Every woman knows that stepping inside a dimly-lit bar triggers a few pressing questions: Should I have beer or liquor? Do I feel like dancing tonight? Why won’t that creep with the Freddy Mercury-mustache stop staring at me?
And, unavoidably: Is there a baby growing inside me right now?
Well, if Alaska state Senator Pete Kelly (R) has his way, the latter question will be easy enough to answer.
Kelly, who represents Alaska’ District B, wants to use state money to install pregnancy test “kiosks and dispensers” in the ladies’ room of any establishment that sells alcohol. Maybe you’re worried you misread the previous sentence, but you didn’t. We’ll let the senator explain the idea in his own words:
“Literally, you can go into the bathroom at the bar and test,” Kelly recently explained. “So if you’re drinking, you’re out at the big birthday celebration and you’re kind of like, ‘Gee, I wonder if I — ?’ You should be able to go in the bathroom and there’s that plastic, Plexiglas bowl in there.”
Kelly hopes that his “Plexiglas bowls” will help prevent fetal alcohol syndrome—which is, honestly, a laudable goal. But when other lawmakers proposed that, instead of pregnancy tests, bars could be required to sell birth control—which would help prevent pregnancies in the first place—Kelly demurred, explaining that his “thinking is a little opposite.”
“[My pregnancy test plan] assumes that if you know [you’re pregnant], you’ll act responsibly,” Kelly said. “Birth control is for people who don’t necessarily want to act responsibly.”
By now, Kelly might regret sharing that last opinion, since it’s earning him a whole lot of attention—and definitely not the good kind. But thanks to Kelly, perhaps soon Alaska’s women can finally experience one of the most significant moments of their lives while standing in a nightclub’s urine-soaked bathroom, surrounded by drunken strangers.
And then it will all be worth it.
