The Seven Stupid States

This is an expansion on a post I made years ago, so let me repeat that one first:

ON ABORTION

by Leslie Fish

One of the not-so-minor points in the recent presidential race was the abortion question.  Obama stated that he believed in a woman's right to abortion.  McCain and Palin announced that they didn’t personally believe in abortion but, if elected, they would not make a federal case of it but would leave the legality of abortion to the individual states.  Still, the word went out: “If McCain gets elected, you can kiss Roe vs. Wade goodbye.”  That helped tip the balance toward Obama.  It’s pretty obvious that, no matter what the Family Values crowd may think, a vast number of Americans – particularly women –  want to keep abortion legal.  Those who don’t had best consider the following facts.

First, abortion can take place only during the first trimester of pregnancy.  After that it becomes dangerous to the mother, and no doctor will do it for anything less than a direct threat to the mother’s life.  Now, during the first trimester of pregnancy the object in a woman’s uterus is certainly not a “baby”;  it won’t become that until the last trimester.  It isn’t even properly called a “fetus”;  it won’t be that until the second trimester.  The proper scientific name for it is “embryo” – as in “embryonic” – and it is absolutely not a human being.  It does not have a human heart or a human spine or human lungs, and it certainly does not have a human brain.  For the religious-minded, consider that without a brain you cannot grow a mind, and without a mind, how can there be a soul?

Yes, an embryo is made of human tissue, but then, so are your toenails. Yes, it’s technically alive, but then, so is a virus.  Yes, it will eventually develop to become a human being, but then, given enough time, so will whole species of monkeys;  the only difference is time – six months versus six million years.  The physical condition of an embryo is somewhere between that of a primitive worm and a salamander.  Its life is certainly not worth the life, or health, or freedom, of a real human being – such as a woman – not unless you’re going to claim that women are not really human beings.

Now, on the question of the “value of life”…  Ask: whose life?

No man has ever died in childbirth, but countless hundreds of millions of women have.  Childbirth is not safe.  It has not been safe since human beings began walking upright, and growing big brains and big skulls to hold them.  Even in America today with all our boasted medical science, according to the medical actuarial tables, for women between the ages of 15 and 50, of the 12 most common causes of death, childbirth is not the last.  Any woman who becomes pregnant is placing her life at risk.  No one should be forced to place their life at risk without their consent.  No one should be forced to risk their life for someone else’s beliefs.  No man has the right to order a woman to risk her life for what he wants.

In any country that calls itself free, to risk your life or not must always be the individual’s choice.  Therefore, to abort or not must always be the individual woman’s choice – and nobody else’s.  Anything less is tyranny.

                                                                      *****

As you can tell from the names of the contestants, this was originally written a few elections ago.  Since then, the political divisions -- and stupidities -- have grown worse.   Trump won the 2016 presidential election, driving the Democrats into a continuing fit of hysteria which has led them to become blatant Socialists.  The Democrats then won enough seats in the 2018 congressional election to start openly pushing their Socialist agenda, which scared the Republicans at the state level to start passing some ridiculously Reactionary laws.  Among these were the various laws in the Seven Stupid States which restrict access to safe legal abortions down to almost nothing.

Now whatever your attitude toward abortion itself, a bit of reflection will show that these laws -- and the politicians who voted them in -- are just plain stupid.  For one thing, they make those states (I'll name no names) look like hotbeds of religious fanaticism and misogyny.  Any business with female managers or corporate officers will avoid building or investing there, which will do those states' economies no great good.  Neither will the lawsuits already in the works, launched not only by women's-rights groups but by medical organizations which rather resent politicians practicing medicine.

For another thing, these laws will do nothing to cut down on the actual numbers of abortions.  There are still the other 43 states where abortion is legal, often right next door to the Seven Stupids, where determined women can go to get the operation done -- often cheaper than they could have at home, even counting the cost of travel and an overnight motel stay.  Where that cost becomes burdensome, the burden will fall -- as it did back in the days when abortion was illegal all over the US -- on the poor, the people most in need of baby-making restriction.  Women too poor to get out-of-state abortions will certainly wind up on welfare, if they aren't there already, and so will their unwanted children.  States that won't pay for poor women's abortions today will find themselves paying for the support of those children for the next several years.

the only advantage gained by those laws is to make the politicians who voted for them feel wonderfully self-righteous.  The taxpayers who will have to live with the effects of those laws are not likely to be grateful, and they are likely to make their opinions known at election time.

Moral grandstanding doesn't really pay well, and it's ultimately stupid.

--Leslie <;)))><