"Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare."
When I hear that currently popular attempt to come up with a politically correct electioneering slogan, with the emphasis on "rare" as it invariably is, my heart sinks in recognition of the extreme degree of obfuscation and oversimplification of vital issues to which our candidates are convinced they must stoop to be electable. I wonder whether they are really right in believing they must appear to be so bashful about abortion rights. Do they really have much understanding of the profound importance of the right to safe, legal, professional abortion care? Don't they care?
Then I think of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" and how Goldilocks judged the porridge set out for the three bears and chose the one that was "just right."
The implication of the word "rare" in this slogan is that there are now "too many" abortions. I have to wonder how many "too many" would be. How many would be "too few?" And . . .
. . . how many would be "just right?"
To those who so-call themselves "pro-life" we know that just one is "too many," "too few" is inconceivable, and none at all is "just right." This regardless of the sure knowledge that such attitudes written into law result in death, injury, illness, and extreme life disruption, with excruciating pain, suffering, and hardship, for uncounted hundreds of thousands of women and teenage girls and their families and friends - women and girls who are known, among other quite respectable names, as "mother," "wife," "sister," and "daughter," in answer to "What do you call a woman who has an abortion?"
I've never seen any reasonable, rational way to argue that "too many abortions" is anything but a completely subjective judgment that would realistically make concrete, rational sense only if we humans were on the verge of underpopulating, underexploiting, and underpolluting the planet. There should be as many abortions as there are women and teenage girls who, for their own reasons, want or need them. Period.
There is just no way to objectively establish that there are "too many" abortions. However, by regarding the following statistics and facts we can catch a glimpse of some of the horrific concrete results of "too few" abortions as well as of some other callous cruelties religious dogma inflicts on much of the world now and strives to reintroduce into the U.S.
The World Health Organization has estimated that in those parts of the world in which abortion is illegal, about 70,000 thinking, feeling, often desperate women and teenage girls die every year from illegal attempts to abort unwanted pregnancies. That is more than one every 10 minutes DEAD because they are prohibited by law from accessing safe, legal, professional abortion care. Many times that number are seriously injured and maimed for life.
In addition, every minute, night and day, no holidays or weekends off, around the world
• one woman dies of complications of pregnancy and childbirth (every minute),
• ten teenage girls undergo unsafe illegal abortions (every minute),
• thirteen infants under twelve months old die (every minute),
• fifty seven people contract an STD (every minute),
• eleven people are infected with HIV (every minute),
• and the already-burgeoned-beyond-the-planet's-capacity-to-sustain human population increases by one hundred fifty more people (every minute),
all sanctioned, encouraged, and even enforced by our pitiless right-wing-dominated "culture of life" government through international interference with and withholding of funding from worldwide reproductive health and sex education programs, all with the vigorous support and reinforcement of the Roman Catholic Church and Evangelical Protestants.
Let's not forget the women brutalized and incarcerated by law enforcement in those countries in which the Roman Catholic Church has pushed for and won the criminalization of abortion and achieved that especially pitiless piece of "God's will on Earth be done." In countries such as Chile and Nicaragua women having not only illegal induced abortions, but spontaneous abortions (miscarriages), are routinely subjected to police investigations and interrogation, arrested, incarcerated, tried, and sentenced to long prison terms. Even many women having natural miscarriages are so afraid of such persecution and prosecution that they avoid seeking medical care in such situations, and some (many I would think) die.
Yet the Roman Catholic and Evangelical "pro-lifers" indulge in the make-believe that they are free from any complicity in "killing."
That is what so-called "pro-life" voters and politicians, whether Republicans or Democrats, stand for, and they won't stop until they succeed in creating conditions in this country mirroring those in the Third World and in Chile and Nicaragua in the examples mentioned above. It is their speciously rationalized way of getting to kindasorta stone and even "honor kill" women they regard as "immoral" and thereby to beef up their twisted sense of power and righteousness over the dead and injured bodies of women and teenage girls.
I have never encountered an unshakably "pro-life" person whose unshakability did not ultimately spring from moral false-certainty derived from blind, uncritical belief in blatantly fraudulent and misleading antiabortion propaganda and/or some tortuous interpretation, made by some pompous and pious authoritarian control freak claiming to be authoritative, of some arcane religious dogma or another. There is no way that such a person can claim to have honestly examined the deepest foundations of his/her "pro-life" beliefs with a sincere willingness to honestly face fact, think logically, and change or mollify those beliefs - or at the very least admit uncertainty where it exists. It is just stating the obvious to say that people who, regardless of high levels of general intelligence, have such mentalities are dangerously irrational, and there is a fine, oft-crossed line between "dangerously irrational" and "psychotic."
It is plainly and undeniably evident that the price we pay for fetal right to life is fatal to a great many women and teenage girls and results in an enormous amount not only of death, but of injury, illness, severe life disruption, extreme hardship, and excruciating pain and suffering for hundreds of thousands of women, teenage girls, and their children, families, and friends that the right to (and accessibility to) legal, safe, professional abortion care, comprehensive sex education, and effective contraception prevents.
Not to mention the dramatic medical therapeutic potentials of embryonic stem cell research.
I perform an average of about 50 abortions per week on women and teenage girls with whom I have in every case some degree of emotional bond, temporary though it is in each individual case. I empathize deeply with them. "I feel their pain." I rejoice with them at their release from the involuntary bondage of unwanted pregnancy.
But then, I am one who, quite reasonably I think, regards all religious dogma as (directly and indirectly) forming the core cause of much of the immense amount of human suffering throughout the world and poised on the brink of broadcasting the seeds of our ultimate destruction. Whether nineteen young Muslim men acting out their religious beliefs by piloting large airliners full of innocent people into large buildings full of innocent people or antiabortion zealots laying siege to a women’s clinic and murdering doctors and other personnel or laws that hurt and kill women and teenage girls in the Third World and even in some advanced nations infected with politicized religious dogma or the "crusade" in Iraq, religious zealotry is tearing our world apart.
We desperately need leaders bold enough to resist the horrors religion inflicts upon us and correct our course – if there is still time.
Let’s hope neither Muslim nor Christian fundamentalists get the bomb!