Ohio Republicans want you to bury or cremate your zygote, but your grandma, well, she’s on her own. That’s the message of their latest move, which happened on Jan. 1, when they decided that the biggest problem facing the people of Ohio was not the 700,000 COVID cases and almost 9,000 deaths, but how they disposed of their fetal tissue.
Statehouse Republicans, who in November accused GOP Gov. Mike DeWine of trying to turn the state’s businesses into the “mask police,” don’t seem all that interested in protecting the lives of actual current humans. But they are deeply concerned about the condition of clumps of fetal tissue as small as the head of a pin.
In the middle of a pandemic that in the month of December alone killed more Americans than the Vietnam War did, Ohio Republicans passed Senate Bill 27. The bill, which will go into effect three months from now unless the courts stop it, requires that any “zygote, blastocyst, embryo or fetus” from a surgical abortion must be “buried or cremated.” It also states that “the pregnant woman is responsible for the costs related to the final disposition of the fetal remains at the chosen location.”
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Failure to bury or cremate the fetal tissue will result in “a misdemeanor of the first degree.” Never mind that in a pile of placental tissue and blood and amniotic fluid you might not even be able to find the relevant cells that constitute the zygote even with scientific training and a full laboratory. Republicans want you to find that fetal tissue and bury it.
Said Jennifer McNally, a trustee of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio: “To be clear, SB27 is being advanced by politicians whose real agenda is to outlaw abortion. This harassment measure is designed to increase costs for women who depend on Planned Parenthood who choose to access their constitutional right to a personal medical procedure. This bill does nothing to improve or protect women's health—it is designed to shame, judge, and inconvenience women and opens the door for politicians to further intrude into personal health decisions.”
Remember when Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick told Tucker Carlson that senior citizens should be happy to die to prop up the Dow Jones industrial Average? He said: “No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.” Yes, Republicans may not care much for granny. But if granny were a blastocyst, well, then, that would be a different story.
DeWine has been more open to COVID protections than many other GOP governors, but he has still been ambivalent about whether to listen to the scientists. He enacted a mask mandate in April only to rescind it 24 hours later when it was met with pushback. And Ohio’s director of public health, Amy Acton, who’d earned high marks from public health experts, resigned abruptly in June. Later she told The New Yorker "that she might be forced to sign health orders that violated her Hippocratic oath to do no harm." That doesn’t sound very “pro-life.”
Under the government of Republican Donald J. Trump almost 350,000 Americans have died of coronavirus. That’s more than twice the number of coronavirus deaths of any other country in the world. At every point during the pandemic Republicans have chosen to do things that have subsequently put Americans lives in danger. Republicans have shown hostility to all the things that could have saved American lives, things like masking and shutdowns.
Yes, lately it’s felt like the Republican Party is the party of death—from their hostility to lockdowns (Trump tweeted “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF”) to their hostility to testing (Trump is reported saying in August, “I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting”), the Republican Party has pretty much embraced its status as a death cult.
Ohio State Representative John Becker, who led the charge to impeach DeWine for trying to protect human life with a mask mandate and other COVID restrictions, is a cosponsor of the fetal tissue bill. Becker suffers from a particularly weird and sociopathic form of cognitive dissonance. He thinks that many people find the requirement that they wear a mask so they don’t kill the people around them “offensive, degrading, humiliating and insulting.”
But he is desperately eager to offend, degrade, humiliate, and insult women who chose to have an abortion or who suffer a miscarriage. He is more concerned with the treatment of fetal tissue that is indisputably dead than he is with the preservation of the lives of actual people who are currently alive.
This is not Ohio’s first rodeo as insane anti-choice Mecca. DeWine signed a very restrictive “heartbeat bill” in 2019 that had been too restrictive for his predecessor, Republican John Kasich. Ultimately, the bill was blocked by a Bush appointed judge who noted, “A woman with irregular periods likely will be denied the opportunity to seek an abortion altogether because she will not realize that she is pregnant in time to choose her fate.”
While digging graves for five-celled organisms might be the GOP’s idea of fun, that fetal tissue could be used for scientific progress, for the discovery of new vaccines, for the prevention of real human deaths. Once again, Republicans put power and religion over science and reality.
Few states have highlighted just how insanely hypocritical Trump’s Republican Party is as well as Ohio. If you’re going to reject the protection of your constituents from a deadly virus, how are you allowed to call yourself “pro-life?”
