Christian,
right-to-life, Conservatives promote abortions. Wouldn’t that be
an interesting concept to see addressed in a serious yet proactive way? That it
seems contradictory only adds irony to reality.
Regrettably,
abortion has become the biggest social issue political candidates exploit, even
though the issue is simply not political, nor should it be. I know good people
who will support politicians and vote on this one issue alone, their
rationality virtually disabled by emotion and manipulative rhetoric.
The
subject of abortion as a significant political issue is unique to the United
States among developed countries. A primary
reason is that those who influence the Conservative electorate in the US have
successfully linked the right to choose
an abortion as a desire to have an abortion.
You will rarely if ever hear an activist,
right-to-life, Conservative refer to someone as supporting a “right to choose”. Instead you will hear the term pro-abortion. They have even been successful in having the
media divide the debate between “anti-”
and “pro-”.
The
great irony is that, in fact, it is your Christian Conservative who is unwittingly
pro-abortion and your right-to-choose liberal who seeks a path toward reducing abortions.
Why?
It
is a fact that abortion has been an active human endeavor at least throughout
recorded history, if not before. Look it
up.
The
world’s historical record shows that from ancient times through the 19th
century when and where abortion was occasionally made illegal was not due to
some ethical valuation of life. It reflected the desire of those in power to
manipulate the transfer of wealth or to increase the population of the laboring
class.
In
other words, those in power who opposed abortion did so in their own self
interest. Not much has changed. Efforts to make abortion illegal today or
impossible to obtain affect only the poor or disadvantaged. Even your most diehard
Christian-Conservative can’t deny that the wealthy will always have the resources
to obtain the procedure in a clean, safe environment. So what really are the
anti-abortion group's motives?
No
one argues that the emotion which right-to-life activists convey is not real
and is not born of the ethics they find compelling given their religious faith.
The question, however, is what this
outcry of emotion is accomplishing? It
is presented as a love of life (I
guess not to be confused with life as
it relates to warfare, guns, or capital punishment).
Yet,
wouldn’t it make more sense that their efforts be directed at reducing abortions rather than purifying
humanity by making women and doctor’s criminals? But the right-to-life movement is not really
interested in reducing abortions or the related potential harm to pregnant
women. Nothing short of a social law on the books will do. They overtly or
unconsciously want to promote and satisfy their own personal
self-righteousness.
There
are essentially no women who want to
have an abortion or find it positive experience. They don’t get pregnant for the purpose of having an abortion. How
refreshing would it be for all participants in this debate to take this fact
and mutually find ways of reducing unwanted pregnancies, not even taking into
consideration the societal gains from less burdened single women or families. Most of what Planned Parenthood does is just
that.
Unfortunately,
unwanted pregnancies cannot be reduced without sex education and contraception, two
factors Christian-Conservatives often don’t want to address or oppose outright.
For
example; they’ll rile, as they did recently, about abortions by African-American
women in New York City exceeding live births by the same minority, but never mention
the soaring teen pregnancies within that group.
How mindless to think making abortion a crime will stop these girls from
getting pregnant.
Just
who benefits from tying abortions to acts of sin and criminality? It is certainly not the unborn in the US,
where abortion rates are higher than other western nations with greater
abortion availability and acceptance. Nor
is it the disadvantaged pregnant women who are subjected to a system that
wrenches from them their self-esteem as they deal with emotional and physical
distress.
The
great beneficiaries are the Republican politicians who manipulate the issue as
a means of garnishing votes for elective office, or at least in the primary process if not general elections.
An
omnipotent Christian God could have designed women to lay eggs instead of live
births, where wealthy white men could oversee their gestation…but he didn’t. By design, women have the difficult burden to
decide what happens within their own bodies, not Republican politicians or
religious zealots.
Perhaps Republicans can kindle Huxley’s Brave New World concept of human hatcheries.
The necessary technology isn’t all that far away. Now there’s a great job for “limited
government”. Until that nightmare, Republicans and Christian-Conservatives can continue
to facilitate the killing of unplanned and unwanted fetuses which their own
self-interest forces to take place.
