The abortion debate doesn’t lend itself to logical arguments.
One the one hand, you have we liberals saying, “You know, it’s really hard to know when life actually begins, so it’s probably best to leave it up to the pregnant lady to choose what to do with her body and whatever is inside of it.”
On the other hand, you have Christian conservatives saying, “Once a sperm enter an egg, a soul gets pulled down from heaven, is inserted into that egg, and that four or five cells is now a human being with all the rights that that the title comes with. And in Arizona, you get might get a few rights before your egg is even fertilized, like maybe the right to bear arms if we can figure out a way to get a gun up in there.”
I respect the anti-choice point of view. If you believe life begins at conception, good for you. You have every right to make that argument, and I’m sure you are sending a lot of money to adoption charities and women’s health clinics so that poor, desperate women have options preferable to the one you equate with murder. Kudos to you!
What I don’t respect is the opinion pretzel some pro-lifers espouse when they don’t want to seem too pro-life, when they, for example, are running for some kind of public office and want to say a thing that sounds good to one group and not so bad to another group, even though it means nothing at all.
Mitt Romney’s official (current) position on abortion is this: Life begins at conception. Abortion should be illegal EXCEPT in the case of rape, incest and if the life of the mother is at risk.
Here is my problem. If life begins at conception, and all life is sacred, is a baby conceived in rape or incest therefore not alive? What is it about the five cells that were the result of a rape that make it not a person? And why are the five cells that are the result of a careless, yet consensual, drunken night deserving of the full protection of the federal government?
And if the fetus that is the result of rape is not person, when does it get personhood? At birth? That doesn’t make sense. According to the pro-live experts, you become a person when sperm hits egg, so if by Mitt’s logic, if you aren’t a person at conception, then you aren’t ever a person. Apparently, if you are the result of rape and/or incest the soul factory doesn’t issue you a soul.
So, about me, the details of my conception have always been clouded by mystery. My mother is nothing if not a spinner of clouds of mystery. I have no idea what went down and she isn’t saying. All I know is that the guy who donated my genes is not the guy who signed my birth certificate.
So maybe I was the result of a night of careless consensual sex, maybe alcohol was involved, maybe some pot was involved (it was the 60s!), and well, at what point does it become rape? When is it rape enough that I don’t get my soul from the Soul Distribution Center? Is there an appeal process?
Another thing bugs me about Mitt’s abortion position…On some days he says that life is sacred and abortion should be illegal. On other days, he says the abortion question should be up to the states. He says the Supreme Court should have decided in Roe V Wade that abortion laws are a state’s concern, not the federal government’s.
Say what?
So he’s saying that if a state wants to declare murder legal, its fine with him, even though life does begin at conception, and abortion is murder, except in the case of rape or incest, when it is not murder, and just fine with God, because God doesn’t give souls to rape babies.
Does that make any sense to anyone? Even to Mitt?
Here is what I believe…Mitt doesn’t give a shit about abortion. If he believed abortion was murder, it would always be murder, no exceptions. He doesn’t believe that bullshit. Mitt does believe, like all Republican politicians do, that the rich should be richer, the powerful should become more powerful, and everyone else can go fuck themselves.
If stating an illogical and absurd abortion position helps get him into the White House, he’s happy to do that and pretty much anything else.
But what do I know? I might not even have a soul.