Montana Tea Party Lawmaker Compares Abortion Doctors to Veterinarians

A Montana legislator came up with a bizarre analogy during debate over a proposed fetal surgery bill that would severely limit legal abortion in the state.

Montana’s The Cowgirl Blog covered the spectacle, reporting that State Rep. Bill Harris (R-Winnett) compared abortion doctors to veterinarians during an executive action session of the House Human Services Committee debating HB 479:

Whether you call this an unborn fetus or an unborn what–anything else, it still rises to the level of needing a humane consideration.

And if I took an animal regardless of what it was, whether it was dying or whether it was just needin’ unwanted or wanted rid of, to a veterinarian to have it euthanized that veterinarian would go to every effort to do that in as painless and as humane a way as he could manage, so for obvious reasons, I’m a yes to this bill.

Raw Story reports that “[c]ritics of the bill say it would impose vaginal probe ultrasounds on women against their will, based on dubious science.” House Minority Whip Rep. Jenny Eck (D-Helena) stated that:

I’m sorry if women’s bodies get in the way of the development of a fetus, but that’s the reality, and until there is a day when babies can be grown in an incubator without women’s bodies, you’re going to have this problem where, yes, we are the vessels that carry fetuses, and you can’t get around that fact.

We have a will of our own, we have opinions of our own, and we have lives of our own, so as soon as we become treated as just an incubator it becomes very problematic. I would say [this is] very different from a situation where someone puts their dog down at the veterinarian’s office.

As The Cowgirl Blog reports, this is not the first time state legislators have gone off the deep end making irrational comments about women.

During the 2011 session, Rep. Keith Regier, now a member of GOP legislative leadership, compared women to cattle on the floor of the House of Representatives. Regier analogized that pre-tested cows are more valuable than open cows in his speech arguing in favor of forced births for rape victims. Then TEA Party Republican Rep. Krayton Kerns made headlines by “comparing Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke to a studding English bulldog named “John-Boy,” and here’s the story.

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