Wednesday, January 22, 2003

Today is the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The Bush administration has already made it clear that it intends to keep chipping away at the reproductive rights of women, including the right to use what is now considered standard types of birth control. In discouraging condom use and lying about the effectiveness of condoms, the administration has also begun to chip away at the reproductive and health protection rights of men, as well.

The next step is to appoint Supreme Court justices whose agenda is to severely alter--and eventually repeal--Roe v. Wade. If this is allowed to happen, women and their doctors will become criminals, and there will once again be procedures botched by unqualified "practitiioners" whose only goal is to make money.

The people who support repeal of Roe v. Wade believe that life begins at conception. No one can say when life really begins, because to make such a determination means that we must define "life," and there is a lot of debate about what meaningful life is. It is perhaps more significant, then, to examine the people in the right-to-life movement, for their belief in the sanctity of life appears very selective.

For example, most of them eat meat and wear leather. Not only were the animals involved slaughtered, but they were also tortured under very cruel conditions on farms. I am going to take an educated guess that most right-to-life proponents are not protesting animal cruelty in industry, farming, and science. In other words--by their behavior--it is easy to see that their regard for the sanctity of life is for human life only. I find this difficult to fathom, but for now, I will accept it.

So if the right-to-life movement's concern is with the sanctity of human life only, then my next question is: Are these same people actively involved in trying to get their states and their country to do something--anythingto prevent the huge volume of American child abuse? Are they lobbying and writing letters and forming protests to do something to help the thousands of children that are neglected, whipped, beaten, molested, raped, screamed at, humiliated, and murdered?

I don't think they are.

What a strange "humane" movement. Only humans matter, and really, when you get down to it, only fetuses matter.

There is no such thing as "pro-abortion," as right-to-life people are prone to say. No one is "for" abortion. For a number of reasons, abortion should be rarely chosen option. But an option, a choice, it must be. For if a woman has no reproductive rights, then she is locked away forever in a prison designed by her own culture. Such prisons have been used to lock women away for centuries.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the old saying sums it up better than anything else: If men could get pregnant, the right to have an abortion would have never been questioned.