For this would I blame the insular stagnation which always arrives from mistaking a self for a community, for how easily factions to this battleground fall short from ever winning any real philosophical debate no matter which side of the aisle they offer their urine analysis. But I really believe that the Pro-Life movement and the Pro-Choice movement both depreciate the values of life, and that this misjudgment underlies their core talking points, providing the unstable framework much of their respective worldviews hang on. Laws manipulated to promote personal preference is by no definition a hallmark of a functioning democracy, and so both sides to this argument seem filled with meatheads.
Pro-Life adherents famously never give public consideration to why they should be so empowered, by a profit-driven healthcare industry and by politicians who see no irony in being at once pro-life and pro-military. Why the same pundits beseeching the value of all life are always the first to speak of stripping state and federal funds from welfare programs. Right to lifers are largely existing in abject denial over their strings being so easily pulled by ulterior motivation. We are informed how in the USA there is supposedly a democratic separation of Church and State. Christians, especially Catholics and Protestants, love to see themselves as persecuted, yet the chances of a President coming into elected power who is not at least verbally Christian are as likely as the chances of any mainstream news platform acknowledging even in passing that the Vatican has more financial holdings than all but perhaps 4 or 5 nations on Earth. In an era where wealth and power are completely synonymous, the Vatican remains one of the handful of nation-states not currently in debt, yet nobody is petitioning them to fund universal free healthcare for all or free tuition at every college and university with a pulse. Nor are their highest ranking officials volunteering to accomplish such benevolent objectives. When powers can afford unquestioning loyalty from so many, they have the resources to save quite a lot of lives, and yet they make the choice not to. As with every other hierarchical orthodoxy, their methodology depends on perpetuating serfs and slave castes to frown over, those problematic others who mean ill-wind for the good guys.
As chauvinistic rightwing politicians obsessively remove every definition of rape from legal dictionaries, their counterparts among abortion fanatics also want free sex with impunity. Pro-Choice adherents are quick to cite as example cases of incest, molestation and rape, when, while milking those depraved circumstances, the actual reasoning in practice behind their actions typically goes more like this:
I never understood how bad timing could be so generally accepted as a serious excuse for anybody who knows how babies are made. But then, by their own casualness do advocates largely exist in abject denial over what that thing growing inside actually is.
Based on the women I have known in my years, I’d wager that for every case of abuse being the reason for an abortion, underage pregnancies or not, there are easily thousands more that involve young women simply unwilling to take a year off from school and/or work and/or social lives, or to explain to their families why they suddenly face the changed priorities, preferring instead to live it up with the kinds of young men not too terribly concerned with a world where male birth control doesn’t exist. Demanding good fortune without sacrifice is childish. The idea that sex is nothing but harmless fun is the same mindset used by those rapists, so it makes for a trashy argument on behalf of empowerment. Far more common than cases where the mother’s life is in jeopardy are cases where the mother simply cannot be bothered with the basic challenges of cause and effect, much less with disturbances to her comfort levels. Just as selfishness is the opposite of selflessness, cowardice is a different thing than bravery. Of course there lie exceptions, but I am convinced that abortions are predominately matters of selfishness, as is any situation where two enter a chamber and only one departs alive. Such persons insist on receiving the same empathy they themselves deny their unborn, despite their not being the one who lost anything, like having their life prematurely terminated. With no self-awareness are they employing the same logic behind all wars, that of putting wish-listing of creature comforts before the survival or well-being of other living things. Upset by the results of their own mistakes, their choice is to take out their frustrations on others, and defenseless others at that, presumably clearing the table to continue making the same exact mistakes magically by no fault of their own. Hiding problems out in the garbage bin is not problem-solving. If you can rationalize that an organic and growing thing incorporated from your genetic coding is not potential life, then you are just another variety of totalitarian, though likely one with a sweeter ass. While I certainly disagree with her logic here, as a creative thinker I will be damned if I cannot conjure up many circumstances where I would conceivably kick Levy out of my bed, even as I provide here one helluva argument for her to never grant me a rousing night in hers. Her body, her choice.
Regardless if the status quo for all sides of today is giving fantasy more weight than reality, up is not down just because we might wish for it to be so, for the same reasons that feelings are not facts. Avoiding consequences is a weakness of character and of constitution, both especially in terms of sex, yet Pro-Lifers and Pro-Choicers alike in their own ways deny the strength required by all that Darwin noted. By all means find cause to kill your fetuses, saving them from this worthless life is ample reason enough, but if you choose to kid yourselves about what they are, then address the resulting valuable proteins going to waste that could otherwise be feeding the starving among those unfortunate third worlders without ready access to AA meetings or to personal choices over life and death. If it’s not real human meat, then prove it with a taste test. If someone absolutely does not want offspring then they are quite welcome to have their cake and eat it too. Alternately, if an unplanned pregnancy has as much right to life as everyone else, then guarantee that everyone else actually does share in this same, theoretical right to oh so precious life, particularly the peoples you yourself fear the most. Or else it’s dubiously limited options for such blessed sanctimony.
Lost in the middle are those whose faith is car-jacked to fulfill demographics of workers and consumers, of potential taxpayers and expendable soldiers. Also lost in the middle are the real victims of rape, and those forced by medical emergencies to make the impossible choice between either continuing their own life or saving the life of their child. The cases where sex lacks mutual consent, or is not a factor at all. All of these lost are the minority among louder voices even while it is their flags which all others drape themselves with, and so as usual the minority find themselves weaponized to suit the personal preference of self-aggrandizing strangers. Of course every bit of life is inconvenient, and by design, but that’s the point where we could start the journey, not where we should end it. Only absolute pricks feel entitled to dictate the choices of others, and only absolute pricks feel entitled to expect reset buttons of the universe. The writer/artist Mike Grell used to have as his email signature an appropriate line, “Life is drawing without an eraser.”
We may grow from tribulation, but from the comfort of selfish appeasements we only grow sheltered and babified, pampered and pacified. There must be no laws prohibiting anybody from making these decisions for themselves, just as there must be no laws protecting anyone from the outcomes of their own decision-making. To say otherwise to either regard is forbidding personal responsibility, and how might contributors to society possibly evolve from no responsibility? If we can at least remain unanimous in despising irresponsible leaders, then perhaps we should stop following their leads, and refrain from giving them anymore examples which too conveniently validate their pathos.