From the comments on my guestbook:
Who would believe it? House Bill 2797, introduced by Del. Bob Marshall (R-13), is such an extreme measure.It states “That life begins at the moment of fertilization and the right to enjoyment of life guaranteed by Article 1, 1 of the Constitution of Virginia is vested in each born and preborn human being from the moment of fertilization.”
This bill is so outrageous, virtually no one thought it would be taken seriously. But it has just been reported out of Privileges and Elections on February 2, 2007, and can advance it to the house floor first thing next week!
It not only presents a direct threat to Roe v. Wade, but access to FDA-approved methods of contraception, including IUDs,Emergency Contraception and even birth control pills.
Call your legistors (free) at the constituent hotline, 1-800-889-0229. Oppose HB2797, personhood from the moment of fertilization.
HB2797 did indeed report out yesterday, by a 12-7 vote. This needs to be addressed. Please contact your legislators.
Crossposted at The Women’s Post
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
On the contrary, this is an issue that needs to be addressed. Women’s rights or not, if life does start at conception (something that still has not been conclusively found one way or the other), then abortion is indeed one of the worst (if not the worst) atrocities in human history, claiming more than 40 million lives. The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness all truly hinge on the first of those, the right to life, and if they are being denied that right then we are no better than any other human rights offender, those accepting of abortion or those who are doing nothing to stop it.
Is this a Republican Conspiracy to lose their majority? Virginia voters are among the most affluent and educated in the country…
http://www.surveyusa.com/50State2005/50StateAbortion0805SortedbyState.htm
It all comes down to who hounds their representatives and who doesn’t James. Hopefully now that bills are easier to access, more people will speak against things like this and get involved in more nuts and bolts elections instead of just debating the presidential outcome that’s two years away.
Also, that survey does not account for districts and how those who are pro-choice are dispersed.
Cory – it does show 4 regions, though.
True.
CR, there is no moment of conception, no moment when unlife becomes life. Sexual reproduction is simply a subset variation of asexual budding, and the actual process of sperm meeting egg is also a process without any definitive magical moment of transformation (even after the first cell division, for instance, the two genetic lines are still clearly distinguishable). Given that eggs can technically self-fertilize, and that ultimately any cell can potentially grow into a new human simply by dividing in the right way, the concept of “potential life” is likewise empty. It is further empty given that long after this stage a developing mass can be split into any number of different masses that can later become separate fetuses, or merge with any other mass to become a single fetus. There is no “individual” here, not at this stage. There is nothing which in any way resembles the functional capacities of the beings for which we have spent thousands of years developing a theory of moral rights for.
So the idea that “life begins at conception” is not something that we can discover one way or another as if it were an objective fact. The idea is a subjective characterization of a complex biological process (and in general a poor one as the above illustrates) and it is merely a sloppy way of saying that we want to consider some nerveless, brainless dividing clumps of cells (especially prior to embryonic implantation, a necessary event without which the process will NOT naturally progress farther) to require legal and moral protection and others not.
Personally, I find the idea to be a virtual flashing neon sign blaring one’s complete lack of any idea what morality is supposed to be ABOUT, which is to do no harm to beings that have the functional capacity to have values, feel harm and reject it, in the first place. The supposed strongest arguments for the idea all rely on hand waving semantics over the word “human”: they are impossible to justify from first principles.
There are rational and sensible arguments that can be made as to why, at the very least, a fetus should be deserving of rights and protections. The abortion debate is one that we will have to grapple with for along time, though it too is not simple, and simply chucking a loaded definition at the problem is not helpful here either.
But for the “life begins at conception” crowd, there is no future history of “conclusively finding” that their view is justified. No zygote will ever complain or speak up about injustices done to it. Zygotes that never develop into fetuses and then feeling people are not people murdered, they are simply potential people that never came to be in the first place, no different than those never conceived in the first place.
So for the LBAC view, there is only a future of ridicule and scorn, given that this bizarre misunderstanding of both morality and biology has had real political effects in becoming an impediment to promising and perfectly ethical research.
Wouldn’t it be easier for Delegate Marshall to submit just one bill next session which would require the citizens of Virginia to convert to Roman Catholicism?
Passage of that one bill alone could eliminate all of extraneous ones regarding abortion, conception, artificial insemination, sex, homosexuality, marriage, and divorce.
What a crock of shit. Between Goode, John Warner, and Harbigot, Virginia is becoming a national JOKE.