Q. and Egg.mendment

Some good questions on murder and monitoring from the internets for our Egg-centric ballot initiative:

When do we start having women register their periods with the government every month so we can track and investigate miscarriages? I'm sure our police forces will consider staking out the feminine hygiene aisle down at Walgreen's to be a far more important task than staking out, say, crack houses.

And when do we start convicting women of murder, and giving them jail sentences that show we mean business? Murder is a crime without a statute of limitations in most states. Since as many as one-third of all American women have abortions at some point during their childbearing years -- and many more than that will miscarry -- rooting out and prosecuting the "murders" of the past 35 years alone will tie up our courts for a decade, and end up with tens of millions of the country's mothers, grandmothers, and childless women alike in jail. The social and taxpayer costs of this kind of witchhunt would be usefully absurd numbers to wave around for PR purposes. So would the prospect of right-wing judges reviewing every woman's medical records to root out evidence of pregnancies that ended suspiciously.

Just asking those two questions always makes the every-sperm-is-sacred crowd do a 180 turn so fast you can hear their necks snap. No, no, no, that's not what they meant at all! Their proposals always try to pin the "murder" on the (presumably male) doctors involved, since all anti-choice arguments are ultimately grounded in the idea that women can never be fully responsible moral agents. Any counter-proposal that insists that the full legal penalties they propose should rightly fall on the women themselves seems to leave them fumbling for words.

And one more question from me: doesn't the Religious Right believe that God will take care of each pregnancy and make sure every child he really wants on Earth is born? Oh, ye of little faith.....