Criminalizing abortion works about as well as Prohibition did.

The anti-abortion movement--you know, the people who flatter themselves by calling their movement "pro-life"--really comes out of the woodwork with cases like Dr. Gosnell's.

This is a strange bunch. First, although they showcase the clinics they set up to compete with Planned Parenthood, their overwhelming focus is on criminalizing abortion.

But only where it's convenient, and with little actual effect. The number of abortions didn't change significantly after Roe V. Wade legalized abortion within limits, nor did they get safer for the most part, because an abortion is, medically, a minor procedure with low risk for the pregnant female. It doesn't require surgery or taking potentially dangerous drugs whether it's done legally or otherwise. It's only dangerous when people resort to folk remedies.

By "only where it's convenient" I mean that even with Dr. Gosnell, he was just the hired hand. The girls and women who came to him hired him to abort their fetuses. If that's murder, then the pregnant females are guilty of capital murder, and Dr. Gosnell was just their assistant.

Yet if you look down comment threads on articles about Dr. Gosness you don't see a single anti-abortion activist calling for these females to prosecuted for premeditated murder. Nor do any call for banning in vitro fertilization and prosecuting those women--desperate to become pregnant--again for capital murder, since in vitro fertilization involves fertilizing many eggs but then destroying most of them.

This isn't just hypocritical--it's grossly sexist. Those women. They're just mushy-brained females who only do what big strong men tell them to do.

It's as if we've been teleported to a fundamentalist Muslim village in rural Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

What we see here is most anti-abortion activists being tightly focused on getting revenge on the men that women hire to do abortions instead of doing things that would actually reduce abortions, starting with proper sex ed & providing contraceptives to one & all....See More

 

Dr. Gosnell the baby killer vs. the Pro Lifers

What we see in "Pro-life" comments about articles about Dr. Gosnell is the luxury of moral posturing without regard to real world consequence.

It's so inconvenient to see how often idealistic policy turns into horrors as it plays out.

Consider China vs. India. China implemented its One Child policy--including forced abortion for miscreants--in 1979. India tried something of the sort but, being a democracy, was forced to give in to the opposition of people like the anti-abortion crusaders you see on this thread.

Today the consequences--and contrasts--are stark. Individual Chinese hate having to obey the policy. Selective abortion of female fetuses has produced millions of excess males. But nobody's starving.

India now has hundreds of millions more people than China. In "pro-life" India, 7,000 Indians die of starvation every day, including more than 5,000 babies below the age of one--babies who never knew a moment of living without suffering. In a land where mothers saw their children's legs off to make them better beggars. Or simply abandon them, as the heartbreaking film "Salaam Bombay" shows.

In the real world Dr.Gosnell was a piker compared to India's "Pro-Lifers."

Abortion provider Dr. Gosnell is the anti-abortionistas' red herring

Americans are split on abortion overall but not on the extreme positions: about a quarter of Americans believe, like me, that abortion should be legal in all cases--but only one out of ten Americans believe it should always be illegal.

And that tenth are anything but true to their beliefs. If they were, they'd be clamoring for prosecuting women who get abortions for first degree murder--after all, the abortion providers are just people hired by the women. If a woman hires a hit man to kill her husband, I guarantee you the women will be prosecuted.

And the anti-abortion crowd should be clamoring for having fertility clinics closed and the parents desperately trying to have children prosecuted for first degree murder as well, since nearly all of them choose to have the embryos they don't use "discarded."

This doesn't mean the anti-abortion crowd are hypocrites. They might just be the sort of people who don't think about what they're doing before they do it. Shallow people swayed by sonograms.
Like the Republican congress that tried to "save" Terri Schiavo because they were certain she was alive because of their interpretations of her movements--then it turned out she had no brain left. Ooops.

Likewise these people are certain about the nature of human embryos with no scientific basis at all. Not to mention no biblical basis for their nutty ideas.

Lastly, anti-abortionism totally ignores the fact that humanity is in the throes of an overpopulation crisis. Earth's total population is increasing at the rate of over 140 people per minute. Already a billion humans are starving at any given time. The anti-abortion crowd acts as it the Earth in general and America in particular have infinite resources, or that Science will fix everything.

They still haven't figured out how immoral their "morality" really is here on Lifeboat Earth. In the long run, they're actually "pro-death."

Abortion and Christianity

What's moral in an abundant, empty land overflowing with trees and streams and plains is different from what's moral in a lifeboat.

Christianity enshrines the human race's instinctive urges to "be fruitful and multiply." Those urges made sense until the abundant land that Earth once was turned into a lifeboat with no rescue in sight and more people on the boat than supplies to sustain them.

Today it would take at least two planet Earths to sustain even the people we now have in the circumstances they now live in, yet we only have 1.0 Earths, and humanity's numbers are currently swelling at the rate of 140 more people total every single minute. 

For example, within this century the world's coral reefs will be extinct, along with the rich ecosystem that depends on them, thus denying the main protein source for many millions of people who live in the tropics. This is because the oceans are becoming acidic, due to all the C02 humans are producing. With the coral reefs all the oceans' shellfish will also go extinct from the same cauise, denying us another important food source. And there's almost certainly nothing we can do to reverse this process at this point. 

Already many millions of people don't have access to potable water. They drink filthy water and get terrible diseases as a consequence. China is running out of water, pumping its wells dry, and so it will dam the Mekong River that today sustains Vietnam. This will turn much of Vietnam into something close to a desert. Futurists predict that the next major wars will be over water, since so many rivers flow from one country into another. We already did that to Mexico when we dammed the Colorado and destroyed Mexican agriculture in the Colorado delta. 

The price of staple foods is soaring all around the world. Anyone who shops for their family has noticed it, but we can absorb the price jumps. In the third world many can't, and consequently more and more people are moving into the "food-insecure" category.

The world had a billion people in 1804. It has 7 billion now, and that is double what it was just a few decades ago. 

The agricultural production revolution of the 1970s moved the cliff farther away, but humanity didn't use the respite to mend its ways. Now the cliff is getting nearer and nearer, and there won't be another tech revolution to save us this time, wishful thinking notwithstanding.

So talk about abortion must take place in the lifeboat, not in the Eden, and what was moral and even desirable in Eden is a very different matter in the lifeboat.

Christianity thus far has totally refused to face this. Understandably. Because it entails agonizing choices that go directly against instincts honed over millions of years. But it is intellectual and spiritual cowardice not to face things as they are.

Christianity thus far is acting like someone who's been told they have cancer. You know the drill: denial, rage, bargaining, grieving, acceptance. 

Christianity is still at "denial." (along with every other major religion of course)

Defend Life!

On every anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, anti-abortion zealots demonstrate in front of the Supreme Court. Many carry signs like the ones shown here, printed up by the Catholic Church's militant social engineering organization the Knights of Columbus.

I doubt anyone who carries such placards is aware of the irony of what they're doing. Especially since nearly all of them would call themselves conservatives.

Conserve-ative. Someone who's centered on conserving.

All this is a tribute to the fact that some of our noblest instincts, instincts that evolved on a planet radically different from the one we live on today, are now instincts that betray us.

And it's a tribute to the fact that most people's reasoning abilities aren't much better than that of an adult crow.

If you hang a treat from a branch on a string, most adult crows can figure out what to do to get the treat without having to experiment. They look at the setup, fly up to the branch, and pull the string up with their claws and beak, and soon have the treat. 

But if you toss the string over a higher branch, so the crow would have to pull down on the string to bring the treat up towards them, they can't handle that kind of two-step logic.

Likewise, these people who want to "defend life" see sonograms of a fetus that certainly looks like a human being, and they want to save it.

But tell them that the human race is expanding at the rate of over 140 people a minute (after deaths are subtracted), on a planet that isn't expanding, and whose ability to sustain us is actually shrinking, so that only by supporting Communist China's One Child policy and promoting its adoption worldwide can we even start to stave off world disaster...you can see their eyes glaze over.

You might as well show a spreadsheet to a chimpanzee and expect them to understand it.

We developed the instincts the "defend life" people express when the human race had shrunk to around 1,600 fertile females plus probably an equivalent number of males, after a Sumatran volcano explosion 80,000 years ago had pumped so much guck into the atmosphere that photosynthesis nearly stopped for several years and the world's animal life was starving to death.

Back then we needed a fierce will to survive and have kids and protect them against all odds.

Today's situation demands that we deny these powerful instincts.

But most people don't even try. They deny that there's an overpopulation problem, or that it applies to us, or that if there is magical new technology will solve it, or if it won't, God will reach down and solve it, and if He won't it doesn't matter because Earth doesn't matter--only Heaven. And God told us to stop abortion--it's right there in the Bible!

Actually the Bible only confers any rights at all on children when they're a month old--thus OK'ing not just abortion but infanticide. But that's in the Old Testament. In the New Testament...nothing about abortion. Just stuff about being nice to people, which anti-abortionistas assume includes fetuses, which no one in biblical times would have imagined. It's applying contemporary ideas to biblical terms.

Elaborate justification of anti-abortionism abound, of course. You can read one here. And you can read a detailed debunking of such stuff here. Starting with the easily verifiable fact that the word "abortion" appears nowhere in the Bible.

This isn't a problem for Catholics, because they don't use the Bible as their final word on God's instructions for us. They use the Pope's official pronouncements, which routinely override what's in the Bible. What's remarkable is how they persuaded Christian fundamentalists to accept the Pope's pronouncements.

Bottom line: when I see people like the two nice young ladies in the photo holding their Knights of Columbus "Defend Life" signs, I see a pair of very nice crows unintentionally--but effectively--promoting the destruction of the only place in the entire Universe that's available to the human race for life (along with the animals and plants we share this planet with). 

Rejoinder to "pro life" pitch

I wrote this as a letter to the editor (250 word limit) in a local newspaper, in response to a letter by a Catholic couple assailing Planned Parenthood, making all the usual assertions and mistruths about abortion. In this response I chose to sidestep their talking points by making some of my own that I believe trump all of that. The headline also conforms to this local newspaper's length limits (it fits on one line of a typical newspaper column):

Overpopulation reality

Dear Editor: Anti-abortionistas like to flatter themselves with the catchphrase “pro-life” It does describe their good intentions—the kind the road to Hell is paved with.

Their validity depends on overpopulation denialism. Acknowledging the overpopulation crisis would nullify their narrow fixation on abortion. The typical’ rejoinder is that not everyone in every country is having too many children. They’re grasping at straws. Russia’s declining overpopulation doesn’t change the fact that our species would need 1.4 Earths to support its current population at everyone’s current standard of living, including the billion that are starving. And even today’s humongous population isn’t stable—it’s increasing by over 140 people a minute.

Unless anti-abortion zealots can figure out a way for us all not to have to share this one planet, or to add another half-Earth to this one, the pockets of population decline won’t prevent inexorable catastrophe—the collapse of fertilizer/antibiotic-intensive industrial farming/ranching, of trawling-based high tech fishing, potable water resources, and rapid extinction of tropical rainforests (that produce 70% of the oxygen we breathe).

And America isn’t one of those pockets of decline. Our population has quadrupled since 1900—about the same rate as the human race as a whole. Worse yet, the Bay Area has 11 times more people than in 1900, doubling just since 1962. (Yet New Urbanists believe we need more.)

The anti-abortionistas’ philosophy of endless growth is the philosophy of cancer. Slowly but surely it’s dooming us.