Happy New Year?

I know I should join the chorus of Happy New Year, and offer my wishes for 2005, but frankly, I'm just too tired from being sick virtually the entire month of December and witnessing the relentless march of horrors that the Bush regime continues to rain upon us, capped off with near despair over the fact that hundreds of thousands of people in Asia have lost everything, including their own lives, and there are still people who believe this.



Yesterday I posted about how information about emergency contraception does not appear in the Justice Department's guidelines for treating rape victims. This further got me to thinking about Evan Scott, the Florida 3-year-old who has been ordered returned to his biological mother, Amanda Hopkins, because his biological father, who was in prison for assaulting at the time, didn't approve the adoption.



Not only is a child being wrenched from the only family he's known, but he's being returned to a mother who only tried to give him a better life and get him away from her abuser, who's controlling the whole situation, even though he and the mother were never married -- not that marriage should give him proprietary rights, but in this case, the rights of someone who is essentially a sperm donor are being held paramount over both the rights of the biological mother AND the child.



So I got to thinking...what happens to a woman who is raped and is denied emergency contraception -- and finds herself pregnant, and is unable to procure an abortion due to lack of funds or availability of abortion services? If she lives in Mississippi, there is only one facility in the entire state now that performs abortions. Does she then have to get permission from the rapist in order to put the child up for adoption?



Do you need further proof that in the eyes of the so-called Christian males who are running things now, pregnancy and childbirth are punishment for women they deem unchaste?



To add fuel to this particular fire, Steve Gilliard directs us to yet another case of America returning to the Middle Ages, and an increasing tendency in the courts and culture to regard a woman as simply a vessel with no rights of her own once she becomes pregnant:

A Spokane woman trying to divorce her estranged husband two years after he was jailed for beating her has been told by a judge she can't get out of the marriage while she's pregnant.



The case pits a first-year attorney who argues that state law allows any couple to divorce if neither spouse challenges it against a longtime family law judge who asserts that the rights of the unborn child in this type of case trump a woman's right to divorce.



"There's a lot of case law that says it is important in this state that children not be illegitamized," Spokane County Superior Court Judge Paul Bastine told The Spokesman-Review newspaper.



Further complicating things, Shawnna Hughes claims her husband is not the child's father.



The bottom line, says Hughes' attorney, Terri Sloyer, is that there's nothing in state law that says a mother can't get a divorce if she's pregnant.



"We don't live in 15th-century England," Sloyer said. "I am absolutely dumbfounded by it."



Hughes' husband, Carlos, was convicted in 2002 of beating her. She separated from him after the attack and filed for divorce last April. She later became pregnant by another man and is due in March.



Her husband never contested the divorce, and Court Commissioner Pro Tem Julia Pelc approved it in late October.



However, the approved divorce papers didn't note that Hughes was pregnant. Sloyer filed amended papers to correct the omission, and the next day, she spoke with Bastine by phone. Bastine said he planned to rescind the divorce and then did so following a Nov. 4 hearing.



"It's not the child's fault that mom got pregnant," Bastine said. "The answer is, you don't go around doing that when you're not divorced."

So these are the "moral values" we can look forward to in 2005, and for three years after that -- the further dehumanization of women in the name of "Christianity."



Is this what you voted for?