Yo, laydeez, no rugrats for now, k?
Nina Liss-Schultz at Mother Jones:
Amid the rapid spread of the mysterious Zika virus throughout Latin America and the growing evidence that it may lead to birth defects, governments in the region have made an unusual request: that women should hold off on having children for as many as two years. The unprecedented directives from heads of state and government officials have shocked many public health and medical experts. They say the prohibition of pregnancy could have untold effects on the birthrate in Latin America, and that managing and terminating a pregnancy is often not an option for many women in the region, where contraceptive access is limited and abortion laws are some of the strictest in the world.
“The way these governments are handling the virus is foolish, highly unrealistic, and insensitive to women,” says Carmen Barroso, the regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in the Western Hemisphere. “Even if a woman is convinced by the governments’ messages, she might still get pregnant unintentionally. What the government should be doing, besides combating the virus, of course, is they should make it easier for women to avoid pregnancies they don’t want.”
Nah. It’s so much easier to just tell women to be and stay unpregnant for the next two years. The sluts.
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, and the Dominican Republic all ban abortion, with no exceptions for rape, fetal anomaly, or the health of the mother. The Vatican city-state and Malta are the only two other places in the world with comparable laws.
Well women should have thought of that before they decided to be born there. The sluts.
Those countries need a law passed immediately that says, for the duration, any pregnancy may be assumed to have fetal abnormality and be terminated at the woman’s request without the need for verification. It seems like it would be a simple bypass of the restriction.
But they *really* need to offer free long term birth control ASAP. It will be cheaper for the governments than the social services that would be needed otherwise.
Have no fear – Pope Francis has set the Vatican’s top spin artists to brainstorming how to get the afflicted families to blame themselves, and the Usual Troofers have already identified at least two labs where Zika was invented for three different purposes. The Status Quo® will get through all this hardly scathed, no matter how many individuals have to suffer.
More seriously: we will never have a better time than now to mount an all-out campaign for complete access to birth control/maternal healthcare/sex ed/etc across all of the Americas and much of Asia, just for starters. And if I can see that from here in the boondocks, probably by now the NGOs & other conspirators working the frontlines of public health are plotting over their lattés, whispering in los barrios, & Skypeing with NOW, NARAL, Am.Atheists, SNAP, and other strident chronically malcontent acronyms.
Unfortunately, as more Zika babies accumulate, anti-contraception fetishists will have to work ever harder to avoid their already well-deserved blame. The ©a†holic component of the Status Quo® may suffer significant shrinkage – if we play our cards right (and avoid getting snatched up for black laboratories).
(More likely scenario: the Pope leads a campaign to have all mosquito-bearing regions soaked with a new miracle insecticide from a megacorp, the Vatican Bank spontaneously pays off its creditors and invests funds with Goldman Sachs, and fedora-hipsters attempt pinhead jokes in bad Spanish accents as Latin America’s health infrastructure collapses.)