Texas pro-abortion lawmaker state Rep. Jessica Farrar introduced her male masturbation bill last week in an attempt to make pro-life laws and those who support them look ridiculous.
But her bill may be having the opposite effect.
The latest revelation about Farrar’s absurd bill is that it would require men to undergo a “medically unnecessary rectal exam and magnetic resonance imagining” and wait at least 24 hours before getting an elective vasectomy, a colonoscopy or a prescription for Viagra, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Her bill, which has no chance of passing, also would prohibit ejaculation outside either a vagina or medical facility, in what it describes as an “act against an unborn child, and failing to preserve the sanctity of life”; there would be a $100 fine for violations, according to the Independent. In addition, it would provide conscience protections for doctors who do not want to perform a vasectomy or prescribe Viagra because of “personal, moralistic or religious beliefs.”
“What I would like to see is this make people stop and think,” Farrar told The Texas Tribune. “Maybe my colleagues aren’t capable of that, but the people who voted for them, or the people that didn’t vote at all, I hope that it changes their mind and helps them to decide what the priorities are.”
But pro-lifers say Farrar is the one who is isn’t thinking. Her proposal ignores basic biological facts about human life and reproductive health care.
Specifically, the “medically unnecessary” forced rectal exams appear to be her response to laws that require abortion clinics to perform ultrasounds and provide women with information about them before having an abortion.
The problem is that abortion clinics’ own websites state that ultrasounds routinely are performed prior to abortions. They are used to determine how far along the woman is in the pregnancy and whether she has an ectopic pregnancy, which could be life-threatening if not diagnosed.
In 2012, Planned Parenthood spokesperson Adrienne Schreiber told Commentary magazine that their policy requires ultrasounds before abortion procedures. Schreiber said the policy states that the abortion cannot take place if the woman does not consent to an ultrasound first.
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“That’s just the medical standard,” said Schreiber, an official at Planned Parenthood’s Washington, D.C., regional office. “To confirm the gestational age of the pregnancy, before any procedure is done, you do an ultrasound.”
A 2003 study in the medical journal “Contraception” similarly found most abortion clinics perform ultrasounds prior to an abortion.
“Almost all sites offering early medical abortion always performed a vaginal ultrasound before and after the abortion, consistent with common practice in the US,” the study said.
Farrar’s bill is wrong on other points, too.
According to the LA Times:
She takes issue with Republican colleagues who invoke the “sanctity of life” and “protection of the unborn child” as a basis for antiabortion measures.
If that is their argument, she said, then they should have no objection to a provision in her bill that would fine men $100 for any “masturbatory emissions” that aren’t deposited directly into a woman or collected and stored by a health facility “for the purposes of conception for a current or future wife.”
State Rep. Tony Tinderholt, a Republican, said Farrar should take a high school biology class.
“Her attempt to compare [her bill] to the abortion issue shows a lack of a basic understanding of human biology,” Tinderholt said in a statement. “I would recommend that she consider taking a high school biology class from a local public or charter school before filing another bill on the matter.”
A man’s sperm and a woman’s eggs are not separate, individual new life. Only when they are put together do they become a human being – a separate, living human entity with his or her own unique DNA.
“A sperm has twenty-three chromosomes; even though it is alive and can fertilize an egg, it can never make another sperm,” former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop wrote in 1979. “An egg also has twenty-three chromosomes, and it can never make another egg. Thus, we have sperm that cannot reproduce and eggs that cannot reproduce unless they get together.
“All that makes up the adult is present as the ovum and the sperm are united – the whole genetic code,” Koop continued.
This is well established science. And it is the intentional destruction of human lives that pro-lifers oppose.
