So Let's Talk About This "Depressing Regularity" Thing

Either pregnant women and unborn children need protection, or they don't

Those who pay any amount of even passing attention to Unrepentant Old Hippie JJ may recall her response to Bill C-484, also known as the Fetal Homicide Bill, or the Unborn Victims of Crime Bill.

For her own part, JJ was against it. She fell in with a broader movement of pro-abortion advocates insisting that such a bill wasn't necessary. Among some of the arguments offered by that movement was that attacks on pregnant women don't happen often enough to warrant special legal protection.

Fast forward to today, when JJ declared her support for a bill in Oklahoma that would allow women to use deadly force in defense of their unborn children:

"I’m absolutely all for people having the right to self-defend, and I unequivocally support the choice of women to carry their pregnancies to term, and to protect themselves doing it. Though being armed and full of rampaging hormones doesn’t sound like the best possible scenario, this law is clearly meant for at-risk women (ie. in bad relationships) so we’re unlikely to see a 'maternity holster' anytime soon. Although it’s disheartening that there’s even a need for such a law, given the Michigan story and the fact that pregnant women are attacked with such depressing regularity, maybe it’s not such a bad thing."

It's an interesting view on the issue that JJ's taken here.

Certainly, there's no reason in the world why women shouldn't be allowed to decide whether or not they'll carry a pregnancy to term -- at least within reasonable limits based on the unborn child's stage of development. And certainly they should be protected from the uninvited intervention of another person.

But one of the pro-abortion arguing points in opposing bill C-484 was that these attacks don't happen frequently enough to warrant passing a special law.

Apparently, according to JJ, they do happen frequently enough to warrant passing a law that would allow women to kill in defense of their unborn children.

It's a head-scratcher, to be certain -- just another hypocritically self-conflictual intellectual self-indulgence that JJ is rapidly becoming known for (things like supporting abortion legislation that would apply to women south of the 49th parallel while vociferously opposing them ot of principle in Canada). It comes down to a very simple question: do pregnant women need protection or not?

JJ -- unlike many of those who joined her in opposing legal protection for pregnant women -- seems to finally admit that they do.

The base silliness of JJ's support for this particular means of protection over the other -- in which a stronger deterrent is provided by criminalizing assaults on unborn children -- appears fully in its abject silliness when one considers the fact that most pregnant women lack the means to defend themselves physically.

Pregnancy is known to be very physically taxing on women. Many pregnant women have difficulty performing ordinary tasks due to the added burden of carrying their child. Most of them would find it more difficult still to exercise lethal force against an assailant.

Not to mention the fact that some men prove more creative in terminating a pregnancy than resorting to physical violence. Consider the case of Gary Bourgeois, who secretly administered a toxic ulcer medication to his pregnant girlfriend while she slept.

Bourgeois' girlfriend had chosen not to have an abortion. His act -- which his sleeping girlfriend was evidently incapable of responding to, with deadly force or otherwise -- was an act of premeditated murder, for which he got off with a sentence of one year in prison because Canadian law doesn't recognize that men like Bourgeois can premeditate murder on the unborn.

Yet JJ seems to feel comfortable supporting a law that would legalize an option that many pregnant women realistically do not have because "the bill doesn’t seem to make abortion any less legal" (bill C-484 exlplicitly forbade its application in cases of abortion), "doesn’t declare the fetus has any civil rights" (protection from violence isn't a civl right, defined as rights imparted specifically to the citizen, protection from violence is a legal right most societies impart even to inanimate property and animals), and "couldn’t be used as a defense for some anti-abortion nut who shoots a doctor" (nor could Bill C-484).

She goes on to explain that "Unlike the typical 'Unborn Victims of Crime' acts, this bill doesn’t focus on the fetus and allude to it as an individual victim, but rather centers on the mother’s right to protect it."

Yet JJ's support of this law clearly overestimates the average pregnant woman's ability to defend herself or her unborn child. It was largely due to the vulnerability of pregnant women -- and, obviously, their unborn children -- that the additional deterrent was called for.

But god forbid that the law offer protection to pregnant women and their unborn children under any terms other than those approved by the pro-abortion lobby -- even if those terms provide scant protection, before or after the act.