My Unsolicited Spiel on Abortion

"The old law permitted abortion to save one life when two would otherwise die. The new law permits abortion to take one life when two would otherwise live." - Herbert Ratner, physician

According to popular logical fallacies, I'm not supposed to have any views on abortion because I don't have a uterus, or because I'm not personally adopting every unwanted child in the world, or because I don't support (insert highly specific left-wing political position here) loudly enough, and this somehow invalidates my natural conviction that killing innocent humans for convenience or because they're disabled or female isn't okay. But I go on holding that conviction without apology regardless. If it helps, I support good sex education and affordable birth control, I don't believe that a freshly fertilized egg is entitled to all the same rights and protections as a viable embryo, I do believe that rape and a few other circumstances can justify an abortion, and I believe that changing hearts and minds with science and common sense is more important than trying to pass specific legislation.

For me this is not a religious issue except for the rape thing. Most pro-lifers don't believe in a rape exemption because - and this is a very legitimate point - children conceived in rape have no culpability for their father's crime and are as inherently valuable as any other human. I do believe in such an exemption because the mother's choice has been forcibly taken from her and my church teaches that, after seeking God's will on a case-by-case basis, this may be a morally justified reason for abortion. Of course I recognize the impossibility and undesirability of writing this religious viewpoint into legislation. I cringe when pro-lifers constantly bring God into their rhetoric, and not just because typing short prayers on Facebook isn't a substitute for actually doing something. However, Secular Pro-Life is also a thing that exists. Screaming at women outside abortion clinics or showing them gruesome pictures isn't nice or helpful either.

What disturbs me most about the pro-choice side is its frequent need to lie about basic biology that a first-grader could understand, variously claiming that a fetus "isn't alive" (which is too stupid to comment on), "isn't human" (because it has just as much chance of being a zebra), "is a parasite" (even though a parasite by definition is a different species from its host), or "is just a clump of cells" (like you and every other multicellular organism on planet Earth). If your worldview requires this level of self-delusion in order to be comfortable with it, that should be a bit of a red flag. The only intellectually respectable pro-choicers are those who acknowledge that a fetus is a living human being and they just don't think it's entitled to personhood.

And contrary to what some want to believe, pro-choicers have a far higher rate of violence than pro-lifers. Some are so radical, in fact, that they support fourth trimester abortions. And these people are allowed to vote.

Abortion rights in the United States are based on the 1973 Supreme Court case "Roe vs. Wade", which found a nonexistent "right to privacy" and somehow inferred from it that abortion had to be legalized nationwide. The plaintiff, Norma McCorvey, had brought the case after she was unable to get an abortion in her home state of Texas by lying about being raped. By the time the case ended she had already given birth to the baby, who was given up for adoption and is most likely still alive somewhere. She soon had a change of heart and became a pro-life activist until her death in 2017 (even though the pro-life movement never fully accepted her because she was bisexual).

Of course, if she hadn't been the catalyst for this case someone else would have. The gears were in motion. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, who presided over sixty thousand abortions before actually looking at an ultrasound and becoming a pro-life activist, recalled: "We fed the public a line of deceit, dishonesty, a fabrication of statistics and figures. We succeeded because the time was right and the news media cooperated. We sensationalized the effects of illegal abortions, and fabricated polls which indicated that 85 percent of the public favored unrestricted abortion, when we knew it was only 5 percent. We unashamedly lied, and yet our statements were quoted [by the media] as though they had been written in law." This organization still exists (minus Dr. Nathanson) under the name of National Abortion Rights Action League.

Kermit Gosnell, by the way, was an abortionist in Philadelphia who was convicted in 2013 for butchering women with dirty tools and murdering babies born alive in unsanitary conditions because the authorities cared so little about women's health that, despite multiple complaints, they couldn't be bothered to inspect his clinic for seventeen years. When he did finally go to trial, most mainstream media outlets didn't feel it was important enough to mention until forced to by the backlash from people who knew how to use the internet. And none of this could have possibly had anything to do with pro-choicers who go ballistic over any and all proposed regulations on abortion. Because choice.

​Then there was the time NARAL had an aneurysm over a Doritos commercial that portrayed an unborn baby as an actual living thing.

Another powerful player in the abortion industry is Planned Parenthood, whose founder Margaret Sanger gave us such gems as "Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying... demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism... [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant... We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all."

Or who could forget this one: "We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

Unfortunately, these quotes are not merely an irrelevant artifact of Planned Parenthood's unenlightened past, as it continues to target minority neighborhoods - probably because they're more vulnerable to its propaganda rather than for any racial reason, but that doesn't make it okay. The percentage of abortions done on black infants in the US is about 150% higher than the percentage of black people in the US.

​As frequently documented by Live Action, Planned Parenthood employees have often shown a disregard for the health of their clients and a willingness to avoid whatever inconvenient regulations still exist, like those pesky ones that might require them to notify authorities about some guy bringing in a pregnant teenage prostitute, or forbid them from selling fetal tissue for a profit. It has literally told college students to ignore the science about when life begins. Though its supporters are quick to point out that abortion is only one of its many services (and of course people had no way of learning about sex for thousands of years until it came along), it resorts to abortion whenever it can. It uses convoluted math to claim with a straight face that "only three percent" of its services are abortions, and pro-choicers repeat this lie without question.

I also want to take a moment to appreciate this sick little video made by Planned Parenthood's Golden Gate affiliate (which has since been closed for financial malfeasance) that glamorizes attacking and destroying pro-life advocates. Something like this doesn't get written, directed, voiced, animated, and released by one misguided employee. Of course they deleted it with no apology, but the internet doesn't forget.

As the names "pro-life" and "pro-choice" indicate, different priorities are at play, so perhaps it's inevitable that the sides talk past each other. But one straw man that continues to blow my mind with its absurdity is "Don't like abortions? Don't get one." It completely, spectacularly misses the point that's explicitly spelled out in the term "pro-life". Most pro-lifers accept basic biology and they all believe that taking the life of a human in early stages of development is morally wrong. The vast majority of them consider it murder of society's most innocent and defenseless, and regard the scale of abortions in the United States and elsewhere as a genocide. And then pro-choicers think they're being clever when they come back with the rebuttal of "Mind your own business." Can you see how that would be a less than compelling argument to someone with this worldview, or do I need to explain in words of one syllable?

In any case, the pro-life side is winning, and I think that's for the best even though I don't see eye-to-eye with them on everything. The rising generation is more pro-life than the previous one, and abortion clinics have closed at an unprecedented rate. What can you do?