I am a proud, even defiant, abortion provider. And, believe me, defiance is an asset in the sociopolitical climate in which I practice abortion care. First, let me assure you that it is not that I love embryos and fetuses less, but that I love women and teenage girls more – although I must confess that I really have no love, nor any feeling at all, for insentient embryos and fetuses in the wombs of women and teenage girls who do not want them there. Like it or not, I respect and feel deep compassion for the dominion of any conscious human female over the insides of her own body and feel no compassion for as yet insentient embryos and fetuses that she doesn’t want there, whatever her own reasons.
There is perhaps no area of human behavior in which clear rational thought and understanding of factual reality is more obscured by obstinate prejudice and intransigent, willful ignorance supported only by emotionally charged irrational belief and misinformed and uninformed opinion and in which the consequences of this failure to face and accept truth, reason, and understanding are more catastrophically and mercilessly cruel than in matters concerning sexuality and reproduction, even among many physicians and other highly educated people who have had every opportunity to know better.
There is much that needs saying (and hearing by open minds) to illuminate the issues surrounding human sexuality and abortion rights and to counter the deluge of blatantly false, misleading, and inflammatory propaganda that has for many years, from launch pads in narrow-minded and rigidly legalistic religious belief systems, flooded the halls of government, the courts of law, popular media, and the internet. Far too many, still, in the 21st century, hold to the facetious maxim, "ignorance is bliss," (though often believing they not only are not ignorant, but know it all) and persist in plunging through their lives uninformed or misinformed, proud of it, and even aggressively defending and championing their ignorance and prejudice, oblivious to the swaths of pain and suffering and destruction they create in their wakes and feeling righteous about it.
I'm talking about the pain and suffering and destruction of, for example, a conscious, feeling woman or teenage girl stricken with an unwanted pregnancy, which is often to her not a "precious gift from God" or a "divine miracle," but a stressful catastrophe of a devastating and incapacitating magnitude. Embryos and fetuses don't suffer or feel pain or anything else. We know that they do not have sufficient brain development for conscious sensation until late in the 3rd trimester. I see nothing compelling to distinguish them from the uncountable billions of early embryos lost on used tampons and pads as the results of early spontaneous abortions ("miscarriages"). But the women and teenage girls are a different story. They are our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, our lovers. They think and feel. And we should think highly of them and feel for them.
Someone rightly said, "A woman does not want an abortion like she wants an ice cream cone, a new dress, or a Porsche; she wants an abortion like an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg to escape."
I use the word "belief" to mean anything that is assumed to be factual and true without credible and verifiable evidence to support that it is anything but guess, imagination, or myth. Believing requires a "leap of faith" in what faulted perception seems to reveal or supposed authority asserts or proclaims, especially if ingrained by long tradition in which such misperception, assertion, or proclamation has gone effectively unchallenged, despite the absence of any credible evidence at all in support of it and even in willful denial and aggressive rejection of clearly demonstrable evidence against it. Believing requires a level of gullibility sufficient to overthrow factual knowledge and replace it with fantasy - with make-believe - with conviction that what is not known is known, in some cases such as rigid religious belief bolstered by long-ingrained and ritualized delusion that what is not known is. Knowing requires simply acknowledging the truth of actual demonstrable fact and is possible only in the presence of a willingness to question authority and discard beliefs that lack authentication by factual reality as we learn more and more about factual reality.
Although there is widespread confusion about it, there is a distinct difference between "ignorance" and "stupidity." The majority of authoritarian believers are not stupid, but even the smart ones take ignorance to a new level. Ignorance means not knowing and understanding, whereas stupidity is a pejorative term meant to convey a relative lack of ability to know and understand. In many cases it is true that not knowing and not understanding result from that sad lack of ability, but in many more cases it is the result of a learned interference with learning and understanding reality by unfounded but esteemed belief. No one knows all, there is a lot to know, and therefore everyone is ignorant of more than he or she is knowledgeable about - even the most intelligent and educated among us. And the vast majority of humans unknowingly suffer to at least some significant degree from a learned and conditioned thought disorder that causes them to fail to recognize and acknowledge the huge difference between knowing and merely believing. For a great many, probably most, believing without evidence to support and confirm the belief is exalted and given dominance over knowing and understanding factual reality. Many people, although plenty smart, relegate their potential intelligence to a position subservient to indoctrinated, unfounded belief and thus render themselves, in varying degrees, quite ignorant in terms of knowledge and understanding provided by honest appraisal of factual reality, thus sometimes in some ways appearing to be quite "stupid" or even "crazy." And in many, no matter how intelligent and educated they are, this thought disorder is of sufficient force and intransigence to qualify them as psychotic - the psychiatric word for insane.
No matter how fervently - even defiantly - even ragefully - one believes that he or she knows what he or she merely believes, he or she merely believes it, and he or she might be wrong - very wrong.)
In general, thinkers do not believe, and believers do not think.
Regarding ardent religious believers of all religions, I question and impugn neither the passionate sincerity nor the noble and good intentions of many of them, and it is likely that most of my friends and colleagues in abortion care are religious believers. However, I can find no credible reason to accept their often strong and fiercely obstinate beliefs as having any basis in reality whatsoever. I think they have been hoodwinked and led astray into thinking in the irrational ways that are catapulting us into worldwide calamity, not by what they don't know, but by what they so strongly believe they know for sure that, as far as we can know, just ain't so. As is allegorized by their frequent referral to themselves as "sheep" and their rigidly authoritarian and ideological priests, pastors, imams, etc., as "shepherds," they strongly tend to believe, without question or critical thought, whatever they are told to believe and to slavishly follow orders, or pretend to, however disconnected from anything real their chosen "authorities" often are.
I performed an early first trimester abortion on a college senior some years ago. She had been seen a number of times among protesters at my clinic, and prior to her abortion procedure she had told a clinic counselor that she was the president of her campus so-called "pro-life" organization (a club dedicated to misinforming, shaming, insulting, harassing, intimidating, scaring, and even threatening women and teenage girls seeking to live by their own values and beliefs, and even seeking the recriminalization of abortion). Think about that. That must mean that she was one of their most committed hard-line agitators against legal and safe professional abortion care for several years - until she got pregnant herself. Then she was in the clinic having an abortion within a week of her positive pregnancy test. She had "explained" to the counselor that hers was a special case - that the reason she had chosen to have an abortion was to preserve her credibility among her peers and the public at large, rationalizing that through her image of unblemished faith and untarnished activism she could nobly save more "babies" and continue to provide an instructive example of blissful sexual abstinence by having secret sex and a secret abortion herself, in her mind sacrificing one "baby" (actually only a tiny brainless embryo), hers, for the hoped-for benefit of many, failing to comprehend that the many she was hoping to benefit were but the sum of many "special" cases, the vast majority of which entailed reasons just as cogent, and more so, than hers.
After I completed her abortion, I matter-of-factly asked her what she was now going to do about her affiliation with that "pro-life" club. Startled, she startled me by gasping, sitting abruptly upright on the operating table, and with an expression of stark horror, blurting out in a tremulous and troubled voice "You're not going to tell them, are you?" Quickly recovering my own composure, I assured her that of course we were not going to tell anyone, hopefully relieving her of that worry on top of all the other worries and fears burdening her at that troubled time in her life. She likely returned to her (now unequivocally hypocritical) role of being the top anti-abortion activist on her campus - unalterably and aggressively opposed to safe, legal abortion care for every woman in the world but herself.
My feelings were mixed. Although repulsed by her blatantly hypocritical self-exceptionalism, I also felt sadness and compassion for this confused and conflicted young woman who had come to me for help in a desperate and lonely moment in her life. And I pitied her for having spent her young life smothered under the crushing weight of the dogma of her religion, as so much of her human potential - so much of her peace of mind, her self-esteem, her common sense, her ability to experience her natural (God-given?") sensuality unencumbered by shame and guilt and fear, her capacity for free critical thinking, her basic honesty and acceptance of reality, and her rationality and understanding - was cold-pressed out of her and replaced by dogmatic superstitious beliefs that abducted and buried her mind under shame, guilt, anxiety, false certainty, and fear of everlasting punishment, and desiccated and twisted her life experience, transforming her into a judgmental mannequin of self-righteous hypocrisy.
I hoped then that she would, and now hope she did, find a means of escape from that artificial mind-twisting and life-crushing interment under the suffocating layers of tradition-bound myth and superstition with which she had been force-fed since her early childhood as her mind was abducted by the belief-driven terror of being condemned and damned to the "fires" and other ghastly tortures of a mythical place called "Hell," the existence of which she dared not question for fear of spending eternity there, establishing in her thus abducted mind the delusion (i.e., fixed belief) that it was all very real and inescapable.
Meanwhile, in the real world, as she herself proved, even anti-abortion activists come in and get abortions or bring their daughters in. You see, their situation is "different," unlike all those other "slutty" women who get abortions. And Catholic women get abortions in a higher percentage, probably because their ban on effective birth control results in more unwanted pregnancies.
We abortion care providers see that degree of hypocrisy, and even worse, regularly. However, it is not always simple hypocrisy. Many women (and, of course, even more men) just don't "get it" until they are personally faced with an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy in themselves or in someone they personally care about. That's just often the way it goes. It's often hard to relate to or understand until you experience it personally in yourself or in someone close to you.
"A woman does not want an abortion like she wants an ice cream cone, a new dress, or a Porsche; she wants an abortion like an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg to escape."
To those against legal and safe abortion I ask: How long has it been since you were a young single mother and supporter of one or more young children, with little or no support from extended family, only minimally educated, inexperienced and unskilled relative to the job market, providing for yourself and your young children as best you could by holding onto the best low-wage job (or jobs) for which you were qualified and found available to you, and knew you would lose that job if you were forced to take time off - or were pregnant? How long has it been since you then responded to a troubling suspicion, perhaps originating from a late menstrual period or nausea that made it all but impossible for you to go to work every day, by testing your urine? How long has it been since that test came up positive for you, confirming your desperate fear that you were pregnant? In my work I see women in such straits daily, some better off and some even much worse. Who are you to judge them? Who are you to want to force them to give up what options they have, maybe even losing custody of their children, maybe even losing their lives to desperate gambles, in order to conform to your moral beliefs? These are the women who would be most hurt, and who are now being hurt, by restrictions or legal prohibitions against safe, professional abortion care. Women of greater affluence will simply do what they did before abortion was legalized in the U.S. They will again hop on planes and travel cross-country or even half way around the world to get their abortions.
Just last week I performed a first trimester abortion on a 21 year old economically and socially disadvantaged woman in McAllen who already had six children. I have rarely seen more desperation and weariness in anyone's eyes - or such relief in her eyes that she was spared from going through another pregnancy and having another child to care for with her meager resources.
Abortion is a decision that's very easy to judge when you're not in the position of having to make it for yourself or in support of someone you personally know and care about. And when you are confronted with so vast and withering a mind-numbing assault of emotionalized misinformation (and fanatical desire to dominate and control) as is afoot today, courtesy of the so-called "pro-life" movement.
Many "pro-lifers" (i.e., anti-abortionists, who believe that abortion should be criminalized) believe abortion should be outlawed with only four exceptions: endangerment of the life of the pregnant woman or teenage girl, rape, incest, and "me."
Many others omit some or all of the first three.
As a physician trained and experienced in both psychiatry and obstetrics and gynecology and for the last twenty-five years having specialized in the provision of reproductive health and abortion care, I have a deep and urgent concern about some of the political developments that profoundly threaten the lives, the health, and the general well-being of American women and teenage girls, as well as the integrity and fullness of their families, educations, careers, and social relationships. My concern is about those politicians and the propagandists and propagandized voters whose favor they curry who are blatantly and shamelessly lying and exaggerating, or through willfully stubborn ignorance employing the lies, distortions, exaggerations, and delusions of others (which deluded, mind-abducted "pro-lifers" actually believe), not only to impose unreasonable, unnecessary, and burdensome restrictions and limitations on women's basic human right to choose abortion for unwanted or even life- and health-endangering pregnancies, but to eventually abolish that right entirely.
Despite its profound seriousness, many influential politicians seem to know, understand, and care little about this issue except insofar as they can manipulate it politically to gain votes from misguided and flagrantly dishonest ultraconservative religious extremists obsessed with the fervor to transform our democratic government into no less than a theocratic police state that would force fiercely held narrow, intolerant, dishonest, irrational, and unfounded religious beliefs on all by restrictive law, and, as well, to reinforce submission to such tyranny by means of the ages-old political expediency of quelling and controlling "the masses" of disadvantaged and oppressed "little" people with relentless invocations and warnings of the mythical "wrath of God."
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
For one example, take our former president, George W. Bush. He based his public opposition to abortion and even to embryonic stem-cell research upon a combination of shameless pandering to his extreme right-wing base, extreme lack of understanding, willful ignorance, and the emotional effect on him of the personal tragedy of his mother's miscarriage that was neither equivalent, analogous, nor relevant to the issue of women's reproductive freedom and the legality of abortion.
My revulsion runs high, as does my concern for the health and well-being of all of us humans, especially the women and teenage girls whom I have devoted my medical career to serving. Along with all of my colleagues throughout this country and the world, as well as the women and teenage girls we serve, I live under the constant threat of domestic terrorism. After years of ruthless, unrelenting defamatory lies extending to insult, harassment, demonization, and threats, incitements, and acts of violence (including the total destruction by arson of the clinic with which I was associated and thirteen other offices in the same building coinciding with a thwarted attempt to set my home afire), countless direct and indirect death threats (including two men waiting for me with a "deer rifle" outside of a clinic) against my family and myself, and the almost daily experience of entering my workplace amidst the din of the mindless bellowing of anti-abortion ("pro-life") bullies, as well as numerous violent assaults upon clinics throughout the nation and the cold-blooded murders of a number of colleagues by Christian "pro-life" fanatics, civil discourse on this issue does not come easily to me.
I often hear some version of "All of us can agree that there are too many abortions in the United States today." Oh? What is this - Goldilocks and the Three Bears? If there are "too many abortions in the United States today" what number would be too few? How many would be just right? Are there too few safe, legal abortions in the world, since tens of thousands of desperate women and teenage girls every year suffer and die from unsafe illegal ones? Aren't the approximately 70,000 living, breathing human females who die every year in this world from unsafe illegal abortions approximately 70,000 "too many?" My just right number of safe legal abortions is just enough for all the women and girls who need and choose them. Enough is ideal, but too many, whatever that means, is infinitely better than not enough when referring to the lives and health of women and teenage girls.
My interest and concern are not about statistics and subjective opinions (i.e., beliefs) about their interpretation. My interest and concern is for each individual woman or teenage girl faced with the dilemma of how to deal with an individual unwanted event deep inside her own individual body that should be her business and no one else's.
A colleague of mine once said, "Everyone in America over the age of eleven has a great deal of information about abortion, and almost all of it is wrong." I wholeheartedly agree and do what I can to shovel some factual truth and reasoned opinion onto the whopping pile of willfully ignorant and zealously held false certainty that has been deliberately dumped upon the American people by the obsessed, sanctimonious demagogues and fanatics of the Christian Right who would jubilantly replace our democratic institutions with the theocracy of their own personal religious beliefs and have flooded all of the media of public information, misinformation, and discourse with blatantly and deliberately fraudulent propaganda in their efforts to achieve that end.
An astonishing amount of simple factual truth has not dawned upon many people or is generally actively denied since we all have a tendency (that some of us have largely overcome as we progressed along the lines of healthy psychosocial development) to believe only what we want to believe, what we feel we must believe, what we have been manipulated and indoctrinated into believing, what centuries-reinforced tradition impels us to believe, what we think will win favor with important others if we believe it (or pretend to), what we believe will ensure hedonic immortality for us and our loved ones, what we believe is good and proper to believe, and generally what we feel a compelling emotional need to believe, and to resent and aggressively defend against acknowledgment of anything that threatens or runs counter to such belief - all in the service of believing that we know we are "right" - so "right" that everyone else in the world should believe, think, feel, and behave exactly like us, or be required to by force of law if necessary.
Or eliminated.
The trouble is, no matter how fervently one believes (or wishes) that one knows that what one merely believes is "right," one merely believes it, and one might be wrong - very wrong.
I don't believe in evolution.
I know it. I acknowledge the fact of evolution. I know it to the extent that anything can be known.
I have encountered one woman who refuses to "believe in" dinosaurs because they are not mentioned in the Bible! She of course also believes the universe was created 6,000 years ago because that's what she believes the Bible says. She might even believe that Adam and Eve rode to church on Sundays on the backs of dinosaurs - oh, but wait - she doesn't believe in dinosaurs! So maybe that was an unfair insinuation on my part. And, of course, she is "pro-life." And then there was the nun in a group of protestors at an abortion clinic who asserted that zygotes feel pain and refused to be convinced otherwise. Do amoebas "suffer?" Do you shed a tear every time an amoeba dies?
And did you know that there is nothing in the Bible to indicate that abortion should be illegal? Nothing. There are passages that might seem to indicate that maybe it should be, according to the Bible, but dragging that meaning out of even those passages is quite a stretch, and, anyway, our American constitutional law, while influenced by the Bible as well as many other legal traditions, is not derived from the Bible. Many offenses of relatively trivial nature are specified in considerable detail in the Old Testament: Don't eat the flesh of cloven-hoofed animals; don't keep graven images (e.g., like the little gold crosses worn as jewelry, graven images of the scaffolds of brutal torture and capital punishment used to accomplish crucifixion in the ancient Roman Empire); don't let cattle graze with other kinds of cattle; don't have a variety of crops on the same field; don't wear clothes made of more than one fabric; don't cut your hair or shave; any person who curses his mother or father must be put to death; if a man cheats on his wife, or vice versa, both the man and the woman must be executed. When even relatively inconsequential things are forbidden in scripture, there appears to be little mincing of words on the subject, and whether or not to bring a pregnancy to term is a pretty important decision regardless of whether approved or disapproved, so I would think that if either "God" or the human authors of scripture had thought it was an important moral issue some one of them would have said so explicitly.
They did not.
To quote Mark Twain, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." Well, if you don't know something "ain't so" that "ain't so," based upon the total lack of credible, factual evidence of its being so combined with its extreme implausibility and even in some cases total contradiction of fact, you should, because this is the 21st century, and you have every opportunity, and the responsibility, to either educate yourself or shut up. Please pardon my bluntness. I'm fed up.
To disbelieve evolution because it differs from the biblical account of creation is equivalent to believing the earth is flat. Taken literally, the Bible says the earth is flat and sitting on pillars and cannot move (Ps 93:1, Ps 96:10, 1 Sam 2:8, Job 9:6). It says that great sea monsters are set to guard the edge of the sea (Job 41, Ps 104:26). And equivalent to not believing in dinosaurs because they are not mentioned in the Bible.
What a fair world it would be if all the people would hold the doors to their opinions and prejudices open to revision by factual information and understanding new to them. However, tragically, a recent opinion poll revealed that 78% of the American people don't (and generally adamantly refuse to) believe in evolution! 78%! Of course they don't know or understand diddly-squat about it, and doggedly refuse to learn anything about it. They just don't "believe in" it because it conflicts with literal belief in ancient stories and folk tales in the Bible. These non-believers of fact-based actual reality are apparently so fearful of questioning the Bible that they have chosen instead to live lives shrouded in delusions that shield them from reality, which is not a bad definition of insanity and of the psychiatric diagnosis of thought disorder. These mind-abducted people keep personifying wondrous illustrations of the seemingly limitless power of the abducted human mind to deny and rationalize, which of course is the nuclear substance of all delusion, powered from still deeper within by indoctrinated, fear-based conviction that their delusions are as necessary for survival, even for a life beyond life of hedonic immortality, as is food, water, shelter, air, and a beating heart.
The reason for this brief digression into the science of evolution is to illustrate that disbelief in something as thoroughly grounded in concrete factual evidence as evolution illustrates a style of thought disorder that comes very close to, if not actually within, the bounds of frank delusion and is both prerequisite for religious belief and develops and grows under the organizing and reinforcing influence of religious belief as it extends into and perverts secular dimensions of thought into irrationality and deep dishonesty, forming the Authoritarian Personality that is characteristic of religious believers in general and progressively more severe as the personality approaches fanaticism in the form of extreme ideological politics that are impossible to influence through fact and reason. As are delusions. As is insanity.
Authoritarian persons believe what they are told to believe under threat of punishment of one kind or another. They are driven by fear not to think for themselves, and they have been driven lifelong by such fear so that they have in many cases lost not only the inclination and not just the willingness, but the ability, of critical thinking. And our politics and governance are a misguided, gridlocked mess as ideological authoritarianism, complete with its lies, delusions, and fear-mongering, runs amok and cons authoritarian voters (who believe what they are told to believe lest they confront what they are told to believe they should fear most, however baseless, misguided, manipulative, and overdrawn those fears may be) into supporting policies that are progressively transforming them into pawns and victims of corporate greed that is undermining the economy and the very social fabric of the United States.
As the result of atmospheric contamination by greenhouse gasses from fossil fuel use, dramatic changes in global climate and weather patterns are now already wreaking death and destruction and rapidly approaching a tipping point at which time it will be too late to reverse its progression and, quite literally, all will be lost within a few decades. Yet we continually hear willfully ignorant political hacks in and out of official government positions, under the thumbs of their corporate donor-sponsors whose concern is only for their short-term corporate profits, ignorantly or deviously laughing off global climate change as a "hoax." Well, it's not a hoax. It is a known fact that it is occurring and that its effects will be unthinkably devastating. I can only urge those who don't believe that to open their minds and reconsider. Learn the truth about it before it is too late, if not already past the point of no return.
Now, to consider some things we know, objective facts and figures that reveal what so-called "pro-life" citizens and politicians stand for.
The World Health Organization estimated, in 2003, that in those parts of the world in which abortion is illegal, more than 70,000 desperate women and teenage girls die every year from illegal attempts to abort unwanted pregnancies. 70,000! That is more than one every 10 minutes dead because they are prohibited by law from accessing a reputable legal clinic for a safe, legal abortion. 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 dangerous 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 150 more people (every minute),
all sanctioned, encouraged, and even required by our government through international interference with and withholding of funding from worldwide reproductive health programs, and all with the vigorous support and reinforcement of the Roman Catholic Church.
There are 525,600 minutes in a year. You do the arithmetic. The numbers are so huge as to be virtually impossible to contemplate, but those are the kinds of numbers we deal with when describing events in a world population of 6.9-plus billion individuals that is growing exponentially and gobbling up and poisoning the only planet we have, toward the point of severe degradation and even destruction of the biosphere upon which all life depends.
And let's not forget the women brutalized and incarcerated by law enforcement in those countries in which the powerful Roman Catholic Church has pushed for and won the criminalization of abortion and achieved that cruel piece of "God's will on Earth be done." In countries such as Mexico, Chile and El Salvador women having not only induced abortions, but spontaneous abortions ("miscarriages"), are routinely subjected to police investigations and interrogation, arrested, and incarcerated. Many women having natural spontaneous 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.
These terrible atrocities are completely and easily preventable and treatable by modern medical science. However, the implementation of modern medical science is blocked by the ardent extremists of the so-called "pro-life" movement, predominantly in the western world by religious fanatics and their supporters in the name of God and Jesus.
Those atrocities are what so-called "pro-life" citizens and politicians stand for.
It was once so in the United States as well. However, in the United States we have recently been vastly more fortunate as the result of the Supreme Court decision in the case of Roe vs. Wade on January 22, 1973, that enjoined the states from enforcing laws prohibiting abortion care. Almost 4,000 women every day obtain professional abortion care in the United States that is legal, professionally provided, and therefore extremely safe. It is reliably estimated that approximately 35% of all adult women in the country have had an abortion. 35%. Maybe your sister - the teenage girl next door or down the street (yes, no matter how perfect her Sunday school attendance or how diligently and sincerely she prays or you pray for her) - your daughter - your best friend's daughter - your wife - your mother - your teenage son's girlfriend! You just aren't likely to hear about it because they fearfully keep it secret. It's one of those taboo subjects most people don't feel free to discuss. Nor do many people want to hear about it, preferring to bolster their comforting false beliefs that it just couldn't be so by ignoring and denying factual knowledge of it.
Even so, tragically, there are today droves of willfully ignorant and misguided persons and their narrow and uncompromising political, legal, and religious organizations in this country who are zealously struggling to throw history into reverse and turn back the clock to those hideous times before Roe v. Wade. They strive to recreate the blood bath and the derailed and wrecked lives that existed prior to Roe vs. Wade as one especially pernicious and merciless plank in their ardent campaign to transform our free society into a religious tyranny motivated by much the same sort of fervent and uncompromising beliefs that moved other crazed religious fanatics of a different religious persuasion to guide large airliners full of innocent people into large buildings full of innocent people in that infamous "faith-based initiative" on September 11, 2001. (I'm merely connecting the dots.) The irrational roots of religious beliefs nourish intolerance to the point of murder and genocide. And war.
These belief-driven, thoroughly propagandized religious extremists who call themselves "pro-life," possessing little if any more compassion for real living, breathing, thinking, feeling women and real living, breathing, thinking, feeling teenage girls living their real lives than was expressed by the Roman Catholic inquisitors of long ago who regularly, proudly, piously, and publicly tortured and hanged or burned alive real living, breathing, thinking, feeling women and real living, breathing, thinking, feeling teenage girls (and men and boys) living their real lives for such "sins" or "crimes against God" of "witchcraft" and "heresy," are succeeding in their zealous efforts to recriminalize abortion care. They have far from given up on their efforts to get Roe vs. Wade overturned, but their major successes thus far have been through their massive propaganda campaign to deceive the public and influence state governments to institute restrictive state laws against abortion care and women's rights to access it. They have produced and widely disseminated a thundering tsunami of blatantly exaggerated, sensationalized, false, and misleading claims about abortion care purveyed by books, brochures, videos, films, internet sites, billboards, etc., and through tens of thousands of churches around the land, and this withering propaganda barrage has paid off for them as more and more deluded, mind-abducted, gullible Americans have been wrongly convinced by their lies, misconceptions, and misrepresentations, more and more pandering politicians have set into law unreasonable and unwarranted restrictions and barriers to abortion care (under the hypocritical sheep's clothing of "protecting women"), and more and more church coffers have been swollen by hysterically emotionalized exploitation of blatant misinformation about abortion care into a cash bonanza as the rabid minions of propagandized true-believers have been set to foaming at the mouth with misplaced zeal.
For example, they love to display gory photos of dismembered late-term fetuses, often blown up to billboard size, to create the false impression that abortion involves the brutal destruction of fully developed, healthy fetuses that could simply be born instead, which is never the case. The "Partial Birth Abortion Ban," now sealed into federal law by a misguided Congress, president, and Roman Catholic dominated Supreme Court, will prevent no abortions. It will merely require physicians to use other methods that in some cases will present greater risks to the women involved.
Another favorite ploy, ever-present on "pro-life" websites, is to display pictures of MICU's in clinic parking lots with the strong implication that such scenes are commonplace, which they are not. The viewer is supposed to recoil in horror and be thereby convinced that legal abortion is very, very dangerous, which it is not. Current safe, legal abortion care in this country is spectacularly safe, and MICU's at abortion clinics are spectacularly rare. All medical/surgical interventions carry some risk. The alternative to abortion is to carry the pregnancy to term and deliver a baby. Just in terms of death rates abortion is spectacularly safer than that alternative. The death rate for continued pregnancy and childbirth is in the neighborhood of 11/100,000, while the death rate for abortion is about 0.5/100,000.
I have a reaction (that "pro-lifers" are generally unable - or unwilling - to comprehend and find outrageous) to seeing those photos of rare MICU's in abortion clinic lots. I rejoice in it. What do you think would happen to the woman being transferred if she were hemorrhaging on a kitchen table up a flight of stairs down some back alley while her illegal abortionist made a quick getaway?
Safe legal abortions are quite "rare" in those countries in which abortion care is illegal, as the "pro-lifers" would have it. Safe, professional abortion care is virtually non-existent and exists only underground in those countries, where finding and accessing it among the confusing array of perilous outlaw incompetents is a crap shoot for life and health that women regularly and in great numbers lose. That is what so-called "pro-life" voters and politicians stand for. Have our values and compassion sunk so low that we can't oppose that? They won't stop until they succeed in creating conditions in this country mirroring those in the Third World and in nations such as Mexico, Chile and El Salvador.
What is the truth as I see it? The past should have taught us all that the damage to the health and well-being of conscious women and teenage girls is much too high a price to pay for criminalizing abortion in a futile attempt to save the lives of basically inert, unconscious embryos and fetuses inside the bodily domain of desperately unwilling hosts.
The political and legal choice is not between abortion and no abortion. It is between very safe legal abortion and very dangerous illegal abortion.
Which would you choose?