Who Are the Real "Pros"?

With abortion and Roe v Wade surfacing as a political issue again for this coming mid-term election, and the decision regarding Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation, I thought my November 2015 essay was worth reposting:

"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 nearly unique to the United States among developed countries, regardless that the personal conclusions about abortion exist everywhere.  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 19^th 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 legal 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. It is clearly born of the ethics they find compelling given their religious faith.  The question, however, is what this outcry of emotion 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 attempting to purify 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 at the cost of women's lives and increased abortions. They will vote for any politician, no matter how corrupt or unethical, as long as he vows to support their goal.

There are no women who desire an abortion or find it a 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 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 omniscient 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.