dropdeadpolitics

My cousins used to live in a rural part of New Mexico just south of Albuquerque.  They had a good amount of land and two cows.  One cow was appropriately named Chuck.  They sold them to a local slaughter house. Chuck and his friend whose name escapes now some fifteen years later probably made for some good eating.  I’ll come back to the cows later but allow me to swing this towards something more relevant for a political website, abortion.  In my opinion, it’s the single most divisive issue in American politics and our nation as a whole.  I don’t have stats on just how divisive it is so I suppose something else could sit higher on the divisive scale which I imagine is something like the Richter Scale where each number is ten times more divisive than the one that comes before it.

So we have two sides…people oppose letting women choose to have abortions and those who support letting women choose to have them.  Each side has a clever name, pro-life and pro-choice respectively.  Of course neither label is quite accurate although the former is much more deceptive.  Pro-life sounds like they are ardent defenders of life in all its glorious forms.  In reality most who oppose abortion simply oppose abortion.  They gladly ate Chuck.  Chuck was alive.  I don’t know too many pro-lifers who adamantly oppose war in all its forms, nor do I know many who think we should stop genocide in foreign countries (you know, policing the world) or feed the starving around the globe with our tax dollars despite the many innocent children who will die this very day from hunger.  But I’m nitpicking and getting off-topic, right?  What this really is about is why some feel it’s not acceptable whatsoever for their tax dollars to fund abortions.

I understand not wanting to pay for things that one doesn’t agree with.  I demanded refunds for my share of the Iraq War for the last seven years and have heard nothing back from the IRS.  Maybe this year?  I didn’t vote for George W. Bush and my Congressman didn’t vote for the war resolution either.  Unfortunatley my senators did, so maybe I’m obligated to pay 1/3 of my taxes.  I’ll accept 2/3 of my tax dollars refunded electronically to my account, just in case the IRS happens to be reading this.  Of course, that will never happen and the government will continue to take my taxes to fund various programs I disagree with.  Arguing that abortion is somehow different because it’s a moral choice ignores that fact that war is a moral choice that kills people.

As for the morality of abortion, pro-choice is the most in line with liberty.  Those who oppose abortions have every right to oppose it by not having them.  That should be enough for anyone who cherishes liberty, but they want to go one step further by claiming they are fighting for the liberty and rights of the unborn.  They like to point out that famous phrase that says, “No person shall be deprived of life…” Of course they ignore the most important word in that sentence which isn’t the word “life” but rather the word “person”. What does it mean to be a person?  Not everything alive is a person.  Chuck wasn’t a person.  He had a name and he became a pet to my cousins, but they nor their parents nor any of us would call Chuck a person.  Chuck was not murdered.  Murder is a legal term where you deprive a person of their right to life without due process.  Again, that pesky word keeps coming up…Person.

So what makes a person?  Being human is part of it and anti-abortionists think that’s all it takes.  The problem with that is we kill things that are human every day.  Have an itch?  You just sloughed off thousands of cells many of which were still living.  They had everything a zygote has at conception.  They were living cells with human DNA.  Are you a mass murderer?  I could take those skin cells, and with the right technology, make another you.  Just like a zygote and every other cell with DNA, which happens to be all of them, could potentially bring life to this world.  We slaughter them by the millions to treat cancer with a poison that we call chemotherapy.  We do the same with radiation.  A living human cell is obviously not a person.  What makes me a person and Chuck a cow, aside from our genetic differences, is I’m sentient.  Chuck had the power of perception via senses, but he didn’t have sentient consciousness.  He wasn’t self-aware.  This is a critical step in defining a person.  We think about ourselves and our place in the universe. We use words to describe ourselves and we recognize our place on the planet.  Chuck did none of these things.  If he did, we had no way of knowing it so there’s a small chance we as a society murdered Chuck.  Somehow, I don’t think the pro-lifers are going to take up Chuck’s cause and make it a political issue with the same zeal as they do abortion.

In the United States, 13 out of every 100,000-child births result in the death of the mother.  When abortion is performed 0.7 out of every 100,000 result in the death of the mother.  Getting pregnant is a health condition that comes with risks that can lead to death.  The percentages aren’t very high, but if a woman isn’t pregnant, that’s one less risk factor to her life.  Is it right to say that a woman must carry a fetus she doesn’t want at risk to her own life, however small, to satisfy someone else’s morals?  How is that liberty and justice for all?  The rights of the unborn cannot override the rights of a living person.  A woman has a right to choose to abdicate her rights for the sake of her unborn child just as much as she has a right not to be forced to risk her life for the sake of that same unborn child.

Chuck is dead.  I’m sure he was delicious.  I don’t think anyone would argue that we should not have sent Chuck to the slaughterhouse because he might have met the criteria of a person.  I think if I floated such an idea, I would be laughed at no matter how strongly I believed it. If you’re a pacifist, you don’t get your tax dollars back that were taken to war a war. Why should we allow special status for those who oppose abortion based on nothing more than personal belief and values?  I respect people who are against abortion…no one is pro abortion people are pro choice.  I have nothing against those who say we should be responsible with our reproductive capabilities.  My only problem is when they throw baby liberty out with the bathwater for the sake of ensuring this country’s laws reflect their own personal values.  They have no right to that, none of us do.