CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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No One Said Abortion Was Easy

Friday, December 15, 2006

this entry brought to you by smashing pumpkins, "zero"


Pro-lifers go about making their argument as if people that support pro-choice are gleefully murdering people left and right and laughing all the way home about it. They hand you pamphlets with cute babies with wild, curious eyes that say some enormous amount of human babies are "slaughtered" every year, as if somewhere there was a prison of babies, and they were all taken, lined up against a wall, and shot at by firing squad while some cackling liberal Nazi wiped his brow with the flesh of a baby butt.

Of course, pro-choicers know it's not that easy, while pro-lifers never seem to see the opposition's side, as the recent law in South Dakota that eliminates all abortions where the birth would not be deadly to the mother, even in the case of rape and incest, demonstrates. I don't think there's a single pro-choicer that doesn't also see the view of a pro-lifer. The key points of both sides of the argument are exactly when life begins, and whether it begins when sperm meets egg, or whether it begins at the point of birth; it's not as if pro-choicers are saying the decision is easy. Nobody is arguing that human life isn't precious, and I think that everybody, no matter how feminist or pro-choice, would argue that in a perfect world there would still be abortions. Most pro-choicers know that despite any ridiculous argument of people using it as birth control (the number of people which in reality is such a vanishingly small number it becomes a moot point), for most people, going through an abortion is one of the hardest choices a woman can make-- certainly harder than any choice a man would have to make-- and abortions often leave women emotionally as well as physically a wreck. The idea of a woman doing such a thing without any sort of emotional ramification is a myth. But this is why the term is pro-choice, as opposed to pro baby murder.

When I was a teenager I considered myself pro-choice, but this decision had more to do with my feeling that I didn't have any right to tell a woman what she could or could not do with her body. But as I got older and started to pay attention to politics, certain patterns started to come up. A woman saying, "I could never personally abort my own child," is one thing, and I completely and utterly respect that. But in terms of political motivation, pro-life is distinctly a Republican "family values" stance. And Republicans tend to also be very unsupportive of welfare and government funded childcare ("We think God helps those who help themselves," one Republican I knew told me). They tend to object to gun control. They also tend to support military force just about any time it comes up.

When you put all these pieces together you realize that they go on and on and on about right to live, then once the child is born, want them to have as little government funded living money as possible. So we've got children who weren't wanted in the first place growing up in poor conditions with uncaring parents in shithole houses going to terrible inner-city schools, mad at the world for their terrible lives, with access to as many guns of as many varieties as possible with which to take out their pent up aggression. If they manage to make it to 18 without getting killed or winding up in jail, and find themselves with no ambition for life (and if conservatives had their way with things, there'd be no affirmative action for them to go to school or get a real job), they can always join the military to be shipped off to blow up innocent civilians and beat up detainees while forcing them to listen to gangsta rap. And the ones that get thrown in jail can be given the death sentence, which they also tend to support, to answer for their sins.

If pro-lifers could find a consistent, non-hypocritical stance on life-- no abortions, better welfare to help those less fortunate than us, no killing people with guns, no blowing up other countries, no death sentence-- then maybe they could make me reconsider my stance on whether a woman has the right to control her own body or not. But when I went down the list of things pro-lifers also tend to support or not support, as a young man, I began to realize, wait, you people are full of shit, aren't you? You pretend to care about families, but all you really care about is your own shitty, counter-productive opinions, don't you?
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with love from CRS @ 9:01 PM 

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