Protect Our Right to Not Reproduce

I don't fully understand why reproductive legislation has been designated a "women's issue" - and I still don't understand why it's a woman's responsibility to prevent pregnancy. (I mean, it's not like we're shooting eggs up your ding-a-ling, but I digress. That is another topic for another day.)

My point is that Bush, while he's being booed out of office by the vast majority of both Democrats and Republicans, is attempting (as a last hoorah, perhaps) to make things even worse. As evidenced in this article about his latest piece of "brilliant" legislation. It's a small step, but a step none-the-less in the direction of extreme censorship and control. Basically, the mother-fucker wants to convince the world that taking birth control pills constitutes "abortion" and thus birth control pills, IUDs, nuva rings - anything that's not a "barrier method" would become something that health-care practitioners would no longer have to offer or inform you about.

This means that a rape victim could be in the unlucky care of a religious right-wing nurse, who could conviently forget to offer her a morning after pill or talk to her about her options should she become pregnant.

Now, I don't know if you've read up on birth control pills, but basically, they do a bunch of things - things which are really awesome (if they work) and fairly uninvasive to most people.

• The first thing they do is attempt to stop you from ovulating by telling your brain you're already pregnant and you don't need to ovulate anymore.
• They also thicken cervical mucous, making it harder for sperm to get through.
  
• And, they make the egg harder to penetrate, so that if you do happen to ovulate and if sperm do get through, they have a hard time breaking into the egg.
  
• Finally, BCPs (and any hormonal birth control method) make the uterine lining thinner, so that if you all of those other things fail, it's harder for the egg to implant itself on the wall of the uterus.

(So, if a sperm makes it through, there's an egg to fertilize, and that sperm can get in - and, if said ball of cells can implant itself onto the uterine wall, that child was really desperate to make it out into the world. I think your kid's a fighter already, Jen.)

As far as I can tell, the hard-core Catholics lose you at "prevent ovulation." I have no idea why, and I won't even pretend to try to understand why every sperm is sacred in this over-populated world. Somehow Bush (the Xtian right wing?) has decided that if sperm meets egg, that's a "life" (even though this happens all the time - and the fertilized egg fails naturally to implant in the uterus - but that's okay because it's the will of God? Right? Okay, whatever you say, crazy.)

Anyway, my point is, this shit is scary. It's one more step toward taking away our basic human right to fuck without reproducing. The Democrats are against it (because they're not as evil as the Conservative religious crowd) and Obama spoke to this issue at a Planned Parenthood convention. This is one more reason you should vote for the fellow. He may still be a politician, with all that that entails, but with him in charge, I'll rest a hell of a lot easier. I believe that he'll take us away from the 1984 world of Big Brother and the Thought Police that Bush has been leading us toward for the last eight years. So, I don't care how against voting you are, or how much you hate Democrats or the hype surrounding Obama - please just get out there and vote for him. Because any vote not cast, and any vote for a 3rd candidate is just a vote for John McCaine - and we don't need four more years of Bush.

Thanks for your time.
~Ember