Scroll all the way down for Tiffany’s reality check.

tiffanyb:

jwisser:

nightsinwonderland:

jwisser:

thesimplebest:

Under Arizona’s H.B. 2036, the state would recognize the start of the unborn child’s life to be the first day of its mother’s last menstrual period. The legislation is being proposed so that lawmakers can outlaw abortions on fetuses past the age of 20-weeks, but the verbiage its authors use to construct a time cycle for the baby would mean that the start of the child’s life could very well occur up to two weeks before the mother and father even ponder procreating.

On page eight of the proposed amendment to H.B. 2036, lawmakers lay out the “gestational age” of the child to be “calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman,” and from there, outlaws abortion “if the probable gestational age of [the] unborn child has been determined to be at least twenty weeks.”

No, this isn’t a belated April Fools’ joke or an example of Poe’s Law; Mother Jones carried the story on 29 March.

If the GOP is waging a war on women, it’s also waging a war on reality.

I just can’t.

Dear Arizona,

1. STOP MAKING ME HATE YOU SO HARD SERIOUSLY DID YOU FIND MY DIARY AND MAKE A LIST OF WAYS TO PISS ME OFF?

2. What the fuck this isn’t science.

3. Where do you get scientists to endorse this shit? How much do you have to pay them?

It’s not that they got scientists to sign off on this. It’s that they simply decided to write definitions into the law that have absolutely no bearing on reality. It’s as though Ohio’s legislature simply wrote a law that defined legal death as occurring two weeks before braindeath.

Um, guys? OB/GYNs have been calculating gestational age from the date of the woman’s last period FOR YEARS. This is long-standing, accepted medical practice. [Link to NIH] Ever notice that 40 weeks is more like 10 months than 9?  Those first two weeks, you’re not actually pregnant yet, and that third week is pre-implantation.

Why? Because ovulation, fertilization, and implantation are all more or less invisible and tricky to pin down, but the date of the last menstrual period is easy to track. So they count from that date and add some extra time on what’s considered a “normal” pregnancy. 

What this law DOES to is remove the doctor’s wiggle room in how they’re counting it (or, more precisely, encourages the woman to report the date of her last period as somewhat later than it might actually have been). It’s a ridiculous law, and worthy of your scorn simply for the way it inserts a bunch of old dudes between a woman and her doctor, but it’s not as imaginary as MJ is making it seem.