Accidents will Happen

A few notes on the continuing uproar over abortion:

1) The anti-choice people always scream that pro-choice people are for killing babies. Well, they are actually fetuses, and if you were to take a fetus out of the woman’s uterus at the point when most abortions are done (according to the CDC, 88% are performed within the first trimester), the fetus would die (this is where the umbilical cord, placenta, uterus, and rest of the woman’s body come into play). Near term fetuses are rarely aborted, except in extreme cases when the woman’s health is threatened, or if it turns out that the fetus has some horrible abnormality not previously detected. So, even though it seems like I’m playing semantic games, I’m not. There are many medical and legal differences between a fetus and a baby, so the antis should clean up their act. When we’re talking abortion, we’re talking fetuses.

2) Are fetuses people? No. They are developing human beings that cannot survive outside of their mother’s womb (until very late in a pregnancy, and even then, only with lots of medical intervention). They are people, with rights as individuals and citizens AFTER they are born (and many of their rights, like the right to vote, are not accorded until they are adults). Some would argue that all life is sacred…but clearly it is not. We wage “just” wars that happen to kill and maim innocent children as a byproduct. We repeatedly fail to address famine and genocide and the AIDS epidemic all over the world. Countless children die in impoverished countries because we have failed to immunize them against preventable childhood diseases. Our government essentially ignores millions of American children in poverty, failing to provide them with adequate health care, education, housing, and even food. How many children languish in our nation’s foster care system? How many non-white orphans are out there waiting to be adopted? Even the Catholic Church, which is generally against capital punishment, does make allowances that there are times executing someone is justified! Can’t we focus some of this “fetus love” on these enormous problems that affect millions of our fellow human beings that already have been born? And what about preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place? Let’s leave aside all the moral judgments about people having sex outside of marriage or when they are teenagers, or if people should have sex for reasons other than procreation, etc. What about making sure that if people want to have sex and don’t want it to result in a pregnancy, that we provide them with all of the accurate information and condoms/birth control pills they need? Seems like a simple solution to making abortion rare, if you ask me. Yet the antis are against emergency contraception, the birth control pill, and condoms (even masturbation)!

3) I’ve read a bunch of quotes from anti-abortion youth born after 1973 who call themselves post-Roe “survivors.” (I was born in 1966 to an unmarried 19 year-old woman and put up for adoption, but could have ended up being aborted illegally and I don’t call myself a survivor…though many people back then would have called me “illegitimate” or a “bastard” and my birth mother a “whore,” “slut,” and worse.) Well, kids, your parents CHOSE to have you, for whatever reason they made that’s none of my damn business…it’s not like abortion doctors were roaming hospital delivery wards, randomly killing fetuses before they were born, or King Herod decreed that all first born male babies should be killed. The government didn’t tell your parents whether to keep you, offer you up for adoption, or to abort you. Spare me your hysterics. Grow up, get out into the world. Things are much more complex and complicated than you imagine. (I’m always amazed by the right wing’s capacity for embracing victimhood...somehow Christianity is always under attack and good evangelical Christians are always being wronged by not being able to impose their beliefs on the rest of us).

4) Why don’t we trust women to make their own decisions? We don’t trust them if they decide they want birth control or an abortion, but we’ll trust/expect the very same women to raise their children to be good, productive members of society. If these women are “morally corrupt” enough to want the pill, how do we know that when they are having babies, they are not churning out little godless pagans?

5) Finally, I’ve read about this supposed “Roe effect” theory that declares that the country is becoming steadily more conservative because liberal people are aborting great numbers of their offspring. What a load of crap. It’s estimated that 35% of American women 45 and younger have had abortions. That’s one in four women. And they aren’t all atheist, liberal, Democrats who live in New York City or San Francisco. Some of them are red state soccer moms who go to church and help out at the PTA. In fact, in terms of numbers of abortions performed in each state, a surprising number of red states like Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia are in the top ten. (A little sidebar here, Mississippi, which has only one abortion clinic and the most restrictions on abortion of any state in the Union has the highest rate of infant mortality in the U.S. -- and rates of infant mortality are higher in red states than blue!) I have two kids and I know plenty of great liberal folks who are having or adopting kids (some of them are even gay parents! Shock, horror!)…I even know many women who had abortions and went on to give birth to many kids. The country is becoming more conservative because there has been a strong, organized effort by the right wing over the past 30 years to drag this country back into the stone ages -- not because abortion is wiping out generations of liberals.