplating a run for the presidency, or the current White House occupant’s racist pejoratives aimed at other countries’ citizens, the Senate is poised to attack women on behalf of the Vatican and evangelical personhood movement.
Of course another religious attack on women is the new normal since America was taken over by evangelical theocrats at the highest levels of government, but it doesn’t mean the media or the resistance should keep silent over another assault on 51 percent of the population. What it does mean is that the so-called “resistance” had better start confronting these evangelical machinations head on before Republicans deal a deathblow to women’s constitutional right to self-determination; a right religious Republicans are crusading to eliminate. And that deathblow starts with controlling women’s reproductive choices with theocratic legislation with no basis in reality - like “The Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.”
It is noteworthy to state right away that this piece of legislation is based on a seriously bastardized and heretical interpretation of the Christian religion. It is, however, part and parcel of the Catholic faith founded on a 1968 Papal encyclical, but it is not “scriptural” to evangelicals by any stretch of the imagination. Evangelicals and Republicans embrace the Catholic personhood movement’s biblical heresy because it originated in the mind of a powerful male tyrant who devised a simple means of controlling his Catholic adherents around the world. Religious Republicans and their evangelical masters are using “the fetus” in hopes of controlling American women and keeping them “in their place” as birth machines like god and the male clergy intended.
According to reports from women’s rights activists, while the public is waiting for Trump’s next Twitter tirade Senate Republicans are preparing to vote on a 20-week abortion ban next week. It looks as if the vote is going to be on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade as a nod to the fanatical personhood movement that the GOP is repaying loyal evangelical voters by using religion to control women with a ban on their right to self-determination. Trump promised his extremist religious disciples that he would sign the Vatican-inspired ban when it reaches his desk.
The Republican dominated House already passed a 20-week ban based on radical Christian claims that a 20-week fetus is a child that feels pain. It is noteworthy to mention that the age of “fetal viability is pegged at 28 weeks” when pathology shows there is enough neurological development in a fetus to breathe oxygen and start feeling anything, even though at 28 weeks the survival rate is at about 50 percent.
The religious Republican ban is founded on the stunningly absurd notion that at 20 weeks of gestation a fetus has full neurological development more than sufficient to feel pain. The reality is that at 20 weeks there are no neurological structures in place for that organism to feel anything according to a clinical professor and OB-GYN at Stanford University. Jennifer Conti is also a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health and she said:
“Twenty weeks is just an arbitrary limit set in place by [religious Republican] politicians that has no medical or scientific backing. There’s actually conclusive evidence that shows that the neurologic structures in a fetus aren’t complete and working until much further along in pregnancy, we think the third trimester.”
Ms. Conti is right, of course, and the scientific medical community concur that the neurological structures are “probably in place at about 28-29 weeks,” not 20 weeks. In fact, according to a comprehensive review reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “the structures needed for fetuses to feel [anything] only begin to develop between 23 and 30 weeks of gestation.” That biological fact was verified by the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists who reported that “premature babies cannot feel anything [much less pain] until 29 or 30 weeks.”
For the ignoramus zealots among the evangelical sect, a “premature” baby is one that has left the mother’s womb and breathes oxygen; what the evangelical god of the bible calls “a living being.” It is not a zygote, not an embryo or a fetus that the anti-choice morons claim are “children” that feel pain. The point is that If a living, oxygen-breathing “premature baby” cannot feel anything until 29 or 30 weeks, then it is biologically impossible for a 20-week old fetus to be “pain capable.”
It is questionable whether the Senate version of the 20-week ban will pass due to requiring a supermajority vote (60) to advance to Trump’s desk, but that is not a completely unwanted result for the religious Republican movement. In fact, it is likely that anti-women’s rights groups, evangelical fanatics, Republicans, the Vatican, U.S. Catholic Bishops, the personhood movement, and all Christofascists want to see the ban fail for an obvious reason; to use the legislation’s defeat during an election year to focus attention on every candidates's position on women’s reproductive rights.
If the measure fails in the Senate, Americans can expect a very heavy dose of attacks by religious Republicans on any candidate who either voted against, or would have voted against, a theocratic fetus law. And that opposition would be heavily promoted as Democrats who “willfully refuse to protect the voiceless, the vulnerable, the marginalized children who science has proven can feel pain.”
As noted above, fetuses are “not children” and they are not living beings according to the evangelical Christian’s god of the bible. And, science has proven that a fetus at 20 weeks has no neurological structure to feel anything. Still, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said there are marginalized children in mothers’ wombs who are in pain and only Republicans can save them. Republicans will beat that dead horse mercilessly in the leadup to the 2018 midterms and the “resistance” will do what they typically do when confronted with “the fetus” by lying Republican theocrats, lose elections.
Republicans have had incredible electoral success with the fetus over the years and it was an important part in Trump garnering support from the evangelical extremists that make up the majority of his base. Besides bringing about the End Times, the religious right flocked to Trump on his pledge to put an end to women’s reproductive freedoms; and for the personhood evangelicals that means abolishing birth control according to the 1969 Papal document that bans abortion, the Humanae Vitae.
This ridiculous fetal pain nonsense has failed in the past but now that evangelicals co-own and co-control the federal government, their assault on women represents a clear and present danger.
Remember, one of the first acts of the evangelicals running the federal government was designating a eukaryotic cell (zygote) as a living human being worthy of federal government protection. Republicans followed suit in the House version of tax reform giving zygotes, embryos, and the fetus federal personhood status for the sake of evading taxation. Theocratic Republicans are setting a precedent to ban all forms of what the Vatican calls “artificial birth control” and every attack on women’s reproductive rights is setting up that ban; and all without the Catholic Pope ever having to utter one edict.
If there is a real “resistance” movement, they have been extraordinarily silent on the not-so-stealthy and sustained attack on women over the course of the past year. A monumental part of the problem is that no organization, or Democrat for that matter, is willing to cite the only source of these unrelenting attacks on women. Believe it or not, there are no laws forbidding anyone from condemning the Republican attacks on women as borne of religion. Oh some people will claim that mentioning religion will kill the message or alienate the faithful, but that kind of mindset is precisely what the religious right, Republicans indebted to the religious right, the religious right clergy, and the anti-women’s movement is counting on. They know that everyone in America is too terrified to say out loud that religion is the only basis for the misogyny and patriarchal attacks on American women and it is why they continue unabated.