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A bill introduced by nine Republican state lawmakers in Iowa on Wednesday would define abortion as "murder," sending doctors and raped women who terminate pregnancies to jail.

State Rep. Tom Shaw says that he authored House File 138 to protect human life, whether “you’re a zygote, an infant, a teenager or an adult.”

The bill defines a "person" as "an individual human being, without regard to age of development, from the moment of conception, when a zygote is formed, until natural death."

"Murder includes killing another person through any means that terminates the life of the other person including but not limited to the use of abortion-inducing drugs," the measure states without making any exceptions for rape or incest.

Republican state Rep. Rob Bacon, who is co-sponsoring the bill, told the Ames Tribune that he wanted to "protect the life of the unborn" because "[t]here’s still some of us that believe life begins at conception."

During a Wednesday interview with Denver Bible Church pastor Bob Enyart, Shaw explained that defining a fertilized egg as a "person" in Iowa's murder statute "just simplifies everything."

"So when anyone has any questions towards us -- the war on women, are you doing this, are you doing that? -- no, it's a simple response," he insisted. "We are only defining who a person is."

"There was a lot of concern with former bills about who would be charged, what would they be charged with... This puts it in the hands of county attorneys, just like any other murder investigation. A person is a person."

According to Democratic state Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell, the new definition of murder would mean that women were jailed if they had an abortion after being raped or to save their own lives.

"We’re talking about the victim of rape would go to prison along with her rapist," she told the Tribune. “It’s very hard to understand the feeling behind it. It’s a health care issue, I mean, sometimes in order to save someone’s life a woman could possibly need an abortion. When we talk about being pro-life, my new question is ‘whose life?’”

Planned Parenthood of the Heartland President Jill June called the effort to restrict abortion rights "the most extreme yet."

"This bill would imprison a woman and her doctor for attempting an abortion," June said in a statement on Wednesday. “A victim of rape or incest would be forced to carry a pregnancy or be put in jail, just like her assailant. Extremists pushing this bill are blinded by their ideology to eliminate abortion, and do not realize how this bill could hurt women and families in our state.”

Even if Shaw's bill makes it out of committee, it would have virtually no chance to pass in Iowa's Democratically-controlled Senate.

(h/t: Political Wire)

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John Fugelsang, filling in for Eliot Spitzer on Current TV this Thursday, had similar issues with a recent Gallup poll on those self-identifying with the term pro-life as Slate's Amanda Marcotte who wrote about that same poll in her column here: The Problem With Polling About Moral Beliefs:

Another year, another Gallup poll on abortion for anti-choicers to misleadingly represent in a bid to deceive the country into believing they're winning in the court of public opinion. Of course, Gallup shares the blame for this travesty, since it publishes its polling results with a lead about the poll that asks if people identify as pro-choice or pro-life. Inevitably, "pro-life" polls well, much better than it would if it were more accurately phrased as "anti-choice" or "anti-abortion," because it's a fuzzy-wuzzy term that deliberately distracts from the legal and sexual freedom issues at the heart of the abortion debate. This year, the poll found that 50 percent of Americans relate to the empty term "pro-life," and only 41 percent to the term "pro-choice."

But if you actually bother to read on, you'll find that Americans are still majority pro-choice, which is why the direct abortion ban in South Dakota and the personhood law in Mississippi went down when put to an actual vote. Scrolling down, you find that only 20 percent of Americans support the anti-choice movement's goal in banning abortion, with 25 percent of Americans supporting abortion rights in all cases, and 52 percent of Americans wanting abortion legal with some restrictions. (Most people imagine a legal regime that will somehow allow abortion for themselves and their friends, but disallow it for those dirty sluts they hear about so much.) This means that only two out of five people who identify as "pro-life" actually align themselves with the so-called pro-life view, demonstrating neatly how useless that term is and why it needs to be replaced with a more accurate term like "anti-abortion," or my preferred term "anti-choice," which encompasses their anti-contraception activism alongside their anti-abortion activism.

Polling Americans on vague beliefs and self-identity doesn't really tell us much in general beyond highlighting how delusional and/or hypocritical our nation is. The reality is that there's a huge gulf between what people claim to believe—even when speaking anonymously to a pollster—and what they actually believe, which is easier to measure when looking at behavior or what kind of policy choices they support. Read on...

John Fugelsang's take below the fold.

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From this Friday night's Piers Morgan on CNN. Ron Paul apparently believes that only women who have been raped should have the right to an abortion. But even worse, he qualified the term with the word "honest." Lauren Kelley over at AlterNet weighed in on a couple of the reasons that Paul's statements during this interview are extremely troubling, to put it mildly.

The 2 Most Dangerous Things Ron Paul Gets Wrong About "Honest" Rape (As in "Real" Rape?):

Last night, CNN's Piers Morgan sat down with Ron Paul for an interview leading up to this weekend's Nevada caucus. One of the topics Morgan brought up was abortion, and specifically a woman's right to choose if she has been raped. Paul's answer was at once befuddling and enraging, and it really gets to the heart of the anti-choice war on women's bodies and choices. [...]

There are many myths to debunk here, but I'll just quickly point out the two most obvious (and most dangerous) ones:

1. Women do get raped by their husbands and partners. That's not some out-there hypothetical. Intimate partner rape is a major problem -- and yes, it happens to well-to-do women like Ron Paul's daughters too.

2. Although Paul keeps going back to women seeking abortions late in their pregnancies, the reality is that 90 percent of abortions occur in the first trimester. So his focus on late-term abortions is disproportionate to the number of women actually seeking late-term abortions.

Ron Paul might have a few things in common with liberals when it comes to military interventions and starting wars, but it's his views on economics and his social issues like this that paint a pretty clear line as to why he's over with the extreme right wing of the Republican base on most everything else.

Full transcript below the fold and Paul's response to Morgan didn't get any better as he rambled on. It's pretty pathetic when even as big of a hack as Piers Morgan manages to make sure the audience realizes you're being completely inconsistent with your answers, which Paul was.

Paul claims he believes in "personal liberties" but apparently those liberties don't apply when it comes to a woman and her body and her reproductive rights.

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