"Republican men with anti-abortion agendas have long taken a perverse kind of pleasure in their illiteracy on the very topics they harp on the most. They love to talk about the sanctity of motherhood and the milestones of fetal development; Chambliss, for instance, wore a pin on Tuesday night that he claimed was the size of a fetus's feet after 10 weeks of pregnancy. But when it comes to the nuts and bolts of biology that medical professionals, insurance companies, and patients will have to parse to determine what reproductive health care is legal and when, they plead ignorance.
This is not a strictly Alabamian phenomenon. Consider the comments of Ohio state Rep. John Becker, a Republican who proposed a bill that would curb insurance coverage of all abortion care provided under non-life-threatening circumstances. When journalists and health care practitioners noted that the bill would also ban coverage of contraception devices, including certain IUDs, that prevent the implantation of fertilized eggs, Becker seemed exasperated. "That's clearly not my area of expertise," he said. He then suggested that pharmaceutical companies could simply "reformulate" their contraceptives to work differently, somehow, to comply with his legislation. That legislation, by the way, included an exception to allow insurance coverage of a medical procedure Becker appears to have invented out of whole cloth. Under Becker's bill, if a woman experiences an ectopic pregnancya life-threatening event wherein a fertilized egg attaches somewhere other than inside the uterusinsurance companies would be permitted to cover a procedure to "reimplant the fertilized ovum into the pregnant woman's uterus." That procedure does not exist."
The Slate
Stupid and ignorant men making laws about women's bodies is ludicrous.
