Virginia Republicans Are Aliens

I don't mean foreigners, I mean malevolent creatures from another world.

Think about it. The only time you hear about involuntary probes, it is because of alien abductions.

Virginia republicans want to mandate involuntary vaginal probes for women:

Inserting something into the vagina of an unwilling woman is a violation in every sense of the word. But not to a majority of Virginia's Senate.

This week, the Senate passed a bill, largely along party lines, that would require a woman seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound and wait as long as a day for the procedure.

The ultrasound requirement may evoke images of the abdominal sonograms standard in most pregnancies, fuzzy black and white pictures conjured by a wand passed across a woman's stomach.

But those ultrasounds are ordinarily done fairly late in pregnancy. In the beginning, particularly the first weeks, an abdominal ultrasound may not be sensitive enough to detect anything.

That's why doctors in many cases use a transvaginal ultrasound. In plainspeak, they insert a condom-covered probe into a woman's vagina to obtain an image.

In order to satisfy the goals of the legislation - which includes a requirement that a doctor determine the gestational age of the pregnancy- a transvaginal ultrasound may be the only reliable course.

The bill, among the most invasive ever passed in Virginia, is the result of frustration by lawmakers opposed to abortion. Unsuccessful in making abortion illegal and unwilling to be frank about their goals, they have tried by technicality and obfuscation to make it harder for a woman to terminate a pregnancy.

Every so often, I hold the delusion that Republicans cannot get any more contemptible.

They always manage to disabuse me of this.