It should show how liberal the part of the world I live in is when I say that I saw my first ever anti-abortion rally yesterday. I was so excited, I wanted to go and talk to them and find out what they had to say! I could hardly contain myself! But I was in a hurry, so I couldn’t stop.
What confused me was that one of the signs said “Abortion Exploits Women,” and I couldn’t quite understand that. How does one exploit a woman with abortion? The only true *gain* a man could get with an abortion would be to sneak in at night, abort a baby, and take the fetus away for study. Other than that, I couldn’t think of a reason.
Now, this may be putting words in her mouth, but I would guess her reasoning for abortion being an exploitation of women would have something to do with women being used for sex. If a baby is aborted, I guess that means more sex?
You know what? There may be some logic in there, but only in the absolute worst case scenario for human dregs. Any man who would do that to a woman for sexual gratification only needs to be taken to task; that is the worst behaviour I could possibly imagine… But here’s the thing; in that case, it is the man who is at fault, not the abortion.
Do you think a man like that wouldn’t go to extreme lengths to get the abortion? Having a safe, clean, inspected, certified abortion clinic could save this woman’s life; so-called back alley abortions have any number of side effects, including infections that could end up being fatal. In countries where abortion is completely illegal, any woman showing up at a hospital with a perforated uterus can be sentenced to life imprisonment or death, regardless of the reason for the abortion (or, regardless of whether the abortion really happened). In a place like that, if a man forces you to get an abortion, if he drags you kicking and screaming to a back alley clinic, if he ties your arms and legs down while the procedure is performed, the woman shoulders the blame for it. Is that what it means to be pro-life?
If abortion exploits women, so does birth control, and so do condoms. These are not meant to be exploitations, these are meant to be safety measures. Have you ever wondered about what it takes to have a child? It takes nothing but one poor decision on the part of two people.
What does it take to adopt a child? It takes months to years of screening, tests, inspections, and that will get you placed on a list if you are lucky. It takes years of reasoned thought, decisions, proving you have what it takes.
I am not saying abortions should be used willy-nilly. I am not saying you should be able to just have sex completely indiscriminately, and then go to the doctor for a morning after pill. But I am saying abortion, if used in a way that is compassionate and understanding, rather than painted as some form of demonic ritual, provides a valuable service. Children of rape can cause long lasting mental issues. That isn’t to say an abortion is consequence free, as far as mental issues go, but if you are an unfortunate woman whose child shares many features with the rapist, there is a chance you will never find the ability to love the child.
A common solution provided by Pro-Life lobbyists is to give the child up for adoption. The problem is, there are far more children than there are “fit” parents. If adoption were similar to having children, you could just give it out to the first drug addled person who walked by, and that metaphor should worry you beyond the capacity for thought. Not only that, but (in the States specifically, among first world nations) giving birth can be so financially destructive that the parents have no choice but to perform the birth unassisted. Not only that, but they will not be in a good position to give the child up for adoption, especially if they are parents who have drug addictions, prior convictions under the law, or any number of other issues that would prevent them from seeking public means of help.
Children born to drug addicted parents have other issues to deal with, too. Developmental issues, and I don’t just mean in their brains. They can be born with major physical defects, as well, depending on the issues facing the mother. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is another one that is very common, and you don’t have to be out on the streets for that one. Respectable middle class homes can still lead to FAS children, despite lack of issues.
Am I saying every child that could have defects be aborted? No, I am not saying that. I am saying having the option (and I will repeat this part) in a clean, safe, inspected, accredited setting could SAVE LIVES.
Did you know that a large percentage (by some estimates 25%) of pregnancies end in what is called spontaneous termination? I don’t mean stillborn or miscarriage, those are other issues altogether, though they do feed into my point. Spontaneous termination basically means the pregnancy ends in failure before the mother even knows she is pregnant.
If you are religious, and decide to go Pro-Life, you are left with the uncomfortable truth that the person who performs the most abortions in the world, the person who kills the most babies in the womb, the person who destroys the most life, is God.
The other problem with Pro-Life people is that being pro-life is INCREDIBLY socialist. While I do agree with socialism, and believe it to be the best way to run a country (see “You can’t win at politics”, an earlier post on this blog), many of the people who are pro-life are, confusingly, also anti-socialist. That’s weird to me, because that ignores the fact that offering children for adoption requires a MASSIVE amount of money from the government and other firms. Adoption is not a for-profit industry, and would certainly not function under free-market capitalism, in any way. If there was not a socialist policy to provide for adoption clinics and housing, adopting a child would itself cost likely in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The other thing is the fact that it seems a fetus (most specifically, in the Southern States, which are the most densely pro-life States in the Union) loses its rights shortly after its birth. Without a social safety net, a child born into poverty will grow up in poverty. The per-capita crime rate SOARS below certain income levels, but that is largely because they have to resort to drastic measures before they survive.
If you want to be PURELY pro-life without exception, you need to provide a solution for poverty. It’s ok, take your time, I will wait.
Until such time as I can reasonably assume a baby will have an equal chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I will stand staunchly Pro-Choice.
The American Dream in action is to force someone in poverty to have a child they do not want and do not have the means to care for, when they do not understand how to leverage those around them for help, so that the poverty deepens and the child doesn’t have a chance.
Blog42: My Stream of (semi)Consciousness 
Ok Chad I simply must say that this is another instance of you just don’t get it. Of course we as humans have no right to take another innocent life, ever! If you truly believe God causes death, well then you must admit that is His right not ours. However you have a very cruel image of God and I am not sure where that grew from. Never the less, once you come to truly understand who God is I know you will be shocked where all these ideas of yours have come from. Killing the child to end poverty is the most ludicrous thing I have ever heard of! Once again I have been denied the gift of wisdom to counter your blog, but I have no doubt that if you seek the truth, the truth shall be found. I have 100% faith that God will guide you to it, maybe not in my lifetime, but I have no doubt it will happen! Love always Mom
LikeLike
First, I would never propose using abortion to solve poverty. The cruelty in such an idea is, indeed, preposterous.
My ideas towards the maleficence of God come directly from the Bible. Using the New Testament to say “God is universal love,” is discounting large portions of the Bible. Even if you look back into the Old Testament, neighbor (in its original connotations) was used to mean the Jewish people, or “others within your social group”. Things that would be considered “sinful” were not sinful when applied to those outside of the Jewish people. Which is, as I understand it, why God would have been OK with all of the abject atrocities contained in the Book of Judges, for example.
What does this have to do with Abortion, you might ask?
I just want to know where the idea of “souls at conception” comes from, and why, given the wide breadth of the literature written about God, does the idea that the life of the child is more important than the life or happiness of the mother come in? Why does the mother get no say in this?
It is very, very, very important to note that I am pro-choice, not pro-abortion. I think that “pro-choice=pro-abortion” is a dangerous, dangerous idea from whence nothing good can come.
But I do think that far too many babies are born dying straight from the womb based on the fact that the mother never should have been pregnant in the first place.
There is so much more to this issue than I can possibly deliver merely through a comment reply, though. One thing that has driven me mad is the Catholic Church’s policies towards sex, sex education, and contraception. Abstinence-only education does not work, because people are not SMART enough to care. I am willing to say that about the human race. Abstinence only education doesn’t work, condoms and birth control are not allowed, abortion isn’t allowed…
I feel like this would not be nearly as large an issue in the public consciousness as it is if the Catholic Church, and other organizations with similar views, would make a policy framework that had any chance of working. I am sorry, I don’t truly WANT to insult the Catholic Church (I have enough people against me as it is), but to say “You can’t use contraception and you can’t have an abortion, and you can’t have proper sexual education,” seems to me like a policy created from the ground up to perpetuate miserable lives.
People more cynical than me have posited that this policy is in place to ensure a constant supply of the unfortunate for the Church to snatch up.
Given the prevalence of AIDS in Africa, and the Church’s continued lack of a reasonable response to the crisis outside of “Abstain better,” proves that saving LIVES isn’t the issue in the abortion debate. For some reason, in the arithmetic of souls, an unborn fetus is more important than a man dying in Africa because he was never taught about how AIDS transfers from host to host. He was told to “abstain from sex before marriage,” as though that will save him if his wife was raped by an HIV-positive person who thought sex with her could cure his HIV.
I understand that the Catholic Church’s view could be categorized as “optimistic”. Seeing the best in humans, seeing that they are able to follow the Bible, seeing that they will listen to the word of Christ… But what happens when they don’t? Do we give up on them? I don’t understand.
You will forgive me, I hope, for siding with the World Health Organization regarding AIDS in Africa before I side with the Catholic Church. And I hope you will also forgive me for caring more for the life of those capable of suffering than I care for those that do not yet have a nervous system.
Further, I don’t understand, in the arithmetic of souls, where the fetus’ death should be so staunchly condemned. It was once penned (and I forget from whence the exact ruling came, forgive me) that children who die before having been baptized experience eternal contentedness, though perhaps cut off from God. Firstly, is that the policy of a loving God? Second, if a fetus is aborted using the logic of the Church itself, it is guaranteed happiness. If it is born, it has a chance to sin, to kill, to get itself sent to hell. The fetus would have been better off.
Do I subscribe to this logic, myself? No, I do not agree with the arithmetic of souls from the start, as it is largely a human construct (I don’t mean souls themselves are, that would involve denying a God at all, and I would not do that. I mean nowhere in the Bible does it define specifically when a soul enters the fetus, mostly because when written, the authors had very little idea of the nature of a fetus at all). But to use the logic of the Catholic Church at all is to admit that abortion leads to happy souls.
Personally, I subscribe to the scientific view. The fetus, prior to having any definable nervous system, does not compare to the suffering of the mother who has been raped. The fetus, having no ability to feel pain, does not compare to the suffering of a person with full body burns, who could be saved by theoretical stem cell treatments.
So yes, I think, to me, that an early-term fetus (without a nervous system) cannot be compared to a living, breathing, suffering human in this world.
LikeLike
Okay, so if life begins at conception, and the cells that are dividing into an embryo are not recognizable as anything but cells, growing and mutating into a person. Every other cell in your body is capable of mutation and change and growing into something else, so why is that theoretical life any more significant than the theoretical life of any other mutations? We have treatments and surgeries for the removal and eradication of a vast variety other cell growth and mutations, why is this one more legitimate than anything else?
Stats and numbers are reflective of nothing but stats and numbers. Over population and population density do affect things like crime, violence and poverty, and slowing the rate of population expansion does lower the numbers. Again, numbers don’t prove a point, but it does correlate trends. These same trends correspond with areas that have more education on birth control and safe sex practices.
The singular part of God’s will that has been stressed the most, is that of choice, and removal of a choice is no choice at all.
LikeLike