This is a rant about abortions. If the mere mention of the word abortion brings up mental images of dismembered babies in trash cans, you should probably leave before I mention the word abortion again. Oops.
So, on with the rant. I am pro-choice. Always have been and probably always will be. Now, before any of you jump on my back and berate me for being a baby-killing godless liberal or something along those lines, let me make it clear that I do not love abortion. I see it as a last-ditch option for people who really need it, such as rape victims or people who used every form of birth control known to man and still managed to have a baby. I don’t see it as a form of birth control. If you can’t figure out how to put on a condom or take a pill, you probably shouldn’t be having sex anyways. I am pro-choice because I want people to have the option of having an abortion. I’m big on rights and freedoms. Banning abortions is denying people the right to have one, and I can’t abide by that. Besides, outlawing abortion will just lead to a rise in illegal (and thus unsafe because well-trained, upstanding doctors wouldn’t perform banned operations) abortions in back alleys and seedy clinics. If someone really wants (or needs) an abortion, they will get one regardless of what the law says. The amount of illegal drug use in this country should be enough to prove that point, however unfortunate that may be. And what reasons are there for banning abortion? Personal? Moral? Personal and moral beliefs have no place in legislation. They’re there, of course, but they shouldn’t be. Laws should be made on what’s truly good for the people, not what the lawmakers believe to be good.
But are there reasons for opposing abortion other than the obvious moral ones? I can’t think of any. A few days ago, someone told me that there were non-moral reasons, but they neglected to tell me what they were. Typical. They just didn’t expect me to call them on their unfounded argument. Anyways, they could have meant economic reasons. But that falls apart rather quickly as well. It costs less to abort a fetus than to raise a child through 18 years. A first-trimester abortion? Several hundred dollars. Raising a kid from birth to college? A quarter of a million dollars. Ouch. Abortions aren’t going to significantly reduce the workforce, either. Indeed, the number of abortions is growing rapidly and has since the early nineties. But the birthrate has also increased. Since not every person who gets pregnant has an abortion, it’s reasonable to conclude that a fair amount of babies will be born in any given year. And since the majority of these children will grow up healthy and wind up working in some career (be it white- or blue-collar), the workforce will always have a hefty influx of 18-year-olds who were thrown out on their own with a warning to get a job and enough cash to buy a Vespa. So there’s no good economic reason for banning abortions.
Heck, I can’t even think of any other possibilities. Economic was the only one I came up with, and I couldn’t even figure out a good argument for that. So it appears that the only reasons there exist people who label themselves pro-life are moral ones. The main one is that abortion is murder. Fair enough. A fetus is a living being, so aborting it is killing it. But is this wrong, I ask you? Most people don’t find anything wrong with eating a chicken. Few find anything morally reprehensible about exterminating mice. And almost no one objects to stomping on a cockroach when it scurries out from under the washing machine. Chickens, mice, and cockroaches are all living beings. Yet most pro-lifers hold to a double-standard. They might picket an abortion clinic while wearing a leather belt, go home to turkey dinner and yell at a few pro-choicers out the window, and call the Orkin man while carrying the baby they conceived after being raped by their ex-boyfriend. And I bet half of them are in favor of the “war” in Iraq. Double standard.
But, of course, there is a difference, as most of these people would tell you. Fetuses are somehow…”better” than other animals. How so? Because fetuses allegedly have souls. They are human, as if that makes any difference. Humans are animals, and that’s all I’ll say on the subject because I don’t want to drag myself off on a tangent in the middle of my argument. Indeed, fetuses are human. They have human DNA. They exhibit human behavior and have human-like features (in the first and second trimesters, that is; by the third trimester, they’ve become miniature humans in appearance). But does this really make a difference? Again, that’s a moral decision. If you’re like me, you callously say that at this stage, life can easily be created again. It doesn’t matter terribly much. I don’t pride myself on saying that, but it’s how I justify abortions. Either that or I forgo the issue altogether and justify it based on rights. On the other hand, you might hold life very dear, in which case I hope you don’t eat animals and are dead-set against war and the death penalty. Whatever the case, your own reasons probably sound the most right to you, so I don’t even know why I’m bothering to write about it. I had a point, but I lost it amidst my jumbled thoughts. I might come back to it if I find it.
It’s clear the moral issue surrounding abortion will never come to a sufficient compromise. But it’s equally clear that denying people the right to have an abortion is the absolute wrong course of action. There is no single moral standard on which to base laws. And there are plenty of sound reasons to leave the option available to those who need it. I suppose it would be best to leave this up to the individual states, but I fear that many states will go the way of South Dakota and ban abortion outright. Then again, I don’t trust our current federal government with the decision, either. Our dear president has a habit of forcing his morals on the American people, whether it’s for our good or not. It’s a good thing he’s only got two more years, or I’d be afraid for the fate of democracy in this country. Can anyone say “the United Kingdom of America”?
Anyways, I don’t want to start ranting about Bush and his ill-conceived Patriot Act and NCLB (not to mention this “war” on terrorism and our illegal occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq), so I’ll stop now and go to bed. Or something. Maybe I’ll check under my bed for FBI agents…