"Life is what happens while you make other plans."

I had other plans for this week's rant - a whole long piece on fearing what others think of you - but I picked up the newspaper today and when my blood pressure went through the roof, I felt that maybe I should write about the latest idiocy committed by Washington DC. If I manage to do so while remaining consistent with last week's rant about feminism, so much the better.

The House has passed, 252-172, a cute little measure making it a federal crime to harm a fetus in the course of committing another crime.

Does this make sense to anyone else?

We are not going to make it a particularly serious crime to rape a woman (or a man for that matter, but men don't get pregnant), but we will make it a crime to harm a fetus in the course of committing another crime, whether the victim or the attacker knows that the woman is pregnant.

Now, aside from the obvious ploy to start introducing restrictions on abortion, I have a fundamental problem with this. Namely, this is the next phase in the marginalizing of women.

If you read last week's rant - and if you didn't go read it; I'll wait - you know that I think that feminists have done a pretty damn good job of removing themselves as an effective political voice. They are too exclusionist for most people to support, and the tight definition removes people who might be both eligible and interested.

But believing that - and I do - is not mutually exclusive to believing that the government is out to shaft anyone it can, as long as they are not WASP males.

So whence this latest bill?

From the belief, by the politicians, that women are a) too stupid to make their own decisions about their own bodies, and b) that no one will notice what is said with this bill.

The message is very clear that we would much rather protect the life of an unborn potential-human than the life of an adult, thinking, independent woman.

If it's now a federal crime to harm a fetus in the course of another crime, such as - reaching real deep into the bag of random crimes - rape or domestic assault, then why aren't rape and domestic assault also federal crimes?

Because women are not important. In fact, the reason that the fetus is being protected - and the fundamental truth behind ninety-five percent of anti-abortion arguments - is because being pregnant reduces women to a state of dependency. I'm quite sure that if the government thought it could, they would make marriage mandatory for women at about the age of 18.

Pregnant women are not able to care for themselves independently. That's how society got formed in the first place - women needed a way to make sure that they would be taken care of during this incredibly risky period in their lives. And men have been trying since prehistoric times to deny women the incredible power that pregnancy and childbirth bring.

This is one of them. The government is saying, in effect, that we value the lives of non-thinking, non-independent organisms that might as well be a very bizarre yeast infection more than we value women.

This is nothing new. In ancient India (and modern India, for all I know) a chicken had more dharma than a woman. I don't really care if I'm wrong here, but I am winging it. As I recall, dharma is the inherent ability of an organism to behave in a moral and right fashion.

Two of the most famous anti-abortionists in history? Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. 'Nuff said.

The government is now running around trying to take more power out of the process of child bearing. They have just strapped a giant weight to the back - or more properly the uterus - of every woman.

I could be raped and murdered tomorrow. If my assailant was caught, brought to trial, and convicted, he'd probably serve, at most, 3 to 5 years. That's all my life would be worth. 3 to 5 years of the life of some asshole who goes around raping and killing people.

First of all, I don't really think that's a fair trade. Second of all, if I was pregnant, suddenly the death of the fetus would be much more important than my death.

That's really not a fair trade.

Because honestly, until it is born and relatively capable of feeding itself, I don't think that your average baby is much of a human. It exists as a potential human, yes. But it is not a human in its own right. Yet now, because men are afraid of the power that women have through childbirth, and because some men are fully prepared to screw women over, this potential creature has more importance than me in the eyes of the law.

It's retrogression, folks. Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant and all will be well. The government is not prepared to defend all of its citizens. It is prepared to defend men, and to claim that it is defending babies, but it is not prepared to assume that women have brains, abilities, and worth other than as a bicep-stroking, cooing, dumb, pregnant bimbo hanging off of some stud's arm.

And as I mentioned earlier, this is only the first step down the road to making abortion illegal. But that would be a whole 'nother topic.

So, until next week, be aware of your environment. If you are female, you live in a country that hates you. And frankly, if you are female and you voted for the imbecile in the White House for precisely this sort of reason, I hope you burn in hell. Because you just handed men the mandate to take what they've been trying to take for 10,000 years or so - the power of creation.

I'm gonna go get pregnant and rob a post office.

Channon