The viewers at Faux "news" were treated to at least two segments this Tuesday evening where they had hosts of their prime time shows doing their best to conflate fertilized eggs with a fetus and in Bill O'Reilly's case, using the argument that cells containing DNA are somehow now the equivalent of a human being.
Not to be outdone by Bill-O, Megyn Kelly did her part to defend the Supreme Court for their God awful Hobby Lobby ruling, and to push more right-wing, anti-abortion, dangerous anti-science rhetoric and the notion that fertilized eggs are the same thing as a fetus, and that many forms of commonly used birth control methods are the equivalent of having an abortion, because the wingnuts on the right believe it's true.
Kelly started things out by going after Jon Stewart, who mocked the ruling and Fox for lying to the public about it earlier this week, and then treated her audience to this:
KELLY: To be sure, these birth control methods do not cause abortion, like the ones performed at Planned Parenthood on a table. But they can and do end fertilized eggs. And to many that is ending a life. Still the left maintains this is all bogus science.
That's because it is. Bogus is relying on "sincere beliefs." Science relies on facts, as one of the two articles she attacked here very clearly explained.
If you’ve read the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hobby Lobby or the reaction to it, then you know what sparked the lawsuit. The Affordable Care Act says that employer-provided insurance must include essential health benefits, including all medically authorized forms of contraception. The owners of Hobby Lobby objected to this requirement, because they believe that four common forms of birth control—two versions of the “morning-after pill” and two kinds of intrauterine devices (IUDs)—are “abortifacients.” In other words, the owners of Hobby Lobby think these contraceptives end pregnancies rather than prevent them. And they believe that is tantamount to ending a life.
The claim, which you can find on virtually any conservative website, has been making the rounds for a long time. It’s stuck because the science on how these particular drugs and devices work wasn’t that great. But recent advances in medical diagnostics and some ingenious studies have changed that. We know a lot more about how the contraceptives work. We can be very confident that three of the four contraceptives do not lead to abortion, even using the conservative definition of when life begins, and we can be almost (although not quite) as sure that the fourth does not, either.
There are essentially six ways to prevent pregnancy:
- Make the cervical mucus inhospitable (sperm can’t get to the egg)
- Inhibit ovulation (prevent the release of an egg)
- Affect fertilization (the ability of the sperm to meet up with and/or penetrate the egg).
- Affect the fertilized egg (prevent implantation)
- Create an inhospitable uterine environment (prevent implantation)
- Affect the implanted embryo
As far as the medical establishment is concerned, pregnancy doesn’t begin until implantation. (In fact, 80 percent of fertilized eggs never implant.) So under this “medical” definition of pregnancy, only method #6—that is, doing something to the implanted embryo—would constitute a form of abortion. But religious conservatives hold that pregnancy and life itself begin at the moment an egg is fertilized. Under the “religious” definition of pregnancy, methods 4, 5 and 6 would all constitute forms of abortion. Read on...
Don't count on something like a few facts getting in the way of their talking points or stopping the yappers over at Fox from creating their own reality though. If Kelly really agrees with these people, when is she going to start calling for fertility clinics to be shut down? Last I checked they were wasting a whole mess of fertilized eggs. If that's their criteria for when life begins, you'd better be ready to shut those down too. Somehow, I'm not holding my breath.
And Megyn, if you don't like "agenda driven pundits" controlling the dialog on this issue, maybe you shouldn't invite the likes of flame thrower Chris Stirewalt onto your show to weigh in on the topic, when it was obvious before he even opened his mouth that his only agenda was going to be to throw mud at the Democrats, and repeat the right wing talking point that everything that happens in politics is always bad for Democrats and good for Republicans no matter what.
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