Editor:
Thanks to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, for the past seven years Colorado has provided intrauterine devices and hormonal implants to low- and moderate-income women at little or no cost.
The results were awesome. Teen (15-19) pregnancy fell 42 percent. Pregnancies of women ages 20 to 24 fell 18 percent. The teen abortion rate dropped 35 percent. The number of teens giving birth to second, third and subsequent children also fell 53 percent.
It also saved the state tens of millions in Medicaid costs for prenatal, delivery and first year of infant care. $42 million saved in 2010. Teen pregnancy, birthrates and abortion rates have been dropping since 1990, thanks to better contraception and access.
So what does the new Republicans majority in the Colorado Senate do? Why, kill it, of course.
IUDs, in their opinion, destroy embryos (a belief that is not backed up by science) and that the program encouraged more sex (gimme a break).
Why do people of faith obsess over birth control and abortion, anyway?
As I understand it, upon conception their names are written in God’s “book of life” so the zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, being innocent, goes to heaven automatically. Isn’t that all that really matters?
Could be God’s will, for all anyone really knows. And as for the women’s fate, that’d also be God’s business, surely not the state’s.
But no, you want to be God.
People of faith and the people of the political right have this insatiable need to punish. Authoritarians.
Last month, Colorado House Republicans brought back and passed The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. Fact: The brain connections needed to feel pain are not even in place until at least 24 weeks, let alone functioning.
The church and the GOP that manipulates them are truly twisted as they fight over a 20-week-old fetus (7.5 to 9 ounces – 1 cup!) that has no chance of survival. Barbaric.
Facts: A full-term pregnancy is 40 weeks. A baby’s brain is the very last major organ to develop. So every additional week of pregnancy is critical to a baby’s health. It’s estimated that at 35 weeks, the weight of the brain is only about two-thirds that of full-term infants. At 27 weeks, it’s only around 100 grams compaired to full-term 300 grams.
Even babies born at 37, 38, 39 weeks have an increased risk of death and cognitive deficits they never “grow out of.”
Regarding late-term abortion, survival at less than 23 weeks is close to zero, while at 23 weeks it is only 15 percent, 24 weeks 55 percent, 25 weeks about 80 percent, at 28 to 31 weeks 96 percent survive, and at 32 to 33 weeks, 98 percent live – but, at a real cost to that child.
So what’s the issue here? They may look whole on the outside but inside they are not 100 percent.
In the Bible, Exodus 21:22-25 describes where a pregnant woman jumps into a fight between her husband and another man and suffers injuries that cause her to miscarry. Injuries to the woman prompt the normal penalties for harming another human being: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. Killing the woman is murder, a capital crime.
The miscarriage is treated differently — as property loss, not murder. The assailant must pay a fine to the husband. The law of a life for a life does not apply. The fetus is important, but it’s not human life in the same way the pregnant woman is.
Quit forcing your religious beliefs onto the general public. All options should be available, not just yours. Not everyone has the same beliefs. How about a serious national campaign for men to either just say “no” to sex or get a vasectomy first?
It’s time for men to stop running away, leaving the women holding the bag. Of children in the U.S., 39 percent are born into single-parent or no-parent situations.
Women are trying to be responsible by using birth control but regressive groups keep making it harder and harder. The religious right has become Americans’ Taliban.
How the church can moralize when they are shacked up with the cruelest, greed-driven social Darwinists on the planet, the Republican Party, I don’t know.
Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
—Matt. 6:19–21,24 (KJV)
Diane Daiute
Sweet Home