ALL THE BABIES

Heh heh.

While the “every sperm is sacred” amendment is clever, I would like to propose something that can actually be enforced, and which would give the legislators in question a chance to put their love of children into practice. It would be an answer to this question here:

Between the years of 1907 and 2008, only 77 women have been elected to the Oklahoma state legislature, and currently less than 20 is serving out of a total 149. But who better to pass laws about women’s bodies than a group of men who will never have to worry about the consequences of their religious zealotry?

Who says they won’t have to worry about the consequences of their religious zealotry?

The next time a state legislature is frothing up one of these “defeat the scourge of women who are not perennially pregnant” bills, let’s attach an amendment that creates the following conditions:

1. The state will allow for Safe Haven dropoffs of infants up to 30 days. The state will similarly provide special shelters for homeless pregnant women and girls.

2. The state will release to the public the home addresses of all the state lawmakers who voted Yes on the bill.

3. All of those lawmakers’ homes will be considered Safe Haven zones for unwanted newborns AND special shelters for pregnant women and girls facing parental rejection, domestic violence and extreme poverty. Those homes will be held legally responsible for the safe placement of all newborns left at their doors and for the provision of shelter, food, clothing, medical care and protection from violent partners for all pregnant females seeking assistance.

You think babies are so awesome that women should be legally forced to gestate and birth indefinitely? They’ll be coming (both the women and the babies) to your doorstep. Have plenty of beds ready.

 

Mr. Stewart, you are under arrest for letting your friend be a stalker, a junkie and an idiot.

Sarah McKinley is all over the news for asking a 911 dispatcher’s permission to shoot the bastard who was breaking into her home. CBS has the details on the crime itself. News OK has more info on her life. All the news sources are going with the story that the perps were targeting McKinley’s home with the goal of stealing her very recently-deceased husband’s painkillers, but to be honest, I think they were after more than just the drugs. They may have been looking for drugs, and reasonably assumed that since Kenneth McKinley had just died of lung cancer, there probably would be some prescription painkillers in the house, but I think it wasn’t just the drugs:

Though McKinley didn’t piece things together until after the shooting, she’d had several strange run-ins with 24-year-old Justin Shane Martin. According to CBS News, her mother says that about two years ago, she noticed Martin following McKinley around at a rodeo. Recently the two bumped into each other at a convenience store, and on the night of her husband’s funeral he showed up to her door and introduced himself as a neighbor, but McKinley didn’t let him in. In the past month McKinley had started locking her doors because she thought someone had moved things around in her home, but her mother thought she was imagining things due to the stress of her husband’s illness.

Also? Four of her dogs turned up dead within the last month. I think we can take her word for it that they didn’t just die in the cold.

Martin and Stewart may very well have been a couple of junkies looking for a fix, but it also sounds like Martin was stalking Sarah McKinley for quite some time before he and Stewart showed up at her mobile home with knives. If she hadn’t shot him, I suspect Justin Shane Martin would have done considerably worse to Sarah than just steal her late husband’s pain meds.

The practical upshot is that since they did not wait for her to take the baby and visit her mother before they paid her a visit, Justin Shane Martin is dead by her shotgun, Sarah McKinley is recognized as having acted in fully lawful self-defense, and Dustin Louis Stewart is being tried for his accomplice’s murder. The logic of the charges is basically that it’s not Sarah McKinley’s fault that she shot Martin when he busted through her door with a hunting knife in hand, it’s Martin’s and Stewart’s fault for fucking with the wrong 18-year-old widowed mother. Since Martin is dead, they can’t very well charge him with anything, so they’re charging Stewart for having participated in a crime that he should have known could have gotten someone killed.

Now, Universe? Can you please stop throwing shit at Sarah McKinley? Can you let her and the baby just have a year in which no door has to be barricaded with a couch? I think she’s had enough for at least a few decades.

Invisible lines in the sand

Via Jezebel (WSJ requires subscription to read full article):

Oklahoma’s governor has vetoed a reintroduced bill that would have required details of women’s abortions to be posted online, because it has no exception for rape or incest. However, Oklahoma’s legislature has overridden such vetoes in the past.

In any abortion-related legislation…how exactly do you make an exception for rape and incest?

It’s easy enough to write the distinction into law, but how do you enforce that distinction? When you have real women coming into real clinics to procure real procedures, how do the authorities know which ones were raped, and which ones simply forgot to use contraceptives?