Abortion--a two-edged political sword

Whether you're for or against it, you need to realize what abortion means as an issue.

First, it has little or nothing to do with saving lives, however you define "life." Advances in medicine mean that abortion is now safe and easy--at least as easy as the average trip to the dentist. Which means that even if if were banned, most people--apart from the poorest and most ignorant--would still be able to get safe abortions (often chemically).

That is, it's like alcohol consumption and Prohibition. Unless America became a true Police State--beyond even what Iran is today--banning abortion 

Second, the importance of the abortion issue to the Republican Party's biggest donors also has little or nothing to do with saving lives, however you define "life." For them the importance is that it's a highly charged issue that can help elect people who will then help them get more money, while abortion-hampering legislation is "profit-neutral."

That's a two-edged sword, though, as the GOP's paymasters discovered when it cost them control of the Senate in the last election, through anti-abortion fanatics winning primaries who could not win a statewide election.

More strategically, anti-abortion fanaticism is part and parcel of a range of the GOP losing its more educated members even as it cements its bond with its base (thanks to Nixon's Southern Strategy) of undereducated rural Southern white men and their wives. Former moderate Republicans are now indepenedents, whose vote is far from guaranteed.

Now the GOP's paymasters have gotten alarmed. They set a fire and are now having trouble controlling it. Especially since many who voted in Republican legislators in 2010 in hopes of getting more jobs and less taxes wound up getting mostly anti-abortion legislation.

And even many who would like to see fewer abortions happening are also alarmed by the extreme language of the Christian Taliban that you can see in abundance in newspaper comment threads about abortion.

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

 

The real pro-abortion argument has nothing to do with women's rights

The Washington Post has an atheist columnist in its "On Faith" section, named Susan Jacoby. Her last column, "The Reproductive Right," dealt with abortion, producing a long comment thread full of religious anti-abortion activists. Here's my comment, which didn't appear in the thread. I guess Jacoby or one of her minions found it inappropriate? offensive? I've re-read it and can't for the life of me figure out what could have gotten it rejected.

In particular I was responding to a comment by an anti-abortionist named Eric12345 who'd claimed that it was right and proper to call fetuses "unborn babies" and in general to use the language of his side's propaganda in any debate. So here, exclusively (though not by my intent), it is:

It does not depend on what you choose to call things, but on whether your choice of terms is true or false. I can choose to call you an ox, but saying so doesn’t make it so.

And in this case it is false to define all zygotes embryos and fetuses as people/human being/unborn babies or anything of the sort.

First, many fertilized eggs aren’t viable. What we misname “miscarriage” is the spontaneous abortion of non-viable fetuses in most cases.

Second, many nominally viable fetuses have no chance of surviving the fetal environment, due to a toxic biochemical mismatch between mother and fetus.

Third, many viable fetuses in viable natal environments have no chance of being born alive in a state of nature because of birthing issues. That means you could define such a fetus in a rich country as an “unborn baby” because medical intervention could save the baby’s life, while you couldn’t define it as an “unborn baby” in a poor country where such a fetus could not become a “born baby.”

Fourth, many viable fetuses in viable natal environment with a viable birthing process still have no chance of becoming a human baby because of genetic defects such as anencephaly—i.e. no brain above the brain stem. Many more have severe defects that give them no chance of surviving birth or more than a few hours or days beyond birth unless they’re fortunate enough to be born in a rich country. Again this would logically force you to vary your definition of that fetus based on the wealth of the country.

Fifth, even a zygote with a positive situation regarding all of these caveats may not be an “unborn baby” because monozygotic twins and chimeras don’t form at the moment of conception. So the trope “life begins at conception” isn’t true if that means a human life. And if it doesn’t it’s meaningless. After all, my gall bladder is alive, but you aren’t going to picket hospitals that perform gall bladder removal operations.

So calling every zygote/fetus an “unborn baby” or even a “potential human life” is not true.

That’s the problem, even beyond the fact that you can’t have a debate about anything unless both parties agree to use neutral terms for the debate. Otherwise it’s just a propaganda campaign

But there’s an underlying issue rarely raised by those who call themselves “pro-life” and “pro-choice:” overpopulation.

Currently the human race’s numbers are expanding at the rate of over 140 people a MINUTE. Even America—far from a third world country—has seen its population double in the last 60 years.

And we’re running out of potable water. It doesn’t look like it, but 60% of America’s water comes from ground water, and we’re overpumping it nationwide—as are most of the world’s other nations, including China. Overpumped porous aquifers collapse—permanently—so they cease to function as reservoirs. So not only are we running out of water, we’re reducing even the existing water supply.

At the same time the 6.8 billion humans on Earth today are causing the largest species die-off since the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, and even with these desperate efforts, one billion of those people are starving, by UN estimates.

You might not care about the unborn unless they’re human unborn, but we’re talking about ecocide. And people kind of depend on this planet to stay alive.

Consequently, in the larger perspective, those who call themselves “pro-life” are really pro-death, unintentionally.

Our procreative instincts were honed over the 100,000 years during which the human race numbered in the thousands, then the millions. Now we must go against our instincts if we want to survive. Instinctively I want every fetus to become a baby, and every baby to become a happy, healthy adult. But my instincts don’t match current circumstances. Neither do yours.

One last political note: right now, in Mexico’s state of Quintana Roo, a ten year old girl who’d been raped by her stepfather is being forced to carry the fetus to term, due to the control over the law exerted by the Catholic Church. This is routine in countries dominated by that bastion of “pro-life” belief. So please make sure to tell Americans that this is part of your agenda for this country. Otherwise aren’t your beliefs inconsistent?

Abortion, once more, the GOP's lifeline in stormy seas

The Washington Post's columnist Gershon (ex-Bush White House staffer) wrote an editorial today slamming anyone supporting Obama who opposes abortion. I entered this comment:

Don't let radical ideologues like Gerson get away with calling their position "pro-life."
If you don't agree with this position and let him call it "pro-life," then he's succeeded in labeling you as "pro-death." He doesn't have to say it in so many words. It just hangs in the air. Whenever you let someone frame the debate this way, you've lost before you began. You have to challenge the propagandists' assumptions and don't let them get into their talking points, which this essay provides in a textbook case of building a McMansion on a foundation of quicksand.

You have to ask "Hey there. Why are you calling me pro-death." He'll say "I didn't." You say "Oh yes you did. Unless you accept that I'm pro-life too. And of course I am. I'm pro-actually-alive people. Calling a dependent organism "alive" is just as true as calling your gall bladder alive. And just like a blastoplast, it has organic functions but can't live on its own.

"Moreover, you're being deceitful. When you say a fertilized ovum is "alive" in some way different from how a gall bladder is "alive," you mean to say that the fertilized ovum is a potential human being. This if false. Some are indeed potential human beings. But others are not, because they're so genetically defective that they can't even come to term. What lay people call "miscarriage" is usually the body spontaneously aborting a non-viable fetus. A non-viable fetus is not a potential human being.

Absent modern medical technology you can't know whether a fetilized ovum is a "potential human being" until it's born. Before then you're guessing, and in many, many cases you're guessing wrong.

"What you're really trying to get your listeners to think without you having to say it is that you believe that God sticks a soul in an egg at the exact instant that a sperm cell penetrates the egg's cell wall.

Only that's nonsense. First, it's based on a 19th century Catholic Pope's interpretation of early 19th century scientific understanding. It's not based on the Bible, which says exactly nothing about abortion, and only implies that fetuses have souls in a few isolated passages, and those only apply to fetuses that are well along in development--enough for the mother to feel the child moving inside her--the so-called "quickening."

21st century science proves that the Catholic Church's position is impossible even if you do believe in God, souls, the Bible etc. Because neither identical twins nor Chimeras occur at the moment of conception, nor, as far as we know, are their existences mandated by the condition of the fertilized egg, either entirely or in part. Sometimes an egg will divide into two organisms that later become identical twins. If the Pope and Gerson are correct, then identical twins either have half a soul each or one of them has no soul at all. Chimeras form even later, when two fertilized eggs merge and become a single fetus with a mosaic of DNA / organs from the two donor blastoplasts. Does someone who's a Chimera then have two souls? And what about ectopic pregnancies? Would a loving God park a soul in an ovum that not only has zero chance of coming to term but will--absent medical intervention--probably kill the mother in the process? Or anencephalic fetuses that a mother can bring to term but when born are unable to even breathe on their own and never will?

It was an amazingly effective piece of propaganda that the Catholic Church managed to convince Protestant fundamentalists that we get a soul at the instant of conception. And it's amazingly that fundies buy this when they say they strictly adhere to the words in the Bible, when this believe is patently non-Biblical.

So: don't let them call themselves pro-life, and don't let them call fetuses "unborn people" or anything like that.

And make them come out in the open about the basis of their beliefs: Catholic dogma based on obsolete and incomplete understanding of the morphology of reproduction.

Lastly, you can point out that Gershon and his ilk are direct hypocrites for not opposing the in vitro fertilization, which produces many thousands of destroyed embryos every year. Be sure to add that his stance, if applied logically, calls the parents holding their in vitro babies in their arms...baby killers. And if he doesn't, he's applying his own "logic" selectively. Which means it's partisan propaganda pure and simple, and nothing resembling the advocacy of life per se.