Friday, December 28, 2012

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "I Am Sad for God" re: Women's Contraceptive Use



The bottom of the birdcage is getting a tad bit noisome as the year winds to a close. I have to remember to clean it more often in the new year.

An end-of-year conversation for your listening ears:


When the news came down that Justice Sotomayor had blocked the request of Hobby Lobby and Mardel Christian bookstores for an injunction against the ACA requirement that employers provide contraceptive coverage in healthcare plans, one EdwardHu responded at National Catholic Reporter (this thread follows the article linked above):

I am sad for God, whose acts of conception will be frustrated by our selfishness and carelessness. We should offer penance in advance.

And then he went on to 'splain that, with his Ph.D. in industrial engineering, he understands that, even if the bodies of women are so designed by God and nature that they naturally abort a certain percentage of fertilized ova before implantation (but he doubts that this is actually the case), they do so because of "things women do!" 

To wit.: women can cause such spontaneous abortions via

environmental conditions, prior drug use, length since off the pill, alcohol, rest, physical activities such as running, diet, dieting, etc. 

Got that? Years of irrefutable scientific evidence go down the drain, when we right-wing Catholics (or evangelicals, like the ones running Hobby Lobby and Mardel) need to prove that women are primarily baby machines, and their bodies simply can't be designed to do anything other than pop out babies each and every time they're inseminated. Except, of course, in cases of legitimate rape, when their bodies are designed to shut that thing down . . . .

Even though anyone with even a scintilla of knowledge of human reproduction has long known that "in nature, 50 percent of all fertilized eggs" do not implant, and that only 30 percent of human embryos develop to the blastocyst stage, and seven out of ten human embryos are chromosomally abnormal, for the faithful, nature simply can't and doesn't work that way.

For the faithful, the body of a woman is designed by God to be an incessantly fertile baby machine, a machine of macho men's dreams, that constantly creates babies every time she has intercourse--since the body of a virile man is designed, in the understanding of a virile man who proves his virility by inseminating his woman, to sow seeds that inevitably produce new life. And if anything goes wrong with this natural process, then it's the fault of women, not of God or of nature. 

It's the fault of women who selfishly do things like take the pill, drink alcohol, use drugs, go on diets, exercise or rest, or live in environmental conditions not conducive to making babies . . . .

I am sad for God, too, Edward. Though I suspect you and I are sad for God for very different reasons.

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