I’d meant to just toss that video up with a short paragraph and call it a day for blogging, but I foolishly clicked a link I saw on Twitter. I’m going to quote the bit that made me too angry to do anything more productive than this.

Asserting conscientious objections, nurses in New Jersey have said they would not check the vital signs of patients recovering from abortions.

I want to make it crystal fucking clear what I’m seeing here. I’m seeing that nurses, people who are well-trained professionals in taking care of sick or injured people, will not make the basic checks necessary for the safety and well-being of their patient if they don’t like the procedure that patient is in for. And they’re calling it a decision of “conscience”, apparently without irony.

How dare you call that conscience? The word should die on your tongue.

Is New Jersey so hard up for nurses that this is acceptable? I would expect a nurse to check the vitals of anyone, to provide the best care possible for anyone, to think of the comfort and well-being of anyone in their care. I include rapists, mass murderers, and space zombie Hitler in that. Not only because a nurse is a professional and it’s their job, not only because if we start performing background checks for medical care people will start dying while the staff decides whether the feel like treating this patient, but also because every human being (or space zombie) deserves a modicum of compassion & dignity.

I’ve often felt that the push to ban abortion had a strong misogynistic element, since so many arguments seem to assume a fetus is more important than a woman, but rarely have I seen it expressed so clearly that a woman who gets an abortion is no longer considered a person. Instead she’s some abomination, something icky to even touch, who deserves neither compassion nor sympathy, whose basic health needs can be ignored. Do you assholes even know what empathy is?

And yet somehow this is conscience. This is moral. If this is the moral conscience you have chosen, that a woman’s ability to control her own destiny should be subject to the whims of biology, then I have to ask why you’re willing to have anything to do with medicine at all. Who are you to question that heart murmur?

Like most batshit insane movements that are bereft of logic, compassion, or basic human decency, this stems mostly from religion.

It’s not clear to me why Jesus needs people to wave signs and scream at emotionally vulnerable people and murder doctors for him, seems to me that if was important to him he could do it himself. But I have to ask, why is terminating a pregnancy interfering with God’s Plan, while extending a life isn’t? Surely if you’re going to be consistent about this, my father must have stolen more than two decades of life when he had bypass surgery in the 80’s, right? Why is your god ok with that, but angry about an abortion?

Really, though, I’m tired of people speaking for Jesus. It feels dishonest on its face, I mean, have you some sort of authorization to speak for him? Power of Attorney, perhaps? Something signed and notarized, something that makes it clear that yes, you are representing him with his full permission and confidence. Because otherwise, I don’t see why I shouldn’t just assume that you’re speaking for yourself, and trying to claim authority that isn’t yours.

I’d stop if I were you, I know it pisses me off when someone puts words in my mouth.