February 16, 2018 10:35 AM UTC

At Least Brian Boner Is Not Your State Senator

• 5 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Better Wyoming brings us the story of some rather ghoulish legislation proposed in that state’s legislature by one Sen Brian Boner (R-Douglas):

The Wyoming State Legislature just can’t resist the urge to barge into doctors’ offices and tell physicians and their female patients what to do during the most private and vulnerable scenarios imaginable.

A proposed bill that would force medical professionals to offer a “nonviable birth certificate” to women who miscarry a pregnancy passed introduction in the Senate on Wednesday. It will be considered by the Senate Committee on Labor, Health, and Human Services next week…

His bill, he said, “will be a way to educate people about an issue that occurs in about 10 percent of pregnancies after the first trimester.”

There you go. Sen. Boner is going to make doctors offer women birth certificates for their miscarried fetuses in order to educate them.

The underlying intent of this legislation, of course, is to chip away at the right of women to access abortion by recognizing nonviable fetal tissue–even couched under the heading of “educational purposes,” the true incremental anti-choice purpose of this exercise is plain as day. The Wyoming bill also differs from the law in some other states in which bereaved parents can request a birth certificate in cases of miscarriage. Under this bill doctors would be required to offer it, a far more onerous provision.

As for Sen. Boner’s “gynotician” qualifications to offer this modest proposal? He’s a rancher.

Optically and practically, it would probably be better for the Boners of the world to bone out of women’s lives.