The next battlefront for controlling women

If you vote Republican, you're voting for banning contraception.

Think I'm being overly dramatic? Read on:

At National Right to Life's conference this year, Mitt Romney set out to convince anti-abortion leaders he was their candidate. At the podium, he rattled off his qualifications. To a layman's ears, it sounded pretty standard for abortion politics. He wants to overturn Roe v. Wade. He supports teaching only abstinence to teens.

But for those trained to hear the subtleties, Mr. Romney was acknowledging something more. He implied an opposition to the birth control pill and a willingness to join in their efforts to scale back access to contraception. There are code phrases to listen for - and for those keeping score, Mr. Romney nailed each one.

One code phrase is: "I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines pregnancy as starting at implantation, the first moment a pregnancy can be known. Anti-abortion advocates want pregnancy to start at the unknown moment sperm and egg meet: fertilization. They'd also like you to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that the birth control pill prevents that fertilized egg from implanting in the womb.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Up to half of fertilized eggs never implant in the uterus, for various reasons. If you're going to classify every fertilized egg as a human being and every unimplanted fertilized egg as an abortion, it's a logical extension for every woman's menstrual period to be investigated to make sure that no fertilized eggs are passed in her menstrual fluid. And it also means that a woman with an ectopic pregnancy is going to have to let it go until her fallopian tube bursts -- and if she dies, she dies. And it further means that every miscarriage will have to be investigated as a potential homicide.

Ask your Republican friends if this is really where they want to go.

Mitt Romney is resembling the old SNL Pete Tagliani sketch more and more every day. From "We'll DOUBLE the size of Guantanamo Bay!" to expressing a willingness to define life as beginning when sperm meets egg, Romney is not above talking completely out of his ass if it means "the base" will lap it up like a thirsty dog. And this is the Republican front-runner?

You think they're going to stop at Roe? Roe is doo-doo. The decision they really want to go after is Griswold v. Connecticut.

UPDATE: Pam has more on how the Republicans plan to tell the nine out of ten Americans who have used contraception that they don't give a shit what the voters want; they, the male politicians, know best. So does Jessica.