Leave it to Alabama to Take the Abortion Rights Debate into the Sewer of Misogyny

A blastocyst is the face of god?!

Human blastocyst, now a little human being in Alabama.

Just when you thought that maybe this nation’s anti-abortion movement had hit bottom, with Supreme Court “Justice” Sam Alito citing a medieval witch-trial jurist to support his overturning of a woman’s right to abort a fetus, we get the Alabama State Supreme Court’s Chief Justice Tom Parker writing the opinion for a decision declaring that a fertilized egg whether in a uterus or a petri dish, is a person.

His decision is reported to have thrown the whole business of in-vitro fertilization — a proces which has enabled countless women and couples to have children who for one medical, legal or other reason or another could not do so in the usual manner of coitus between the future mother and father — into a panic of uncertainty. Typically, because in-vitro fertilization is not a sure thing, medical specialists will “harvest” a few eggs from a woman’s ovary and fertilize them in a petri dish, and then insert the most successful fertilized egg into the desired uterus to develop into a fetus. The rest get tossed.

Will tossing them out instead of keeping them on ice indefinitely now be a crime in Alabama?

The crackpot theologian jurist Parker’s remarks certainly make that seem likely. In his legal opinion he wrote:

“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God…Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

Does this whack job of a judge even know that up to 15 percent of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, with most of those occurring within a few weeks of fertilization? Three months is how long most young couples wait before telling parents, family and friends that they are going to have a baby. They wait that long because there is so much uncertainty about the viability of a pregnancy before twelve weeks that they don’t want to have to deal having to explain that it was a “false alarm” or that the pregnancy failed, on top of having to deal with the personal emotional turmoil of having lost a wanted baby.

So my first question for this oh so pious judge, so sure of his belief that the “face of God” looks like a blastocyst, and that destroying such a bunch of protoplasm is “effacing his glory” (sic—he forgot to capitalize the pronoun for his Lord) that he’s willing to assume he knows God’s will in this matter and that his God feels so easily insulted is this: Why then does he think there are so many spontaneous miscarriages?

Could it be that the process human procreation is so complicated that a lot of the attempts of humans to have a child are botched, and that if indeed some god designed that system, he didn’t make it all that well, and it often goes off the rails and self-destructs— self aborts if you will — to prevent the disaster of a still-birth or of the birth of a non-viable child that will die after being born? To put not too fine a point on it, if 15 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriages, and you believe this is all part of god’s plan, then god him or herself is terminating pregnancies for the same reason many women terminate their pregnancies: because the fetus is damaged, flawed or unviable.

Another question he should be required to answer is what he thinks should be done with the developing blastocyst or early fetus that is (hopefully) expelled naturally, often into the toilet in those early weeks. Is the mother in that case guilty of “mutilating a corpse” if she hastily flushes the bloody remains down the toilet in surprise, horror , fear or sadness? Should she instead scoop it out of the bowl, put it on a towel, and bring it to a coroner for a proper burial?

These are important issues raised by Judge Parker’s stern sermon, oh I’m sorry, opinion from the bench.

I am guessing Judge Parker, while he may have studied law, never really had a class even in high school on child development or human physiology. So I think it’s important for him to look hard and long at the above photo of a five-day-old human blastocyst — the type of thing that, if you looked really hard at the expelled material from a spontaneous miscarriage you might find by poking through the tissue. If he discerns the face of his God there , I would urge him to draw it for us, because I sure don’t see it.

What I do see from the opinions of Justices Alito and Parker is a lot of misery, suffering and torture for mostly young women, both those who get unintentionally pregnant and don’t want to have a baby and induce a miscarriage or abortion, and others longing to have a child but who lose one to a spontaneous miscarriage. Neither can expect much empathy or solace from the likes of Rev. Judges Parker or Alito.

I do have one more question for Judge Parker. The case in question on which he was writing his opinion, involved fertilized eggs in the petri dishes of an in-vitro fertilization lab. Now, the Bible on which Parker grounds his “thinking” (I’m being generous here with my vocabulary) was written at a time long before such a thing as a ‘test-tube baby” could even be imagined. Does the judge think God enabled that miracle of fertilization to occur and for mitosis process to begin to form a human blastocyst? If so, did that god of his also decide which of the assembled blastocysts should get placed into a woman’s womb to grow? Because if he did, he was consigning the rest of them to the medical waste bin. Not all those decisions were made by human lab techs, after all. They most likely looked at the progress of the blastocysts and seeing some undergoing cell division and growing better than others, so then they selected the best growth prospects, dumping the rest in the bin. So was that decision the lab tech’s, or was it the god’s who controlled, presumably, which blastocysts would thrive and which wouldn’t. So was it the lab or the god who was killing “babies”?

The real question is, why are we even at this point?

There are babies growing up in poverty in the US with poor nutrition because their parents don’t earn enough to buy sufficient nourishing food. There are babies dying because of lack of access to pre and post-natal care. The US has infant mortality statistics that rank it among third world nations even as some third world nations are actually ranked up with leading wealthy post-industrial nations because they actually care about babies’ welfare.and the welfare of their mothers.

Meanwhile this benighted country wants to protect zygotes and blastocysts.

Today’s TCBH! Family Fun Brain Teaser: Find the Human Baby blastocyst!

Guess which of these blastocysts is a “human baby” according to Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker (Hint: Look for the “image of God”) The answer will be provided tomorrow, as well as the identy of the other creatures in the picture.