Suppose Colorado’s “life at conception” ballot initiative had succeeded…
Nov 10th, 2008 | By Chris Ray | Category: FeatureThis election season, while generally a triumph for America’s leading center-left political party, saw a number of ballot initiatives of questionable libertarian merit succeed in several states. However, one of these initiatives, a Colorado proposal to define a “person” as “any human being from the moment of fertilization,” failed by a wide margin. This proposal’s obvious intent was to outlaw abortion, but its full text says that it would amend all Colorado state laws to accord with the scientifically dubious postulate that life begins at conception.
As a purely masochistic thought experiment, I began to wonder what practical impact this amendment would have had on non-abortion-related laws had it not been prematurely terminated by the democratic process. Here are some things I managed to come up with:
- Miscarriages would be treated as manslaughter. With or without an abortion, a miscarriage would now involve the death of an individual with full legal recognition, so it seems an obvious corollary that even the unintentional extermination of an unborn American citizen would require extensive legal inquiry to find out who is to blame. Women who consume chemicals that are dangerous to fetuses (coffee, deli meats, alcohol, etc.) would find their wombs turned into crime scenes while it is discovered to what degree the mother is responsible for the death of their children.
- Traffic cops would have to carry around pregnancy tests and routinely administer them to women that are pulled over during traffic stops. Why? Because driving with a child in your lap is illegal. Because a quick visual inspection of the outside of a woman’s womb isn’t enough to tell if a woman is carrying an unborn child in her lap while driving, we would need to test them. Not only that, but women who are pulled over while driving apparently alone in carpool-only lanes would have to be tested to see if there was, in fact, an (unborn) child in the car with them, thereby protecting them from tickets.
- Choosing a natural birth over a cesarean section might be child abuse.
- No pregnant woman would ever be able to go to an NC-17 movie, a nightclub, a bar, an adult entertainment store, a wine-and-spirits market, or a gun store, thanks to the fully recognized minor sucking blood out of her placenta.
- Children would obviously have to be enrolled in primary school nine months earlier, because the child’s age would now be calculated from conception and not from parturition. The obvious extension of this is that the childhood vaccination schedule would have to begin while the child is still in the womb.
- Gynecologists or ultrasound technicians who do this or that to the naughty bits of women might have to be classified as child abuse.
- Having sex with a pregnant woman would probably make you a pedophile.
25% of the voting citizens of Colorado are in favor of making state law harmonious with this list. Good thing only one fourth of voting Coloradans are complete idiots.
Last 5 posts by Chris Ray
- How much goat’s blood do I have to gargle in order to get a little recognition around here? - December 12th, 2008
- It is time to restore the original meaning of Christmas! - December 2nd, 2008
- Christian theocracy group accuses American Humanist Association of collaborating with “America’s enemies” - November 12th, 2008
- More data is needed to confirm Bloom’s hypothesis about why American atheists are so mean - November 7th, 2008
- Lack of Miracles Puzzles Theologians - October 26th, 2008
Loading ...
If an unborn baby isn’t human, then what species is it?
[Reply]
Roy Natian Reply:
November 10th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
It is Homo sapiens, but it’s not a person. There’s a difference.
[Reply]
Joe Reply:
November 10th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
An arbitrary legal one.
Quite a few laws were impacted, and had to be modified, when people with natural tans… and those lacking penises, were given personhood.
Quite a few laws were impacted when child labor laws were enacted.
The ethical dilemma of balancing individual rights within a society is not a trivial thing. And the biological difference between a baby 2 minutes before birth, and 2 minutes after is not quite as big as some people would like it to be. Deciding on the age to allow voting and consent to sex are just as important and just as arbitrary.
Doesn’t mean one can’t still be pro-choice, but it does mean some pro-choice people can be self-righteous ideologues, just like everyone else.
[Reply]
Katie Kish Reply:
November 10th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
zebra fish
[Reply]
Joe Reply:
November 10th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Goes good with a little lemon… and some white wine sauce.
[Reply]
Chris Ray Reply:
November 10th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
It wouldn’t be an atheist discussion thread without SOMEONE talking about eating babies.
[Reply]
Abhishek Bhatnagar Reply:
November 11th, 2008 at 4:31 am
So if fetuses become people, atheists would be cannibals?
[Reply]
Though I moved from Colorado recently, I still have an interest in political affairs there. I had a feeling it wasn’t going to pass; even many of the pro-lifers could see the possible legal soup that comes from the vaguely used word “person”, but even I did not see it failing with such a large 3-1 margin.
[Reply]
I haven’t read this post yet except to skim it for the word “God”. The reason being that I wanted to see if it were mentioned yet that if life at conception was the definition being subscribed to, shouldn’t God be treated as the state - and the world’s - most prolific abortionist, as a sizeable minority of conceptions do not make it to birth.
[Reply]
This post is rather lame. It doesn’t succeed as either humor or a reductio ad absurdum.
[Reply]
Chris Ray Reply:
November 12th, 2008 at 7:04 am
I wasn’t sure it was intended to be either, but, thanks for reading.
[Reply]
Well as I detailed in my post, anti-abortion or miscellaneous “life” amendments failed all across the nation even as gay marriage and adoption bans all passed.
So apparently we love to kill babies, but giving gay people rights is completely unconscionable.
[Reply]