CONTRACEPTION IS THE NEW ABORTION

[defrog]

Team Def Agent zen_kitty brought this to my attention, and it’s been blogged just about everywhere else, but I think it’s worth passing on to you, because it is a cauldron of Epic Weird.

Basically, the Department of Health and Human Services has released a proposal for new anti-discrimination rules that apply to health organizations getting federal funding. Sounds harmless. Until you see that by “anti-discrimination” they mean “protecting the rights of workers to refuse to provide medical services that violate their religious beliefs”.

Such as, oh, access to abortion and emergency contraceptives, say.

I mention these specifically because the HHS rules also expands the definition of “abortion” to include contraceptives such as Plan B, IUDs and others.

To review: the HHS wants to give legal protection to people who make treatment decisions regarding family planning based on religious beliefs rather than medical science, and it is rewriting the definition of the core treatment that workers object to on religious grounds (abortion) to give them a greater range of things they can refuse to give you.

See what they did there?

To really appreciate what’s going on here, it’s important to remember that these are the same people who, under Bush’s leadership and with his blessing, believe that teenagers and poor people in Africa shouldn’t be given condoms or even told about them because it only encourages them to fuck before marriage.

Which is a sin. As it happens. A coincidence, I’m sure.

And here they are, in Bush’s final months, attempting to broaden the range of what constitutes abortion by simply arbitrarily changing the language. It’s like revising the definition of “theft” to include “making a copy of something you legally own, even if you never sell it to someone else or even tell anyone you have it”.

Taking the HHS rules to the logical extreme, we could find ourselves in a Philip K Dick universe where any sex act that doesn’t result in pregnancy could legally be declared an act of abortion by the local Pre-Crime Unit of the HHS. Won't that be fun?

Notice also – and this is something I haven't seen any reports pick up on yet – that the HHS policy seems to be worded as though abortion is illegal. Which it is not. But their policy treats it as though it is. Or should be.

With all the scrutiny this is getting now, I have my doubts it will pass. But it’s a master class in subtle doublespeak propaganda – not least because this is from the same people who warned us all through Hambone Clinton’s reign of the evils of Big Govt intruding into Americans’ private lives.

O, the hypocrisy irony.

Language is a virus,

This is dF

Comments

[def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com]

This is more or less why I remain convinced by my hypothesis that, at some level, at least to some of these people, the real issue is control over sexual conduct in accordance with fundamentalist Christian doctrine of procreation and no sex until marriage. The policies they favor indirectly but consistently work in favor of that position. They'll deny it to yr face (and I have asked), but I seriously doubt it's a happy coincidence.