drinkthe-koolaid:

Do you plan to vote this year? If so, this is a must-read.

Among the points made in the article:

“Ryan really holds an extreme position on abortion rights, even relative to other conservatives. I didn’t grasp this until I learned, via twitter, that he’d co-sponsored a bill declaring that life begins at fertilization and defining fertilization as “the process of a human spermatozoan penetrating the cell membrane of a human oocyte to create a human zygote, a one-celled human embryo, which is a new unique human being.”

Just in case your sense of reproductive biology is a little fuzzy, let me explain why that’s so significant. This is the earliest possible point at which you could define life, unless you want to go all Dr. Strangelove. As far as I know, it would effectively prohibit intrauterine devices (IUD) and some oral contraceptives, since those forms of birth control can stop pregnancy by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. It would also ban in vitro fertilization.

Of course, fertilized eggs fail to implant all the time. That is how nature works. And that is one reason why even the ultra-conservative, rabidly anti-abortion voters of Mississippi rejected a similar proposal.”