Recent hate-mail had another angry message complaining that I said I wasn't "for abortion" but am for abortion to be legal, safe and available to women decide to end a pregnancy. I am, for the record and because of the record, opposed to the people who harass women who are going to a clinic that performs abortions because such groups and such manifestations have such a record of attracting violent lunatics who commit murder.
The recent referendum in Ireland, still massively Catholic, voting to allow abortion presents a challenge for those who would like to stop abortions. They should face the fact that making abortion illegal never stopped women from having unsafe deadly abortions or trying to poison or injure themselves to cause an abortion. That is the real "pro-life" outcome that is the stated goal of the anti-choice political movement and, I'll point out, the position that anti-abortion religious leaders take. Their position is not different from the 19th, early 20th century prohibition movement to make alcohol illegal and as fraught with disaster as that national experiment proved to be.
At this point, they should realize that any standing or future prohibitions on legal abortion will not end abortions and their campaign to do that will only expose their hypocrisy. There is no reason for anyone to believe that preventing or ending abortions is their real goal since they refuse to face reality on what that would require. They should also face the fact that you can make the most brutal laws against it but that won't stop abortions from happening. There will always be abortions. But they don't want to prevent as many abortions as they can, they want to control women, their bodies, their lives.
Instead of trying to achieve a world where there will be no abortions through legal prohibition they should, instead, try to change peoples' minds about having sex which puts women at risk of becoming pregnant when they don't want to be or can't afford to be or shouldn't because the health risks or other factors make it a really bad idea to be pregnant.
That would be harder to do, it's easy to get people to vote against the freedom of choice for other people, it's harder to get them to change their own behavior, especially the men. It's hard to say that the men who produce unwanted pregnancy are the primary cause for abortion but I think it's clear that they have as much, no, more power to prevent abortions than women do. Men are the ones who coerce women into having sex that leads them to have unwanted, unwise or dangerous pregnancies, the kinds of pregnancies that lead to abortions.
I, of course, don't believe the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, the "pro-life" leaders, the Southern Baptists, or Mormons or Republican Party really care enough about preventing abortions to do that hardest of things, PRESSURE MEN INTO NOT PRODUCING SUCH PREGNANCIES. I doubt it's ever occurred to most of them that men have any responsibility in the matter, they put it all on women. For most of them, including the Catholic Bishops, especially those appointed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the issue of abortion has been a political tool for them to put right-wing politicians and judges and justices in place to prevent things like social-justice and economic justice and basic decency. Opposition to abortion in the United States has served the fascists in pretty much the same way that racism and hatred of poor people has, it's just a question of tweaking the messaging to make it optimally useful.
That is the real reason that the anti-abortion movement in the United States is also an anti-contraception movement, that's why their goal isn't the prevention of abortions, just legal, safe abortions. Their goal would re-introduce the widespread trade in dangerous, horrific illegal abortions, something I'm old enough to remember resulted in the routine treatment of miscarriages as a potential felony, which even the smallest rural hospitals suspected was a possibility. It also led to me knowing women who had been permanently injured by an illegal abortion or, in one case, a woman I went to school with dying from one. It also led to a trade in infanticide, organized criminals who specialized in "baby snuffing," including that masked as adoption rackets.
The only real thing that has ever worked to prevent abortion was the promotion of scientifically sound, safe contraception, of instructing people of the age when they have sex in how to use it, to encourage its use, to discourage its non-use and to make it universally available to everyone who uses it. I would, of course, include the vitally important issue of preventing the transmission of sexually transmitted disease, the use of contraception does have the possibility of increasing promiscuity and promiscuity is, by far, the leading cause of STDs. As my critic also whined about, I'm as opposed to the transmission of STDs through anal and oral sex as I am unwanted pregnancies and for the same reasons, they lead to human misery and disability and death. That's what I'm really opposed to, which is why I am also against prohibition on safe, medically sound abortion.
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