This post isn’t for everybody, but if you read it, understand that one opinion is just that: one way of looking at something. Your way may be different in one or more (or all) ways, and that’s okay, too. I feel that discussion is vital on important issues, so some of these opinions are purely mine, and others come from an amalgam of information from various sources who may offer additional insight. Don’t vilify the messenger.
NASA never committed murder when they ended a mission because of factors which made continuing unsafe; the command center simply told the crew to abort the mission. The word abortion, in layman’s terms, means the stopping of a thing. Lately, however, we hear the three words “abortion is murder,” along with angry-faced protestors hoisting signs, and the world becomes a polarized entity, as with anything which can divide opinionated individuals (like politics, religion, and what toppings are best on pizza).
Since I am not one hundred percent on either side of the abortion issue (because I don’t fully like how it might be used, but realize it is a necessary thing in this world), I have been considering everything I have seen on either side of the Roe V. Wade issue. I realize that we cannot totally obliterate the availability of abortion. We cannot stop an effective and health restorative medical procedure from being performed. As long as the world is not one hundred percent pure and good and safe enough to allow us to overpopulate ourselves with abandon, we cannot stop abortion.
One of the biggest things which convince me that we are not ready to not make abortion available is the way the so-called “pro-life” front argues their case. They are not pro-life so much as they come off as “pro-birth.” They appear to be cheering for rapists and dehumanizing and isolating victims, with some states going so far as to make abortion unavailable for victims of rape or incest; I have to sit down and take deep breaths when I see a woman–a woman–standing in a group of protestors endorsing forcible sexual assault. But then, I can’t grasp the concept of female genital mutilation, and women in countries where it’s still practiced cheer that on, too. It’s sad to think that somebody could be so convinced that a man should be allowed to subjugate a woman so horribly, and that I could share the public streets with them, and they think me a monster because I think a victim should not suffer a pregnancy resulting from such abuse. But then, a judge granted a rapist visitation rights with the child resulting from his assault of a woman, so I guess now that rape is okay.
Sure I know that some people abuse the availability of abortion, using it as birth control instead of any of the myriad alternatives out there. However, I would rather know that somebody would not be born and be spared the horrors of adult inhumanity: I read about babies delivered only to be smothered or drowned and then dumped in toilets, left in trash cans or dumpsters or, in one infamous case, taken onto a crossroad and set afire. No anti-abortion people stood up and praised the fact that those babies were born.
The anti-choice (my preferred term, which goes with pro-choice) front does not contribute a cent to the born: infants in constant withdrawal pain from the drugs their pregnant mothers took suffer alone. Born babies starve daily, and who on the anti-choice front is feeding them? The objective of the anti-choice front is to get the babies born, not to move beyond that.
A woman going to Planned Parenthood receives knowledge and compassion, if she can get past the middle school playground styled bullying and rhetoric and harassment. Pro-choice don’t hoist signs showing babies who were born and grew up in households where their days were numbered and the their suffering atrocious. I remember reading about a toddler who was killed by his mother, who then tried to cook away the evidence by placing the dismembered body in a pot. Tireless articles pass my eyes, in which children were starved, abused and beaten, neglected and deprived. For years. Sure, they live to be tweens or teens sometimes, but so many are aged three or under, it breaks my heart. “Not my problem” is still part of our national fabric.
You don’t see any anti-choice people cheering because those victims were born. It’s because we still stand on the sidelines of human suffering that it seems logical that we should try not to add to the problem. If somebody cannot be a good parent, either don’t give birth, or make adoption work better, or let’s figure out how to make rape bad again, and come up with sufficient punishment to fit the crime. I won’t elaborate on that.
Sometimes we see the “sanctity of human life” as meaning that everybody needs to live. It’s the same mindset that keeps the elderly in pain-wracked stasis while waiting for what some of them hope will be their last breath. Human life is not pure and good and safe, and limiting options will not make it so. Standing by doesn’t make life better, either.
And before anybody starts countering my words herein with arguments that there is a heartbeat and brain formation and the ability to smile in utero, remember that a flower is inside the seed, but at that point it isn’t a flower yet. And I don’t think that God is waving His mighty hand and picking and choosing who has babies and who does not: that responsibility, with the added burden of the foibles of the human body, He left to us with our free will. When my time comes to account for what I have said, I will accept what He tells me was right or wrong, not the words of an overly passionate sign-waving protester in front of a women’s health clinic.
States are starting to enact tougher abortion laws. Remembering how life was before, I worry about our future becoming our past again: the bad part of the past.
Let’s not be so rash that our absolutes start destroying what we are trying to build. The middle ground is what we need, and we’ve had it for decades: don’t lose it now.
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