Outrage with a side order of scepticism

[neadods]

Since when are miscarriages police business? Since John A. Cosgrove decided that if women don't report a miscarriage to the authorities within 12 hours, they have committed a Class 1 Misdemeanor. Yuppers, not telling the cops that you've miscarried (along with name, age, time of conception, last period date, size and gender of fetus, and signature/address of funeral director) is just as bad as arson and stalking.

All of the fury I've seen hitting the web so far is coming from LJ, which is reacting to daily_kos' news release with link to the bill. A virtually identical post is at Democracy for Virginia and is, I think, written by the same author.

This is outrageous. Let me make it clear, the text of this bill is outrageous and serves no legal or moral purpose.

BUT! Something's off here.

I noticed that this bill is to be filed 1/12/05. Five days from now. Wur?

Further investigation shows nothing on Google news hitting under "Cosgrove, miscarriage" aside from his other anti-woman work (making the harming of a fetus a crime) and assorted references to "miscarriage of justice." Searching Planned Parenthood of Virginia's website for references to Delegate Cosgrove + miscarriage produced no mention of this bill. Other stuff to be pissed about, but not this bill. You'd think Planned Parenthood would be all over this. They aren't. Neither is that other great arena of random chat on all topics, usenet. A search for "john cosgrove miscarriage" for the last week resulted in no hits at all.

There's something wrong here. I'm not entirely sure what, since it looks like there really is a bill like this that will be filed in the future, but there's something wrong here and it isn't named Cosgrove. Are we being warned in advance of a travesty, or - like gay marriage replacing Iraq in the 2004 election - are we being distracted while something else is going on?

Comments

[lagilman]

Time for Virginia (Dem, Liberal, female, Other Interested parties) 'critters to start asking pointy-type questions in official forums...

[faireraven.livejournal.com]

They DO mention "Amendments may be offered on the floor to accomplish this", though. This may be one of them.

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?051+sum+HB1677

And it's in there as of 12/17/04, house prefiled.

And I'm looking at what they have on their "key issues" page... It hasn't been updated since June 10th. That could be why you're not seeing it.

[hildy.livejournal.com]

A post in northern_va explains a little more about the bill and its intent.

http://www.livejournal.com/community/northern_va/154701.html