Now that it’s been out there for a day, everyone’s had time to notice how chockfull-of-chewy-Awful the House of Representatives tax plan is. There are so many nuggets of concentrated Dreadful that we may never have the time to dig all of them out. For example: You there, Grandma, lounging around in your Geri-chair at Shady Acres. Time to pony up, moocher. From CNBC:

The bill would repeal the medical expense deduction, which allows people who spend more than 10 percent of their income on out-of-pocket health costs to write them off. "This would be a joke if the consequences weren't so serious," said Brad Woodhouse, campaign director of health-care advocacy group Protect Our Care, in a statement. "Republican leaders are determined to raise health-care costs for middle-class families who need it most — in this case people with high medical costs or those paying for long-term care." While it's not a widely used tax deduction — about 5 percent of tax filers claim it — for the old and sick it can be significant.

But there’s also a relatively obscure provision regarding the beginning of life that is sneaky in a number of different ways. While eliminating the deduction for student loan interest for actual college students, the bill provides a deduction for college savings for those students who haven’t been born yet—and that is not an exaggeration for effect, either, as Politico explains.

The legislation includes language that would open up tax-advantaged college savings accounts known as 529s to what the legislation calls "unborn children" as designated beneficiaries. And a bill summary specifically defines that as “a child in utero. A child in utero means a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.”

You may recall the several efforts made by the anti-choice forces out in the states to pass “personhood” laws that would grant constitutional rights to any potential human being at any stage of development. These laws were so nutty that one of them went down to a resounding defeat in Mississippi Goddamn. Here, in a tax bill that is loathsome enough as economic policy, we see “personhood” slipped into the language of the bill as though there already were a basis for it in law.

“This is a back-door attempt to establish personhood from the moment of conception,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) . “What’s next, giving a Social Security number to a zygote?”

Well, yes. That’s entirely possible.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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