Turkey Baster Bob Strikes Again—No In Vitro For Single Women

Proposed legislation that would have made it illegal for doctors to offer artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization to single women failed to make it out of committee in the Virginia House of Delegates.

Virginia Pilot columnist Bronwyn Lance Chester has a delightfully acid take on "Turkey Baster Bob's" continuing attempts to interfere with his fellow Virginians' reproductive decisions:

Until this week, I had no idea that single women who desperately want children and go to clinics for help were such a menace to the commonwealth.

But I'm getting more REM sleep now that I know Del. Robert Marshall, Republican from Manassas, is on the case.

As lawmakers return to Richmond this week, a firehose of questionable legislation has spewed into the General Assembly. One of the wettest bills is Marshallis.

Turkey Baster Bob wants to forbid medical professionals, like those at EVMS' Jones Institute, from performing artificial insemination or in-vitro fertilization on unmarried women.

Marshall, you may remember, boasts an unsurpassed zeal for government meddling in private lives.

His invocations of "family values" make Pat Robertson look like a wuss. He's set in his sights colleges that distribute morning-after pills, and crusaded to keep newscaster Hugh Finn on life support over his wife's objections.

So it's no great surprise that he's determined to keep Virginians safe from the scourge of single mothers.

Marshall could be dismissed as a clown except that he managed to get the Virginia House of Delegates to pass a bill in 2004 that would have banned college physicians from prescribing emergency contraception to students. He proposed such legislation because he claimed that emergency contraception turned women students into "chemical love canals for frat-house playboys." Fortunately, cooler heads in the Virginia Senate nixed the bill.