f-ing rant

abortion

Rather than fighting to make abortions illegal, anti-choicers would make a lot more sense to the rest of us if they instead focused their efforts on convincing women why it is not always expedient to have an abortion. Abortion should always exist as a legal option for women, outlawing it is just plain crazy and nonsensical for way too many reasons.

First of all, I don’t get these anti-choicers. Let’s say I had a wife, and she wanted to have an abortion, and some man named Dugan walked up and told me that my wife shouldn’t abort her baby. While I considered which fist to punch Dugan in the face with – the right or the left? – I would ask him if he was willing to adopt my wife’s baby when it was born. Whether Dugan would say yes and actually mean it is hard to know. But one thing I am certain of is that there would be a pause before his answer. A momentary gap of time in which all the possible implications of adopting a stranger’s baby would flash through his fat ugly head. Even if this pause only lasted a couple of seconds it would probably feel to Dugan (and me) like an eternity. There would be his health to consider (at 53 could he really endure all those sleepless nights and diaper changes?) as well as his financial status and marital happiness (would Dugan’s wife put up with a new infant just as their youngest child was about to go away to college). I’m guessing Dugan would play it safe in the end and offer to set me up with an adoption agency he claims to know well. I would then ask him, “So, you are telling my wife not to have an abortion yet you aren’t willing to personally adopt her baby?” At this he would probably stutter before finally saying, “Well, yes.” This is when I would curtly tell him to piss off, and I can practically see him walking away looking all red and embarrassed with his tail between his legs.

But I don’t get these people, all these Dugans who take the moral high ground that aren’t any different or better than the rest of us. Why Dugan is convinced that he knows what is right more than anybody else enough so that he should have the right and the power to change the laws is beyond me. If Dugan and all the other anit-choicers were smart, they would limit their discussions about abortion to a series of pointed pleas. They would aim their messages at liberal minded women in an effort to make them consider the life growing inside of their stomachs and what aborting it could potentially mean. They would aim their messages at all teens and young girls as well. It would be like the anti-smoking campaign: a bunch of propaganda designed to get people to think and act one particular way that was considered by some to be the best way to think and act.

Many people think smoking is a public nuisance not to mention a public health hazard. Some want to continually strip smokers of their rights and eventually tax the vice out of existence. To them it should be a luxury that only people who can afford lab-cloned lungs should indulge in. But outlawing tobacco is not an option. How could tobacco possibly be outlawed, and if it was who would be crazy enough to enforce such a stupid law? And what should the punishment be for someone who smuggles illegally grown stuff or smokes in their bedroom at night?

See—it is just plain stupidity to try to even imagine outlawing cigarettes. Smoking is almost inseparable from all of our collective realities.

Similarly, abortion is a practical procedure. Almost any doctor will tell you that there is always a case to be made for the expedient abortion. Sometimes middle-aged women get pregnant long after they think they can’t. Teens are molested and raped. Fetuses are deformed or macrocephalic. Becoming pregnant could be detrimental to a woman’s career. Etc.

I am sure there are some middle-aged and elderly people who remember the pre-Roe vs. Wade days, but their cause seems more like an anachronism than anything these days. Why anybody would want to go back to the draconian system that existed before 1973 is beyond me.

coat hanger

The graying women who beat the anti-abortion drums are like reverse feminists if you ask me. But I am also confused as to why these people are still taken seriously in 2009. Old men and barren women have no business telling females with working ovaries what they can and cannot do with their bodies. They should be out of this whole thing—period.

But why the anti-choicers don’t get it is nagging me. Why they would rather hope to outlaw abortions instead of reduce the number of abortions is beyond my comprehension. But I guess I am expecting too much from the republicans if I think they are aware how impractical and foolish they sound to us pragmatic people. When my late grandmother was asked if she was a democrat or a republican she replied, “I’m a democrat, I’m too smart to be a republican.”

I guess this makes sense. Hypocrisy is often accidental. It is the one betraying mark of the foolish person. One-third of all women will have at least one abortion during their lifetime. Some people would like to believe that out of all of these millions of women there will be absolutely zero republicans having abortions. But if you sit in any evangelical church, attend any republican political convention or chug beer with chicks at any redneck bar in America you will be looking at females who have utilized the legal procedure of abortion because, to them, it was expedient.

Look in their eyes. Sometimes the loudest preachers are the biggest liars.