Should the Sins of the Father be Visited Upon the Son?

Should the Sins of the Father be Visited Upon the Son?
There is a very loud and powerful political constituency out there that is always on the lookout for religious folk who want to “impose their morality” on the rest of us. But it seems that this same crowd is much less considerate when immorality is imposed upon the church.
Last week, Washington governor Gary Locke signed a standard piece of progressive legislation that requires Washington hospitals to offer morning-after birth control pills to female victims of rape. As many hospitals are owned and operated by the Catholic Church, this means that the state is now forcing the church to do something that Catholics consider immoral.
According to the Catholic owned and operated Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, the law is consistent with their current policy.
"We provide contraceptive drugs for the purpose of preventing fertilization in cases of sexual assault," said hospital spokeswoman Marilyn Thordarson.
But Planned Parenthood all but accuses the hospital of lying and breaking the law.
"What I would hope is the anecdotal evidence I hear is wrong and that the new law will reinforce what is already happening," sniffed C.J. Gribble, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of the Inland Northwest. She claims to have spoken to at least two rape victims who insist that they were not offered the morning after pill at Sacred Heart.
The cover that everyone seems to be hiding behind is that nobody really knows for certain how these morning-after pills work. The hide-your-head-in-the-sand crowd likes to pretend that they somehow prevent conception in the first place. I think these people still believe in the tooth fairy. It’s far more likely that the fertilized egg is simply prevented from implanting itself in the womb. The embryo is simply washed out of the body and dies in a toilet somewhere. No matter how one tries to decorate it, the morning after pill is an abortion.
It’s true that the little embryo at this stage does not have hands, feet or a beating heart, and those who are eager to be humbugged will no doubt find some comfort in that. But everything that happens to a human embryo from conception to death of old age is a gradual process or maturation, with no clear distinctions that would allow anyone to say, “before this stage of development, the embryo is not a human.”
The moderate pro-life and the moderate pro-abortion forces seem to agree with the notion that abortions should be permitted in cases of rape or incest. This moderate view therefore agrees that the sins of the father should be visited upon the son or the daughter. But a child is not less human if the circumstances of his conception are unsavory. The moderate view holds that if a child is conceived of one of these particular sins, then it is the child that is to receive the death penalty.
The Catholic Church’s hospital administrators seem to favor the buried head approach.
"If, after appropriate testing, it is considered medically appropriate, approved FDA drugs can be administered in a Catholic hospital for contraceptive purposes for the prevention of fertilization," according to a statement by The Catholic Health Association. "In a narrow set of circumstances, a Catholic hospital cannot provide these drugs if their effect would be abortifacient: that is, the fertilized ovum would be destroyed."
Do they know something the rest of us don’t? Or are they choosing willful ignorance? Would they change their mind if it were determined with certainty that the drugs simply prevented implantation? Or, will they simply claim that it cannot be known for certain if the woman receiving the drugs was in fact pregnant? Currently, there is no medical test that can reliably establish pregnancy before 72 hours after sex.
And in reality, this new law is a totally unwarranted intrusion into the hospitals’ affairs. Washington state law already permits victims of rape to acquire abortion pills at a pharmacy without ever visiting a doctor in the first place.
So what’s the real intent of this new law, and why all the complaining by Planned Parenthood? Women who need the medication already have unfettered access to it. It seems that this is just a case of state sponsored bullying.
After all, bullies aren’t really interested in beating people up, just in humiliating them.