Questions for all the religious folks who are politically biased around this subject. What if this wasn’t YOUR RELIGION, but rather someone else’s (gasp):
Q: If a corporation is owned by Christian Scientists who believe that all forms of health care are wrong, should the corporation be able to override the rights of all its employees and impose their religious beliefs onto all their employees and not provide any coverage? A: No of course not!
Q: If a corporation was owned by fundamentalist Muslims who believe in Shira Law, which considers Insurance of all types to be Gambling and it is strictly forbidden, should they be able to override the rights of all its employees and impose their religious beliefs onto all their employees and not provide any health coverage or workplace safety insurance such as workmans comp.? A: No of course not!
I think all these same shills who are against these large corporations having to provide the mandated comprehensive insurance due to “religious bias”, would be up in arms and spitting mad if this wasn’t their religion and good’ol christian folks were being denied their rights due to someone else’s beliefs. Funny how all the folks that are more then happy to impose their beliefs onto others cry foul when the tables are turned. And by funny I mean sad and myopically shortsighted.
Myers’s argument doesn’t hold water as science - he’s quite clear that he chooses reject the “fertilized egg is an individual human” position because he doesn’t like the conclusion it leads to. That may be ok as politics (he also rejects the “fetus counts as an individual human” position), but it’s not a scientific argument.
szielins also argues that pregnancy begins at implantation, but that’s mixing apples and oranges. Pregnancy is a condition of the mother, and quite clearly doesn’t begin until implantation; the problem is about the fertilized egg as well as about the mother, and it becomes a policy problem once there’s a conflict, which includes before pregnancy.
Maggie, thanks for an actual scientific discussion - that is rather a change from the understanding we had of how IUDs worked when they first came out.
He also points out a number of problems with a definition of “species” that includes only the attributes that a fertilized egg can encompass.
And, really, if you water the definition down that far… should we be crying over every fertilized egg that doesn’t implant for whatever reason? Or is it only immoral when someone knowingly does something to make it more difficult?
Because it’s a term of art from biology, brought up in the context of an argument about the law. In both the context of biology and in the context of the law, we can legitimately point at biology textbooks and the dictionary and say, “‘Pregnancy begins at conception’ is an incorrect statement, just as `Pregnancy begins when the man and the woman undress’ is incorrect, or ‘Pregnancy begins when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun’ is incorrect.” A couple of savants somewhere explain why they don’t much care for the standard definitions of “pregnant” and “pregnancy” because Kant and natural law; that’s great, but it’s irrelevant to biologists, lawyers, and members of the general public interested in the underlying policy issues.
EDITED TO REMOVE: sorry, thought I was replying to Rckyhillsd. He, not you, brought it up the “dispute over usage of ‘pregnancy’”, for reasons of his own I’m not clear about. Apologies for the earlier draft.
If a person has religious beliefs in the USA, is it legal to forcibly impose those beliefs on someone else?
If it isn’t, why should a company be able to do this to their employees?
How is this different from having a minimum wage?
What if a company’s religious beliefs infringe on other human rights—let alone those guaranteed by the Constitution? Should these beliefs be indulged?
What a coincidence. That sounds quite a bit like this person’s complaint (from the “Secular Pro-Life” people’s blog) about that particular P.Z. Myers post.
SocialMaladroit - Thanks for the pointer. I haven’t seen the articles you’ve referenced, but Myers really was mostly ranting, and I’d expect most other criticisms of him on it to sound pretty similar to mine. It wasn’t his best work; I usually expect to see better from him, even on issues where I disagree with him.
Thanks for an excellent explanation of a complex issue. What’s not complex is the religious belief held by the Hobby Lobby people: a fertilized egg (thanks to its “soul”… and I love the quandary of the twins outlined above) is equal in significance to a live person and thus must be accorded equal rights and protection. Small problem: you can’t give rights to a fertilized egg without taking away the rights of the live woman within whose body it resides.
Yeah, and on the other side you have 40 corporate law professors writing an amicus brief for the ABA. Having read both I think the ABA has the better overall argument.
Right, there is no explicit mention of a soul. It is implied by the fact that murdering a human is sinful and a non-human not necessarily so. Some of the parts of the Christian Bible regarding when a soul is attached to the body are.Where God tells the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you” and where Luke talks about Mary saying, “when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy”. Where is the text on quickening?
The IUD looks like a torture device from a Charleton Heston sci-fi movie. I’m so sorry ladies that you got to deal with contraptions like that, it just looks painful. A vasectomy is a hard thing to rationalize for a person who hasn’t had kids yet. Condoms aren’t awesome when it comes to long-term relationships (no pun intended). And when the moment that a male version of a pill comes out, I’ll personally volunteer myself to be a spokesman.
If the crux of the argument is “whether sperm and egg meet” and thus an IUD is a auto-abortion device (though clearly the evidence presented here contradicts that), then abortion foes should note something I’ve heard from OB/GYNs before: a very large number of fertilized eggs simply do not implant on their own, and are flushed out with menstrual flow. God, it would seem, is one of the busiest abortion providers around.
Flying Spaghetti Monster Co will do this how ?? Hobby Lobby has an established clientele and an established supply chain. The MOST FSMCo could do is compete. . .
