Mother Davis looks at a stale potato chip in her bowl of munchies, and considers,

There is no short name for the legislation, S.Amdt. 4233 to S.Con.Res. 70, so let’s name it ourselves: Let’s call it the Holding Kids Hostage To Right Wing Obsessions Amendment.

That’s HKHTRWOA for short. I admit it. I am not skilled at acronyms.

Yesterday, the Holding Kids Hostage To Right Wing Obsessions Amendment was proposed by Senator Wayne Allard. Senator Allard is the odd, odd man you see in the photograph here, smiling with a dog and a skeleton.

Allard’s amendment was to “require that legislation to reauthorize SCHIP include provisions codifying the unborn child regulation.” SCHIP is the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Here’s what this means. Any effort to merely reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, not even expanding it at all, would have been required to include language that officially recognizes a fertilized human egg, which just had a sperm enter it seconds ago, as a “child” with equal rights to any other child.

What kind of health insurance does a fertilized egg need? None at all, of course. Until a baby is born, it doesn’t need any separate health insurance. It’s already covered under the mother’s health insurance, and an amendment (Boxer Amdt. No. 4379) approved just before Allard’s amendment already gave SCHIP coverage to pregnant women.

Thanks to the amendment from Senator Barbara Boxer, the health of the embryos and fetuses carried by women given SCHIP coverage would already be taken care of. So, what was the need for the Allard amendment?

Allard’s legislative maneuver had nothing to do with giving adequate health care to pregnant women and their embryos and fetuses. It had everything to do with the right wing’s agenda to ban the Morning After Pill and similar contraception.

You see, the American right wing is furious that young women might be able to take a pill that prevents implantation of a fertilized egg. It isn’t because they feel sorry for the fertilized eggs. Fertilized human eggs don’t have any feelings. They don’t have nerves that can sense pain, and they don’t have brains that can think about their plight, hoping to become big babies some day. For many days after fertilization, they’re just little balls of cells.

Right wing politicians like Wayne Allard are furious about contraceptive pills that can be taken right after sex because they can’t stand the idea that a woman could take control of the reproduction that happens in her body, and choose whether to get pregnant. These politicians hate the idea of contraception, and think that it’s an unholy thing. That fertilized cell is a means of establishing government control over women’s sexual lives.

That’s the reason that these politicians have been trying for years to get legislation passed that gives official recognition of a fertilized egg as a “child” with full legal rights. To that single cell, they want to grant the identity of a complete human being, and even give it legal precedence over the woman in whose body it was fertilized.

Just think: If those fertilized eggs were given full legal rights, then every single egg fertilized in the process of in vitro fertility treatments would have to be implanted into a woman. Otherwise, the doctors and the couples trying to get pregnant could be charged with murder.

The Allard amendment, to require that fertilized eggs be recognized as children with full legal rights, would lead straight to such nonsense, and thus would actually prevent loving couples from having the children they desire, while forcing many unprepared, unmarried women to become mothers against their will.

By requiring any SCHIP renewal to give full legal status to fertilized human eggs, Wayne Allard’s amendment would have taken away health insurance from huge numbers of actual American children, all in the name of the most extreme right wing “Pro-Life” agenda. That’s why I’ve named the Allard amendment the Holding Kids Hostage To Right Wing Obsessions Amendment.

Thankfully, the Holding Kids Hostage To Right Wing Obsessions Amendment was not approved. Three Republicans, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, crossed the aisle to vote for common sense and vote the amendment down. On this issue, they took the true moderate position, that a fertilized egg is not entitled to the same rights as a ten year-old child.

Guess who voted the other way. Republican presidential candidate John McCain voted in favor of the Holding Kids Hostage To Right Wing Obsessions Amendment. John McCain voted in favor of giving a fertilized egg the same rights as a ten year-old child.

Not only that, John McCain voted in favor of taking health insurance away from American children unless fertilized eggs were given full legal rights. No one who is willing to keep sick American children from seeing a doctor for the sake of an extremist right wing agenda will get my vote.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both did the right thing. Obama and Clinton voted against the Holding Kids Hostage To Right Wing Obsessions Amendment.

Tossing that rotten chip into the compost,
Mother Davis