An Epidemic of Pinheads

The epidemic has started. A few days after Marco Rubio declared that women who are pregnant with Zika-infected babies should not be allowed to have abortions, one such baby was born to a woman in Texas. The infant died:

The girl, born in Harris County, Texas, had several Zika-related birth defects, including microcephaly, which leaves the head and brain underdeveloped. Unlike the recent cases of Zika in Florida, where local mosquitoes are spreading the virus, the mother in Texas likely contracted it in Latin America, according to a statement from Harris County health officials.

Meanwhile, Zika is starting to take hold in the United States: 

Four cases of Zika infection in Florida are very likely to have been caused by mosquitoes there, the State Department of Health said Friday — the first documented instances of local transmission in the continental United States.

“Zika is now here,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news briefing.

Republicans in Congress torpedoed attempts to stop the spread of the disease by littering legislation with special-interest gimmicks and divisive policy changes that invited a Democratic filibuster and a veto threat from the White House:

Democrats said they blocked the bill because Republicans were using the must-pass legislation to score political points, jam through unpalatable policy changes and cut money from other programs, including provisions that would hinder access to contraception for women [emphasis added] and weaken environmental restrictions on pesticide use.

Republicans, in turn, accused Democrats of manufacturing excuses for blocking the bill, but they did not dispute that some of the provisions favored Republican policy positions.

Democrats and the White House have been pushing since February for the Republican majorities in Congress to approve $1.9 billion in emergency financing to fight Zika, which can cause brain damage and other serious defects in infants born to infected mothers.

Republican religious zealots are intentionally increasing the likelihood that women will become pregnant and infected with Zika and be forced to bear microcephalic infants to term.

It's kind of ironic that Republicans are doing everything possible to increase the number of microcephalic infants, commonly called "pinheads." Pinhead is a derogatory term favored by Republican blowhard Bill O'Reilly. But the epidemic of pinheads we're suffering right now isn't caused by Zika -- it's caused by intolerant conservative racist and religious rhetoric spewed by the likes of Trump, Hannity, O'Reilly, Rubio and Limbaugh.

Rubio's stand is typically hypocritical:

"I understand a lot of people disagree with my view – but I believe that all human life is worthy of protection of our laws. And when you present it in the context of Zika or any prenatal condition, it’s a difficult question and a hard one," Rubio told POLITICO.

"But if I’m going to err, I’m going to err on the side of life."

Republicans like Rubio talk a big game about being "on the side of life," but he, like the vast majority of Republicans, favors the death penalty and complains that we're not killing people fast enough. They demand death even in cases of offenders who are mentally disabled or were juveniles when they committed their crimes. They favor starting unilateral wars of convenience that kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians (as well as American soldiers). Republicans like Trump even favor assassinating the wives and children of suspected terrorists. So much for the sanctity of human life.

But this really begs the question: what is human life?

The courts have decided that a brain-dead person can be taken off life support, though many Republicans still oppose this. In 2005 Republicans fought to prevent Terry Schiavo's husband from removing her feeding tube, although she had been stuck in an irreversible persistent vegetative state for 15 years. When she was autopsied the pathologist found she literally had only half a brain.

Republicans bitch about welfare queens not pulling their own weight: why -- in their own terms -- do they want society to support a bunch of pinheads who will never amount to anything, and can't even feed themselves or use the toilet?

This is the kind of "human life" Marco Rubio wants to prolong. Infants born with severe microcephaly will never be normal. They will never laugh, talk, or play, or go to kindergarten. They will never be able to feed themselves, or walk or take care of their own basic physical needs. They often suffer seizures. Many cannot swallow, see or hear. Most of them will never be able to recognize their own parents. Many will die after a few short months or years.

In other words, such children will suffer interminable torture until their disability ultimately kills them.

Yes, there are people with severe disabilities who still have lives and contribute to society: Stephen Hawking cannot walk or feed himself. Yet, because he has a functioning human brain, he has been able to communicate and accomplish amazing things.

Children born with severe microcephaly will never do that, because they are not, in the most important sense, human beings.

Our brains are what make us human. It's not opposable thumbs, or upright bipedal locomotion, or (mostly) hairless bodies. With today's technology children born without feet can become Olympic caliber runners like Oscar Pistorius (that technology, sadly, will not necessarily make them decent people, however).

But children born with severe microcephaly do not have human brains: they will never really be human.

Microcephaly can be detected in utero with ultrasound, and there's no mistaking the symptoms. If a woman wants to accept the burden of caring for a severely disabled infant until its disease finally kills it, that's fine. That should be her choice. But such children require constant medical attention for a condition that will never be cured.

Now multiply this by the potential for thousands and thousands of microcephalic infants if the Zika epidemic becomes widespread, and you have a recipe for a tsunami of medical bankruptcies and escalating health insurance costs, all to keep tiny-brained children alive for a few short years.

Republicans constantly bitch about the tyranny of political correctness. Forcing women to bear severely disabled babies whose lives will consist of unending agony is the height of conservative political correctness and religious orthodoxy carried to preposterous lengths.

So I'll be politically incorrect and call a spade a spade. Fetuses with such severe mental handicaps are not really human: they have not been born yet, they have no experiences, or emotional attachments. Nor will they ever be able to form them. They cannot survive on their own and most would die without extensive and expensive medical intervention.

Mothers have to consider the consequences of carrying a deformed Zika baby to term and make their own decisions. Bearing such a child will be an expensive, time-consuming and thankless task that will steal the love and attention from their other children and their spouses, as well as drain their financial resources, and ultimately the resources of American society. Does it make any sense to have thousands of microcephalic infants on life support who are only going to die in a few years, at a cost of billions of dollars?

When the precepts behind the religious absolutism on contraception and abortion were forged centuries ago, these were all moot points. Women died in childbirth all the time, miscarriages were extremely common, and child mortality was extremely high. Birth defects were thought to be the result of sin or curse. Infants with severe birth defects would die within hours or days. Those that didn't die were frequently abandoned in the wild.

It is our advanced technology that has made these questions of birth control and abortion such controversial topics. Absent our advanced health care system we wouldn't be having this discussion -- our Christian forebears just let deformed infants die.

This country should be doing everything it can to prevent the spread of Zika in the first place. We should be doing everything to ensure that women don't get pregnant in areas where Zika is prevalent. Birth control should be freely available everywhere, but most especially when women are at risk of bearing children with birth defects.

And we should never prevent a woman from terminating a pregnancy that will ultimately result in only misery and death.