Right up until birth...
H-0057 mandates:
The General Assembly intends this act to safeguard the right to abortion in Vermont by ensuring that right is not denied, restricted, or infringed by a governmental entity.
Sec. 2. 18 V.S.A. Chapter 223 is added to read:
CHAPTER 223: REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS Subchapter 1. Freedom of Choice Act 11
§ 9493. INDIVIDUAL REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS 12
(a) Every individual has the fundamental right to choose or refuse contraception or sterilization.
(b) Every individual who becomes pregnant has the fundamental right to choose to carry a pregnancy to term, give birth to a child, or to have an abortion.
(c) A fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus shall not have independent rights under Vermont law.
Someday in the near future…
Why my wife and I decided to abort our gay son.
By Steve Lavedas
Well, got the blood work results, and there’s good news and bad news. Good news: It’s a boy and he’s healthy. Bad news: He’s gay. I didn’t even know there was a blood test for that now, but I guess it’s new? They found the genes that cause homosexuality and they test for them now…
I’m a really tolerant person, but this has made me think hard. I don’t know how I feel about trying to raise a gay son. Will I be able to relate to him? Won’t his life be super hard? I know things are getting better for gay people, but it seems to me that being gay is really hard in the South in other parts of the country yet.h, where we live. Gay people aren’t really accepted here like in other parts of the country.
My wife told one of her friends that we are going to have an abortion because we don’t feel equipped to deal with raising a gay child. Apparently it got around to some of our gay friends from college. I’ve been getting emails, texts, and IMs all day from them asking me why I’m a homophobe, and why I hate gay people.
I don’t understand. It’s my wife’s body. It’s her choice, and I agree with it. It’s our choice of what to do with our pregnancy. How can anyone else tell my wife what to do with her body?…
We got to the clinic almost an hour early. They made us sit in the waiting room for a while and finally called us back, but instead of walking us into a table with stirrups like we expected, they escorted us into an office. A man in a lab coat was waiting at a desk.
“I recognize you,” he said, after looking at us sternly for what seemed like an eternity. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. My wife didn’t speak either. “What you are doing should be a hate crime, and I won’t have any part in it,” the man said, looking angry.
“But it’s my body,” my wife said, sounding defiant, but like a little girl too. “It’s my right.”
“It’s hateful,” the doctor responds. “You are terminating this pregnancy because you don’t want a gay child. Are gay children less valuable than straight children?” He sounded like a teacher trying to impart a lesson to a very slow student.
“No, but—” my wife started to say.
“A gay child has just as much value as a straight child. In fact, you are lucky! Gay children are very rare. Census numbers put the number of homosexuals in America at around 3 percent. It wouldn’t take many more people like you,” he nearly spits the words, “to eliminate homosexuality in America. That’s genocide, and I won’t have that on my conscience.
With that, we were ushered out. My wife cried all the way home. When we got there, we found that someone had firebombed our rented townhouse and wrote “Bigotry Doesn’t Belong Here!” and “Love Wins!” in spray paint on the sidewalk. I guess some fetuses are more equal than others, but I can’t understand it. I just followed all the arguments I’ve heard from our society to their logical conclusions.