MOLLY:
My friend Sally is pregnant and she was made to watch an ultrasound of her fetus. Are they going to make me do an ultrasound, and make me watch?
DOLLOP:
The Virginia House of Delegates are worried that women will not want to be pregnant, and they want to shock them into having a baby.
The state of Virginia has a lot of problems. Rural poverty, the worst traffic jams in the country, the influx of illegal immigrants, a lack of affordable housing, a low minimum wage, pollution, guns in the hands of maniacs, and so on. One of the Delegates said, “It is hard. It is hard work. Hard problems. It is so hard. Let’s go beat up on poor pregnant girls instead.” And they did.
After hours and hours of discussion, deliberation, voting and voting, getting bills to the floor, rereading the Virginia Constitution, rereading the law of the land, looking at Washington Post polls on abortion, and having spirited debates, they managed get to the bottom line. “Some girls and women regret getting pregnant. Let’s not allow that. Those girls have sinned many times: They had sex. They had unprotected sex. They got pregnant. They told somebody. They are not married to a nice, clean, affluent Virginia Delegate like me.”
Since some of the Delegates went to school in a True-Christian madrasa, they knew all about abstinence vows but were not too sure how babies got made. And a few other things. Plus, they were forbidden to think about it.
The opposition, darn it, prevailed with a ruling. Before the Delegates could vote on poor pregnant girls, they had to learn where babies came from. They were locked in a room and forced to watch videos. Now, you might think, can you talk about human eggs getting fertilized and avoid talking about the Delivery of Sperm? No, you cannot. Some mischievous staffer downloaded some clips from porn movies which he recast as “Human Reproduction Mechanics.” The Delegates had a predictable reaction: “Whaaaaaaaaaat!!!!” But they really came unhinged during the segment on swimming sperm. Basically, a million little sperm compete and crowd each other – like the running bulls of Pamploma – stepping on little sperm, jabbing elbows, poking eyes, cutting each other off to get to the Queen, a very fickle egg. “Nascar race” is an understatement.
The Delegates concluded, pushing aside “hard” concerns about the regional distribution of transportation funding, the numbers of people with no health insurance, beach access versus the rights of mansion owners, and so on – that The Root Cause of Pregnancy is Semen. If you want to reduce pregnancy, and unwanted pregnancy, you had to go after the Semen. That means the men, if the Mechanics movie was right about Delivery.
They decided that a video “intervention” was a pretty good thing. Why not a video that men would be made to watch before they delivered semen? Sure, you could get poor pregnant girls to watch a video about babies, and make them cry. But what about getting the men to think about their choices in The Act of Deliverance?
They hired Michael Moore, a nice man with a weight problem, who promised not to make it too funny, because extreme laughter is known to interfere with Human Reproduction Mechanics, according to people in the know. The Delegates themselves had to go on faith, here. Mr. Moore was to get men to “think about it” before they delivered any semen. For example, there could be segments of a screaming baby keeping you up all night, poop and throw-up all over the house, incoherent little people who want something and cannot tell you what it is, many trips to Target and Wal Mart for strange devices with nipples or a dozen different sizes of “nappies.” A segment would show the man writing a check 200 times for an amount of money that would easily pay for a hunting cabin, a powerboat, a GPS, a satellite-driven TV, an all-terrain vehicle, thousands of cases of beer, AND a few years off.
Mr. Moore overstepped his bounds, however, and produced a video for the Delegates too. It showed babies crying in emergency rooms, homeless people, victims of domestic violence, kids sleeping on rags in hovels, people with bad teeth, bad hair, bad clothes, bad health, and bad knees who could not afford medicine, and families without food. Silly kids who dreamed of chicken nuggets instead of iPods. Especially, he showed poor pregnant girls who became hostile, drunk single mothers, or abusive mothers, or drug-heads who left their kids with the grandparents. Foster kids who wanted a “real” family.
When they saw the second video, the Delegates were overwhelmed. Those who were single immediately vowed to marry the girls and give them a better life. The others offered to adopt the babies, as they were True-Christians, and pro-life. They offered to share their more-than-spacious houses, hire the girls as live-in nannies for a generous salary, send them to college, and pay for summer camp for the kids. They vowed to never engage in the nasty Mechanics thing. Not without protection, anyway, about which they knew nothing, however, because the madrasa was funded by the U.S. government and abstinence was all they were supposed to know.
A group of poor pregnant girls got together, took up a collection, and promised to send the Delegates copies of their ultrasounds so that they could have at least six months to prepare to help out and start writing checks.
