This is a new series of articles I'm hoping to write, detailing why I feel that the left is correct on a variety of issues. The first such issue I will be examining is a hot-button topic, and one that should be important to most women and many men this election cycle...
Because the Republican candidate has virtually vowed to overturn Roe vs Wade with his SCOTUS choices. Join me after the jump for a critical examination of... ABORTION POLICY AND YOU.
The first thing to note is that the dichotomy between 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice' (or more propagandistically, 'pro-abortion') is a false one, and one that was constructed to serve specific political purposes. The fact of the matter is that people who are in favor of abortion legislation are no more 'pro-life' than anyone else... They are pro-state-control, pro-government, anti-liberty, but nothing about either their tactics or their arguments (many are simultaneously pro-capital-punishment, for example) indicates that they are pro-life.
Abortion is acceptable and sometimes adviseable. This first topic is sure to set the rigid social conservatives on edge, but I argue quite confidently that not only should the right to choose be respected, but so should the act of abortion itself. Most people who describe themselves as pro-choice say that they have a personal aversion to abortion, and yet they do not feel that the government should force someone else to follow their particular moral compass as well. I argue that abortion itself is a positive force in society.
If any of you have read the book Freakonomics, you would have encountered a particularly compelling set of data related to the significant reduction in crime rate after 1973, when there was a noticeable increase in availability of safe abortive procedures. Notwithstanding this, which is itself a compelling reason to allow those who suffer unwanted pregnancies to eliminate the problem, I find abortion to be downright life-affirming. That is to say, it allows those who have made bad decisions to recover and learn from them, rather than being saddled with a bundle that they (quite frankly) neither wanted nor will take adequate care of.
If one is ever going to have children, I think it is incredibly important to be prepared for them. Maybe it is because I am gay, but I find the idea of having children 'whenever they come along' to be somewhat faulty in the logic department, unless you are already prepared, emotionally and financially, to care for your new ward. The idea that forcing someone to have a child they neither want nor can adequately care for is PRO-life... That is beyond my ability to comprehend.
Illegal abortion only means unsafe abortion, not no abortion.
Like prostitution and drugs(both of which I think should also be legalized, but we'll get to that some point later on), the government will never be able to eliminate abortion, no matter how authoritarian and oppressive the method they choose. Some claim that abortions are always unsafe, but those people are liars. In fact, the vast majority (97%) of women who have the procedure go through it without any complications whatsoever.
This compared to the days of back-alley abortions, where it is believed more than a million procedures were performed every year without proper sterilization, tools, or even expertise. Before 1973, many thousands of women died due to infection brought about by either self-performed or inadequately performed abortions, and the number of abortion-related deaths has fallen from astronomical heights to nearly nothing now. I ask those who claim they are 'pro-life' how they can be alright with not only the 'baby' dying, but also the mother, because of bad legislative policy.
It's not your business anyway. Last I checked, a woman's body was her own to manage. If she has no job and lays on the street until she starves to death due to laziness, well... She has that right. If she chooses to drink drano instead of a daquiri - well, again, it is something that she has the right to do, if she is daft enough to choose it. However, the moment she is so careless as to allow some random chap to spill his seed into her nethers, her life and her body as no longer hers.
Indeed, despite the fact that the VAST (and I do mean vast) majority of fertilized eggs are not implanted into the walls of the womb and therefore are aborted by either nature or God himself, the very second that any such egg of the same character as these rejects finds itself latched appropriately to the innards of the would-be-mother, that spirit-less, life-less bundle of cells is supposed to take precedence over the woman herself. What kind of madness is this?
A woman's body is her body, period. If you don't want her to get an abortion, convince her not to. Don't try to remove it as an option through legislation. The societal need for abortion is so great that no matter how many ways you try to eliminate it, it will always return.
In short, abortion, like defecation, is quite unpleasant. But also like the latter, the former is quite necessary and inescabable as well.