With the official decision by the six radical theocratic clerics on the Supreme Court to take away reproductive rights, so-called “trigger” laws have come into question. In Mississippi, a 2007 trigger law is set to go into effect on Jan. 7 that will ban abortion after 15 weeks “except in cases where necessary for the preservation of the mother’s life or where the pregnancy was caused by rape.” The lawsuit that overturned Roe v. Wade was filed by Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office and she has finally caught the car she was chasing.

Having caught that car, Republicans can’t even pretend to lie about how much of an infringement on Americans’ rights this is. Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn is answering questions about the new law, and he has some big ideas of how the 2007 trigger law doesn’t go far enough. Rape? Incest? Gunn thinks those things are God’s will and in fact, the moment an egg and a spermatozoid meet should be considered life!

Hours after the Supreme Court decision came down, Mississippi Free Press reports that Speaker Gunn spoke with reporters on the State House floor. Here’s a verbatim retelling of that interaction:

AP REPORTER EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS: What about the case of a 12-year-old girl who was molested by her father or uncle?

SPEAKER PHILIP GUNN: I believe life begins at conception. And every life is valuable. And those are my personal beliefs.

DAILY JOURNAL REPORTER TAYLOR VANCE: So that 12-year-old child molested by her family members should carry that pregnancy to term?

SPEAKER GUNN: That is my personal belief. I believe that life begins at conception.

Gunn then said he only wanted to talk about how Roe v. Wade was overturned and didn’t want the focus to be on what that actually means for human beings living in places like Mississippi. Gunn’s position, and this is not hyperbolic, is that incest survivors and rape survivors should be tried, convicted, and sent to prison if they decide that they would rather terminate an unwanted pregnancy than live with that trauma for months and months, then birth a child into the uncaring GOP hellscape Mississippi Republicans offer up to young parents.

Speaker Gunn, like the rest of his GOP cabal, is best known for attacking living wage concerns and saying labor shortages are due to COVID-19 unemployment benefits. For all of Gunn’s talk about the need to protect sacred life and the lip service he and other conservatives have given to the need to help those people having children, Gunn and the Mississippi GOP have yet to expand their Medicaid programs—a move that would directly help alleviate some of the health care problems faced by Mississippians, pregnant and not.

The guy that made the comments above and tweeted out the same day that “The day so many prayed for is here. HB1510 is law and Roe v. Wade is no more. With love for children and the women who bear them, we move forward to secure strong and lasting legal protections and cultural support for life, and a vibrant network of abortion alternatives,” is also the guy that for TWO YEARS in a row has “killed an extension of postpartum Medicaid benefits, likely guaranteeing that many low-income people will lose health insurance benefits only two months after giving birth.”

Mississippi has one of the most abysmal infant mortality rates of any industrialized place in the world. In fact, it has the worst infant mortality rate in the entire United States. Gunn became speaker of the Mississippi House in 2012; since then, the abysmal rate has gone from third worst to worst worst in the country. So, for a decade, Speaker Philip Gunn’s legislation or lack thereof has led to dead babies—thousands of them.

Considering that he is under the delusion that life begins at conception, this means that his God—the same one he pretends is an excuse for his cruel attack on young parents—murders millions of “babies” every year, as about half of all fertilized eggs die and are lost (aborted) spontaneously, usually before the woman knows she is pregnant. Among women who know they are pregnant, about 10% to 25% will have a miscarriage.”

Mississippi abortion providers are suing the state, arguing there is a state precedent that supersedes the 2007 trigger law. Rob McDuff of the Mississippi Center for Justice was a lawyer on that precedent. He explained to Mississippi Today that “The Mississippi Supreme Court’s 1998 decision interpreting the Mississippi Constitution exists completely independent of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions about the federal Constitution. It is binding precedent. As confirmed by the Mississippi Supreme Court in that case, the decision about whether and when to have children belongs to individuals and families, not to the state’s politicians.”