The Abortion Debate

Posted June 10th, 2004 by Sean Williams

Okay, pull up a chair. Talking about the abortion debate is preaching to the choir and it always is, so don’t read any of this. You already made up your mind, there’s no point, but I’m doing this anyway because if there’s anything I hate more than someone stomping on my civil liberties it’s using my time well. If you don’t want to deal with too much ranting, jump straight to point eleven. Try to skip the stuff in bold right above it if you can.

Point One: Sexual release is one of the things we are here on this planet to do. Snack, Nap, Poop, Pee and Procreate, that’s the top of Mazlo’s triangle. Or the bottom. I never remember. Maybe it wasn’t Mazlo. Anyway, for some reason People Who Believe In God want to make these things weird. Pooping, eating and orgasming are the things that feel best in this world, and we’ve tried desperately to attach moral implications to the ways we deal with each of these things. If you take these three ideas you could make an entire career as a stand-up, talking about this stuff as if it were taboo. Because we are all infants.

Point Two: Legislation concerning the above three things is a waste of time. Drug addicts are addicted to drugs because they light up the same part of the brain that the three above things light up. You might think there are people in the world who are controlling their sexual urges, but they are *LYING TO YOU*. They aren’t. Don’t come and tell me you have your shit under control, you’re a fucking liar. You cannot control the sexuality of your constituency. You can’t control your own sexuality. Priests can’t and neither can you.

Point Three: You don’t have to have sex in order to have an orgasm. You don’t have to stop the sexual act in order to keep abortion and overpopulation under control. But unless you are willing to support a *massive* overhaul of the public school system wherein we teach masturbation, oral and digital intercourse techniques, and long exhaustive lessons about the best way of pleasing your partner without intercourse, but you still want people not to have abortions, then you are an ass. If you want to stop abortions, then teach kids as young as twelve about different options you have sexually. Who am I kidding, take a lesson yourself. I can’t believe how many women I’ve been with who think I know something special when I’m just doing the standard stuff. And women have no idea how much fun sex can be because they’ve spent their entire lives with sticks up their collective asses.

Your kids are going to have sex at a younger age than you did. You better start talking, and you better find some options. Telling them not to isn’t going to work.

Point Four: You cannot be a Republican or a Libertarian and be Anti-Choice. You also can’t be a Catholic and Pro-choice. See, these words mean something. It’s very fashionable nowadays to claim you are a libertarian, because people are incredibly stupid and they feel like it’s a clever thing to say. It’s like saying you’re a Republican like George Bush, or a liberal like Clinton. None of these things make sense

Republicans support a smaller government. It’s the lynchpin of their philosophy. Libertarians believe the same only more so. Legislating abortion is a call for larger, more intrusive government.

Point Five: There is much debate about the beginning of life, but if you say it’s the egg dividing, then my mom unwittingly killed six of her children when she miscarried. And your logic does extend that far, she needs to be held responsible for the health of her uterus which, once detected, was fixed and she was able to have three children after the miscarriages. (She could have found out before the miscarriages, not doing so was just lazy, right? I mean, certainly lazier than the four minute mistake you make when you say “I just want to feel you inside me, just for a second” when you’re sixteen.)

Or was that God’s choice? Those six “babies” who “died” as “multicellular non-cognitive growths”. Because if it was, then the miracle of her last three children was directly in opposition to God, which means my life was begun in direct opposition to your God. I can live with that.

Point Six: If you were pro-choice when you were in your twenties, but now that you are married with children you are pro-life, I have news for you. You’re still pro-choice. There is a difference between being pro-choice and being a person who has abortions. You changed your mind. This is America, for the love of God, and that is what being Pro-Choice is. It is retaining the right to do what you want with your mind and body.

Point Seven: The quote “I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion is already born”, which has been attributed to Ronald Reagan, should be followed with, “I’ve noticed that every man who is anti-choice has no possibility of being pregnant.” Jesus, the circular logic of the hopeless mystic. People who say, “there must be a creator, or we wouldn’t be here to even ask the question…” make me want to cancel my subscription.

People who are born to parents that hate them and abuse them and grow up to be serial rapists can be put to death by the state, but if a woman gets pregnant, she can’t say “Man, I already hate having this kid, I want to just stop this before it gets out of hand” shouldn’t be allowed to make that decision? Are you retarded?

Point Eight: People don’t want to have their babies. Most of them do, but not everyone. Look at the world, and think about time. Think about how long the world has been here, how long it will continue to be here. Think about how hard and unhappy just being alive is. Think about the years you have been here, the years you have to go, the long miserable slag toward ill health and mental degredation that you have waiting for you, and then after you die, how long will the world continue on and on, with your life long forgotten, your ancestors lives just dust on someone’s mantle with pictures of more people who don’t matter.

You weren’t aborted, and neither was anyone else who was here. If someone doesn’t want to bring another god forsaken life on to this planet, why the *hell* do you want to *make* them have that child? Where do you live, what are the circumstances of your life, that you think “Y’know what we need? More fucking *people*!” Spend a week riding the subway in New York at rush hour, and I guarantee you, you’ll be thinking, “yeah, I’m pretty much okay with *all* of these people not having kids.”

Point Nine: Don’t talk to me about adoption. Okay, you’re a middle class white girl and you’re pregnant. God doesn’t want you to have an abortion, right? He wants you to have this child and put it up for adoption so another couple who can’t have children can raise it. Because you’ve figured out god’s plan.

Fine. Who am I to say? I mean, who the fuck are you to say, but, fine. That’s God’s plan. He made that couple in Dulluth *barren* so you could have your idiot, conceived-in-the-back-seat-of-a-Buick, white kid be adopted and raised a corn fed existence.

So my question is this. Why are there so many unwanted babies of color? Why are crack babies of color allowed to die unadopted? Oh, I see, now God works in mysterious ways, right? The orphanages are full of babies all over the third world and Europe, but God wants *YOU* to have your *MIDDLE CLASS WHITE KID*? Fuck you. I can tell you my feelings about this particular abortion, not only should that kid not be born, but the abortion is one generation too late.

Point Ten: John the baptist was twenty years older than Jesus. So don’t pull the mother of Jesus and the mother of John meeting each other in the old testament when they were both pregnant and the frickin’ zygotes recognizing each other. It’s why it’s called the Apocrapha. The sin of Onan was not spilling his seed upon the ground, it was disobeying his parents. Sodomites were not wiped off the earth for rogering, they were wiped off for not extending a welcome to strangers. And the laws concerning sexuality in the old testament are about *ownership*.

Jesus never said anything about abortion. He did however say that divorce should be punishable by death. That was Jesus, not Moses. Jesus. Good Time, Full of love, new testament Jesus never said one word against abortion, but did call for divorcees to be put to death.

The old testament does say that Adam became man when he breathed his first breath. Nothing about the idea of Adam was considered Adam until he breathed.

Okay? SO READ YOUR FUCKING BIBLE, YOU FUCKING IDIOT.

Point Eleven: Okay, here’s the deal. No-one is pro-abortion. No-one thinks that stopping a pregnancy once it has begun is a fantastic, fun, celebrated idea. But there are lots of things that are hard, lots of choices we have to make for the sake of our future that we do celebrate. No-one wants to work a shitty job while they are trying to graduate from college, but we celebrate that as a hard decision that is ultimately for the best.

Some pregnancies are unwanted. Some married couples with good incomes don’t have the time or the love to give to a child. Most of all, the birthing and raising of children should be the most sober and solemn responsibility we enter in to as people, and if there is any doubt at all, people should be allowed to not be parents. It isn’t laziness that impregnates people, sometimes it’s absent mindedness, sometimes it’s callousness, and you know what? Sometimes two people try to get pregnant and then do and realize they made a mistake.

It happens in a second, or, if you’d rather count the entire sexual act, in an afternoon. You overslept for class once, or you forgot your homework at home. You even once did badly in an assignment at work or at school. Maybe you forgot someone’s birthday once. All of these mistakes take the same mental slip as not taking a pill or using a condom that is too old or just letting your natural, overbearing urges get the better of you for five minutes. That feeling you get in the morning when your alarm goes off and you hit the snooze button? That’s nothing compared to a 17 year old in the throws of one of his first sexual encounters.

Unless you feel like you have lived a life without mistakes, you have to allow others the right to clean up after themselves. It isn’t your baby, it isn’t your body and it isn’t your decision, nor is it your right. Take all of the time you currently spend railing against abortion and spend it on trying to make your own life better. Your old buddy Jesus wouldn’t have thrown the first stone, so you need to back off.