Mission aborted

As a country, we are never, ever, ever going to agree on the topic of abortion. Ever.

If you are truly pro-life, you believe to the core of your being women and doctors are murdering babies.

If you are truly pro-choice, you believe to that same core women should have complete and total control over their own bodies, no matter what. Period.

This is not like slogging it out over the merits of progressive or regressive tax policies or if tariffs are a good idea, it’s far more personal.

When one side believes the other is advocating for a form of genocide and the other believes you are ripping away fundamental human rights and essentially enslaving women, there really isn’t much room for debate or space to meet in the middle.

And no amount of screaming “murderer” or playing fetal heartbeats on loud speakers is going to change anyone’s mind any more than dressing up like characters from the “Handmaid’s Tale” while waving wire hangers is.

It’s just not.

The only way any person’s heart or mind is ever changed on this issue is if they have to go through this experience themselves in some way. Only then, can one really understand it. And depending on the situation, the most fervent pro-lifers have become pro-choice and vice versa. Every situation is so different and so personal.

It’s only easy to pick a “side” on this if you are thinking in the abstract. For those actually living it, it’s not easy at all — it’s likely one of the single most difficult and defining moments of their lives. As it should be.

Again, we are never going to agree on this. But I think most of us can agree the Alabama legislature handled this in the typical ham-fisted way they handle just about everything else. That would be in the most embarrassing, unproductive manner possible, and with reckless disregard of taxpayer money.

As the Supreme Court justice most pro-lifers are counting on to overturn Roe said during his confirmation hearing, “This is a circus!”

And it truly is.

I don’t care if you are holding up signs with uteruses made out of snakes or enlarged ultrasounds pictures, the exchange between Sen. Clyde Chambliss (R-Prattville) and Sen. Linda Coleman Mason (D-Birmingham) was absolutely cringe-worthy for us all.

“I’m not trained medically so I don’t know the proper medical terminology and timelines,” Chambliss said. “But from what I’ve read, what I’ve been told, there’s some period of time before you can know a woman is pregnant.”

Chambliss then argued women should be able to terminate their pregnancies as long as they didn’t know they were pregnant.

Huh?

Is there some sort of time machine involved in this scenario or is your uterus supposed to whip out a cell phone and make an appointment at the clinic for you before your brain catches up? I don’t know.

Bless your heart, Clyde.

These guys should clearly be passing laws for it to be mandatory that everyone in the state has to take at least one semester of basic human biology. NO EXCEPTIONS!

Sen. Coleman Davis fired back stating the obvious, “You men don’t know what you don’t know because you’ve never been pregnant. You can’t get pregnant, you’ve never been pregnant, you don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant, you don’t know what a woman goes through when she’s pregnant.”

This exchange, of course, was devoured by the national media, who played it over and over and over again to showcase to the world just how ass-backward we are. Mission accomplished.

Thanks, Clyde.

I don’t really care what the national media or “SNL” or Alyssa Milano thinks of Alabamians. I am one. I am embarrassed of (and for) folks like Clyde, too, but I know and love far more really incredible, thoughtful, talented, funny and brilliant people who still love this state for many other reasons and are proud to call it home. Sadly, we just can’t get any of those folks to run for office because they don’t want to have to deal with morons, like the Pride of Prattville.

Good job, Clyde.

But what I do care about is how this ridiculous “circus” is most likely to accomplish absolutely nothing. And that nothing is going to come at a very high price for the taxpayers of the Yellowhammer State.

Most legal experts agree the Alabama law will never make it in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. It is too draconian and unconstitutional and the issues at play have already been decided on as a matter of law. The federal courts have repeatedly ruled the government does not have a “compelling interest” to violate a woman’s due process rights in these matters before a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The Alabama law would certainly do that, as would the “heartbeat bills” being passed or considered in other states, like Georgia.

The court only takes on cases when the lower courts can’t agree on how the law should be interpreted and that is just not the case here.

Most scholars agree the justices would be more likely to take on more nuanced cases, like ones that have already come out of Indiana and are already sitting at the Supreme Court, which ban abortions based on things like race, gender and/or genetic disorders, and also requires fetal remains to be disposed of by burial or cremation.

So, my question to Rep. Terri Collins (R-Decatur) who sponsored the bill in the House and to Clyde, of course, did you guys even look into this to see if your bill, which by your own admission was designed to go to the Supreme Court, would actually make it there? Did you call up any Pro-Life legal experts that went to Harvard or Yale, or even the more prestigious University of Alabama Law School (RMFT!)? You know, just to ask them if this was the best way to do this?

I’m guessing Clyde did not, but what about you, Ter?

So here we are left with a law that is most likely not going to make its way to the Supreme Court and is going to cost a fortune of our money for the state to litigate. #soalabama

And for what?

So we can be known as the state where we think it’s OK to force a 13-year-old girl to carry her grandfather’s baby to term? Or where a husband has to watch his wife bear the child of a man who brutally raped and beat her in front of him?

Oh sweet home!