Get fucked. It's the law.
I don't have time right now to weigh in on this fully -- and certainly not to improve on Amanda's take -- but readers familiar with my apocalyptic IVF series will want to be aware of the sky is indeed continuing to fall. With the caveat that I haven't read the original documents myself, here's Laura McPhee's description (basically confirmed by the AP):
Republican lawmakers are drafting new legislation that will make marriage a requirement for motherhood in the state of Indiana, including specific criminal penalties for unmarried women who do become pregnant "by means other than sexual intercourse."According to a draft of the recommended change in state law, every woman in Indiana seeking to become a mother through assisted reproduction therapy such as in vitro fertilization, sperm donation, and egg donation, must first file for a "petition for parentage" in their local county probate court.
Only women who are married will be considered for the "gestational certificate" that must be presented to any doctor who facilitates the pregnancy. Further, the "gestational certificate" will only be given to married couples that successfully complete the same screening process currently required by law of adoptive parents.
Ironically, this will probably be killed by attacks from the right, because it acknowledges premarital sexual intercourse without condemnation.
Comments
FWIW, the bill is now dead:
http://tinyurl.com/du3t3
Posted by: randee | October 5, 2005 11:00 PM
Does anyone else see the ramificaions of this leigislation on the lesbian community? If queers can't get married and single women can't have assistance in pregnancy than lesbians have no way to start families. Thank you religious right for trying to wipe out the homosexual menace. This is scary stuff, its akin to sterilazation of an undesirable minority...
Posted by: JRC | October 10, 2005 5:47 PM
So funny, this. You see I was born in Indiana, the great grandson of an Indiana state senator. The trouble is, he was never married to my great grandmother. She was a servant in his home. She bore my grandmother at 15 years of age and then died at the ripe old age of 23 from diabetes that came about as the result of her pregnancy. Love those Hoosier values!
If you want to stop teenage single parent pregnancies, why not hold the men responsible who get them pregnant. Prison? Sounds good to me!
Tim Jones
Posted by: Tim Jones | October 10, 2005 5:50 PM
JRC - the bill was pretty explicity aimed at gays and lesbians, though more to "protect" children from having gay parents than to stop them from breeding more of their own kind, since, after all, children (even genetic ones, I think) of gay parents are no more likely to be gay themselves, and it's still almost exclusively hetero parents who are giving birth to homospawn.
Posted by: radosh | October 11, 2005 9:04 AM
I think the superficial attack here on the lesbian community is just cover for further stages of population control. The logical extension, of course, will be the requirement of a certificate to have children...
Posted by: Josh Strike | October 11, 2005 10:45 PM