You didn't really think that they'd stop at abortion, did you?

From Daily Kos, the battle of what to do about contraception if Roe v. Wade is overturned is getting ugly, as anti-abortion forces make it clear that they are going to try to turn a legal ban on abortion into a ban on as many contraceptives as humanly possible. In an effort to circumvent these anti-contraception efforts, Senator Mary Margaret Whipple of the Virginia Senate has written up a bill to protect the women of Virginia from having the birth control pills taken away from them once it's determined that women don't enjoy the privacy rights won in Roe v. Wade. The quibble in the Virginia Senate is over the two definitions of what "contraception" is.

There is the medically correct definition that Whipple intends to use, which is that it prevents pregnancy.

"Contraception" is defined, for all purposes, as the use of any process, device, or method to prevent pregnancy, including steroidal, chemical, physical or barrier, natural or permanent methods for preventing the union of an ovum with the spermatozoon or the subsequent implantation of the fertilized ovum in the uterus.

But some of the right wing men of the Virginia Senate don't like the correct definition of contraception, because it relies on correct definiton of pregnancy, which starts at implantation. And they don't like that because that means that after the man has shot his load, that doesn't necessarily mean the woman is pregnant. Nope, a woman's body still has work to do in order to be pregnant, an offensive notion to say the least.

But just because science says it's true doesn't mean the law can't pretend that pregnant is something that men do to women, instead of a two to tango situation. And the men-do-it-to-women-end-of-story definition is the one that the right wing men of the Virginia Senate prefer.

But Senator Devolites-Davis ignored the definitions of contraception used by medical science, turned to Dictionary.com as her source of definitions of medical terminology, and has now introduced an amendment to Whipple's bill that removes Whipple's medical terminology, specifically the wording that refers to implantation.

As I have pointed out many times before, the debate over what "pregnant" is really reveals the ugly, wormy side of the anti-choice brigade. This ain't about babies, folks. It's about denying female agency wherever it rears its ugly head, even and especially in something as commonsensical as the fact that it may take a man to make a baby, but men surely aren't the ones who make babies.

Edited to add: Does anyone else see the irony in this whole situation? Anti-feminists are always complaining that feminists won't admit that there are differences between men and women. And yet in the one situation where we have mountains of evidence of a bona fide, undeniable difference--that women's bodies have a process to turn raw material into other human beings and men's don't--it's the anti-feminists that are denying the difference and saying that both men and women contribute equally to making a baby.