Mandate, My Ass

The lesson of those decades is that you can't eliminate the moral question by ignoring it. To eliminate it, you have to agree on it: Abortion is bad, and the ideal number of abortions is zero. But by conceding that, you don't end the debate, you narrow it. Once you agree that the goal is fewer abortions, the only thing left to debate is how to get there. As a politician might put it: "My opponent and I are both pro-life. We want to avoid as many abortions as we can. The difference is, I trust women to work with me toward that objective, and he doesn't."

Isn't that better than anything you heard from John Kerry?

Excuse me while I impart a hearty Fuck You on behalf of all my female friends.

Besides the nauseating and gratuitous slap at Kerry (who is not one of my faves, but that's just a cheap shot), once again we have a pundit telling Dems what they're doing wrong with no factual basis. And the starting point is the notion that (gasp!) abortion is bad.

Says who? You? You've never had to have one, Bill.

Absolutely, abortion is bad -- if your view of women is that they're pretty much baby mills. If you really think Every Sperm Is Sacred. If you can't wrap your mind around mitigating circumstances in a changing world. If you can't keep your damn hands off other people's lives.

There are lots of good reasons to have an abortion. If you've been raped or sexually abused, for starters. If you can't safely bear a child because of some other medical condition. If you find out early on that the child would have catastrophic birth defects. If you are in an economic or professional position that will not allow you to raise the child. If your birth control method fails. If you know you can't handle the responsibility of raising another life-form for eighteen years.

(The moral folk pooh-pooh at this point, usually along the lines of, "Well, you had sex, you're responsible for the results." The idea of terminating an unwanted pregnancy -- sorry, killing a beautiful loving blessed child -- as a responsible act is completely beyond them.)

I don't know if Mr. Saletan has bothered to notice, but the same religious psychos who don't like abortion also don't like birth control. In fact, they don't like sex. And they don't want anyone else to like it, either.

They can't even be honest about it.

Again, this isn't about saving babies. It's about controlling women, legislating God, and sanctifying birth (never mind pre- or post-natal care).

People are going to have sex. We are at least medically in a situation where we can prevent many of the physical problems of sex, and, as much as the religious types may hate to hear it worded this way, one of the problems of sex is an unwanted pregnancy.

A fetus at the outset is not a baby. And treating it as if it is, with rights equal to or greater than the mother, is ludicrous.

The problem to adress, as usual in this age of screwed-up Puritanism, is a combination of the definition of abortion as a necessarily bad thing, the inability to admit that people have sex for reasons other than procreation, and the need some people have to impose themselves into other people's private lives.

# posted by filkertom : 10:32 AM