privacy

Or is this another earth bound finding from the patriarchy?

So many people insist god speaks. Jimmy says Jesus ''does not want all of these abortions''. I dunno Jimmy. Could Jesus maybe have helped with the rescue that crashed in the desert, all those years ago? Maybe, Jimmy, you could ask AND get an answer...

The Fifth US Circuit Appeals court has indeed upheld a MS lower court finding that the right to privacy does not extend to purchasing sex toys. Further, the MS high court ruled that there is ''no fundamental right of access to purchase sex toys''.

Not to get too serious... because, really, this is a laughing matter... but only if you live outside LA (seat of the Fifth Circuit, right there in wild and pagan New Orleans, now destroyed as an act of god against the abortion clinics - and whatever else!) and outside GA TX MS and AL wherever else the men (and women assists) love to deny humanity.

Made in China FOB Ningbo seaport.
Minumum order 10 dozen.

That is right, surely god filed an amicus brief with the court. Surely there is a passage of bible screed that prohibits... TOY-GASMS !?! and pink fluff handcuffs, dildos that light up... cock rings... butt plugs - and whatever else.

I wanna see the amicus brief. Otherwise it is "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Or should be, in a half-way decent world.

from Talk to Action

One can almost hear Mark Twain snorting in disgust.

(Image by Kafka/AP)
This week Governor Mike Rounds of South Dakota finally ended the suspense. After a prolonged, tantalizing and agonizing period of presumably sober deliberation, Rounds signed the Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act. The law protects human life beginning at "that point in time when a male human sperm penetrates the zona pellucida of a female human ovum." Unless, of course, the live human in question is a woman who wants an abortion – in which case she'd better be a sodomized Christian virgin.

People are buy women's eggs. The price ain't cheap. If you are tall, with sterling SAT scores, Ivy League, and without a family history of genetically related diseases, your egg can command $50,000.

A man with similar attributes can expect to sell his sperm for $1200.

Certainly the man does not carry the resulting embryo, but with modern technology, neither does the woman. The fertilized egg can be planted into another woman's womb ... at the proper moment in her cycle ... and there is about a one in five chance that it will "take."

Egg cost more because they are more difficult to "harvest." There are risk to the health of the female donor. The procedure may mean she can never have children and some women are opting to have eggs set aside for their own use when the harvesting takes place.

Science fiction?

No this is happening today.

The developments in science are outflanking the political discourse which is getting stale. Harvard Business School Professor Debora Spar writes about the prices of sperm and eggs in her new book, "The Baby Business," ISBN 1-59139-620-4. She observes that contraception has made it possible to have sex without pregnancy, but today we can have pregnancy without sex.

Fundamentalists, among others, do not want school to teach students about sex, yet is this science something that can be taught to high school seniors in their biology class?

In the face of these changes, are the State legislatures even in step with the 21st century? With some 400,000 fertilized human eggs in various laboratories, what does this do to the belief that an fertilized egg has a "right to life." 400,000 "people" is the population of Alaska - enough people to earn a seat in the US House of Representatives.

Can selling an egg (or sperm) be prevented? Should it be prevented?

People who don't want to be pregnant are told they "must be." Many of those who can't get pregnant, want to be. They want to joy of carrying the child. Some who cannot carry the child will pay another woman to carry a child that is not genetically hers in any one - the most startling case being one where a woman of color (Filipina) carried a white couple's baby.

Is this what the folks in South Dakota, and elsewhere, are considering as they grind out anti-choice legislation. Who controls when, how, and if we breed?

Is seems the market forces have already shown themselves and international boarders are easy enough to cross.

We are on the edge of a tidal wave of bio-evolution.

I hope to be blogging more about Spar's book (I'm about half way through) and hope others, as well, may want to discuss the issues that it raises.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Citing what they see as a more receptive or antiabortion high court, lawmakers easily approved a sweeping ban on the procedure, one that declares that life begins at conception.

South Dakota's law makes it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion unless the mother's life is endangered. There are no exceptions for cases in which a mother's health may be threatened or cases in which the pregnancy results from rape or incest.

On the March 3, 2006, broadcast of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer we saw past the benign rhetoric about how the Supreme Court is going to stay impartial and the new Justices are not coming to the Supreme Court to grind an ax.

South Dakota has passed legislation that discriminates in favor of an embryo over the rights of a woman to control her own body.

Reproductive technology marches on. It is possible to place a fertilized egg of one woman into the womb of another woman. This is not surrogacy where the man impregnates another woman. This is the transfer of a fertilized egg of one women into that of another.

Currently, there are Third World women, and women of poverty in this nation, who are hiring out their wombs to people of means (often of different ethnicity) so that the hiring couple can have a baby that is biologically "theirs." The egg and sperm of the hiring couple are joined, and the embryo is implanted into another woman who has agreed to carry the fetus through labor. If a woman who has donated her womb has a change of heart, under South Dakota law she cannot get out of the services she has contracted to fulfill - nor does she (or so it seems) have any real legal standing once she delivers the baby.

This is not science fiction. This is the state of affairs today, and we are going down the slippery slope where the state begins to assert eminent domain over the womb.

Stay tuned. This is going to get a whole lot worse before we get away from people who are more interested in the rights of an embryo than a woman.

from Talk to Action

Amarillo, Texas isn't the kind of place where most people would expect to find a rock star. Amarillo invites visitors to "enjoy our wide-open spaces and stay a while" because that's what Amarillo has the most of – wide-open spaces. But that is about to change. This dusty little city of 176,000 on the high plains of the Texas Panhandle is poised to become a new anti-choice Mecca as the world headquarters of one of the Catholic church's most influential proponents of judicial status for embryos, the man who has been called the Pope's "vicar for life," Fr. Frank Pavone.