Silence

I have been silent for about a year now.

For anyone who follows my blog, I am alive and well, just not in the mood to write.

It is all because of Trump. Every day I am more infuriated, more astonished, and more terrified. It would be nice to write about it but so many writers, much better than myself, have written about him ad nauseum...what could I possibly add?

As for tackling other subjects, it seems the few I come up with that are not overshadowed by Trump, seem even more trite than my usual blogs because the world is on the  brink of disaster.

So until this man is not the focus of everything, I cannot think of anything to write about.

Any ideas, Dear Reader?

My Right To Life

Abortion is a very tricky topic. Below I have list just 3 of my arguments and I am happy to take your feedback and comments as long as they are civil.

ABORTION IS NOT MURDER.

If I shoot you dead I murdered you. Clearly you are a separate and self-sustaining being who would have lived had I not done something actively to stop your life.

  

Abortion is the removal of a being that is not self-sustaining, meaning that, without a body as its host, it would not survive; it is a parasite.

The difference here is that, by shooting a being that is self-sustaining you are actively changing something about it to prevent it from continuing to sustain its own life. Abortion is taking away a being’s ability to use a host body to glean life. That is not a self-sustaining being. It is a being that is using another’s body for its life. Again, that is a parasite.

Abortion is not murder as long as the being cannot sustain life without another’s body. Murder is killing an active, living being. Abortion is removing a parasite from a human’s body, one last time, it cannot live outside the womb so it is a parasite, at this stage no better than a tape worm.

Murder also must be done to another human. Technically, you do not murder an animal, you kill it. I am not going to cover what constitutes a human life. That is something for religion and science to debate. I can say that religion is simply a set of beliefs, that there is no scientific proof for it (there is actually more scientific proof against it) and religion has no part in our law making process (do not confuse religion with morals) so it is an invalid argument. Science  has not yet answered the question when does “life” technically and absolutely begin. Until we have a definitive answer as to the actual moment a fetus goes from being a parasite to a human, we cannot call it murder. You can preach all you want about when life begins, quoting scripture, but you must understand that there is no scientific basis for religion so it is no better than a fairy tale when it comes to important, life changing laws. I am not talking about what you and your family believes. Your religion is none of my business and you have every right to practice it in peace and I, as a decent human, will respect that right. However, your religion ends where my nose begins and I do not have to agree with your religion simply because you do. Our nation doesn not work that way.  In fact, it works so wonderfully that I very well could be a religious person and yet still hold these beliefs, no one can know unless I choose to tell them. You do not know right now, despite the content of this article.

MUCH OF THE PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT IS SIMPLY ARROGANT PUNISHMENT

I say “most” because not all people feel this way, but enough do that it is worth mentioning here.

Let’s start easy. Have you ever noticed that people who are pro-life are usually also pro-death penalty? Stop for a minute and think about how hypocritical that is. Now add religion to it. Is there not a commandment that states you shall not kill? So why is the state exempt from this in a religious, pro-death penalty mind? Technically, the state represents you and the 6^th commandment says you cannot kill (in reality, when translated backwards from English it say you cannot MURDER, a huge difference, but modern day  Christians use the King James version of the bible so I will too) so how can you justify the death penalty and stay true to your god? You can’t. The death penalty is murder, that is, the taking of a human life that is self-sustaining. The only reason for the electric chair is punishment, but isn’t that up to God and not you? Certainly you can put a person away for life if they murder to keep them from harming again and you can do missionary work to try to save them, you can try to change them, but you are not allowed to MURDER them in the name of punishment. Can you cast the first stone?

Taking that a step further, I don’t think anything makes me more irate than when I hear someone say “abortion only in the case of incest or rape”. I see. So if if a woman gets pregnant by Uncle John or is raped by her date, then the being inside of her is not human? Because being pro-life you cannot harm the “child” within her so it obviously cannot be a child if abortion is ok in those 2 cases.  So you have just admitted it’s not a child. No? It IS a child? Then judgment and condemnation must be more important than life itself. If you allow a woman a “conditional” abortion, i.e., one that says it’s ok when it was forced on her, when she had no say, as in the cases of rape and incest, then you are punishing her if she conceives in any other manner. You are saying “ok, since you did not willingly open your legs we will give you a pass on this one, go ahead and kill that baby, but if you have sex willingly then no baby killing for you.  Your punishment will be to carry the baby and care for it the

rest of its life and oh, even though we can dictate how the rest of your life will go, we won’t help you out at all. You will have that baby and you are on your own because you fornicated! Talk about hypocritical. Talk about grandiose. Do you think you are God himself and you can make this shit up as you go;so you can control women’s bodies and actions like the church has done for all eternity? This is why religious beliefs have no place in government. Either it is a baby and therefore cannot be murdered, or it is not a baby and an abortion is morally right. You cannot have it both ways and I am pretty sure this is not what Jesus would do. Please note how this punishment theme melds with the death penalty scenario. It is a pattern of control, of using the “word of God’ to punish others, to dictate what they can and cannot do. Put simply, people who are pro death penalty and pro life are little tryants hiding behind the “word of god” to justify their judgement nature, their need for power over others.

ABORTIONS SAVE LIVES

I would wager even the most adament pro-choicers did a double take on that byline.The bookFreakonomics first published this idea and several universities have backed up their findings. I will put a link to a Harvard study at the end of this paragraph if you are interested in a more in-depth look at the phenomenon. Basically, it goes like this: most violent crime is committed by low income, inner city teenagers/20-somethings. When abortion was legal in the 1970s the majority of them were performed on lower income, single women. Let’s jump forward about 20 years to 1991-1997 when there was a 50% drop in crime. No one could figure it out. Then someone got smart and realized that abortion was legal around the time these aborted fetuses would now be at “criminal” age at ant the socioeconomic level most violent criminals are from. Since abortion was legal these potential criminals were never born. Now if I just left it there this would be easily challenged so with the consideration of your time in mind I just gave you the basics. Here is the link to the Harvard study (just one of several) that goes into much greater detail (but not so deeply into academia that it gets boring):

 Harvard Study on Crime and Abortion

Not only does it save lives in this complex way, it saves women’s lives too. Many women perform abortions on themselves or go to back alley butchers. They feel they have to.Their parents would kick them out of the family if they were pregnant, their boyfriend would beat them again if they found out, so many reasons why a woman feels this is a life or death situation for her and, like all of us, when it comes to life or death, we are going to choose ourselves over a fetus. It’s not the same as choosing yourself over your child, a human; you are simply stopping a parasite from using your life force any longer. And before you judge, you really need to be in those shoes. Really.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PRO-ABORTION

I have never met a person who likes abortion. Not ONE. The fact is, we don’t know for certain when a fetus becomes human. If you are not religious the bible doesn’t help, and science has yet to give us a definitive answer, so the idea that it could possibly be a baby rolls around in your head. I think one of the biggest factors in this is being pregnant. I have seen women fight tooth and nail against abortion, but once those maternal hormones kick in at pregnancy, the doubts begin, the hormones take over and your gut instinct, through ages of evolution, tells you to save this baby! But your intellect knows better so it’s a huge battle and I feel for anyone going through it. So do not ever call anyone pro-abortion, especially if you haven’t had to face this choice yourself.

This is why “pro-choice” is used. No one likes abortion but we do like choice. When I meet a woman who would never even consider an abortion I am not one to try to change her mind. It is her life and her body and if she wants to keep the fetus, more power to her. I can say that because I know she has a CHOICE and she has exercised that choice and chosen to have a baby. I know a lot of women who are pro-choice who would sprint to the nearest abortion clinic if they needed one. She, and I, support a woman’s right to choose, whether its choosing to carry or abort.

So what is the answer? We must come up with a law, once and for all, that is a compromise.  Everyone has their own idea and, for what its worth, here is mine.

Since science cannot give us an exact time or stage of development that life technically begins, we cannot discard abortion completely. You can argue about the potential of a fetus becoming a person but I can just as easily argue that it may become a person who is a serial killer, in which case you would actually be taking more than one life by allowing the birth. We cannot “what if” our way through life.

Conversely, we cannot have unregulated abortions since, at a certain stage, this entity ceases to be a parasite and becomes a being that can live outside the host body. If a being can live on its own it is not longer a parasite, it is now and individual, and to have an abortion would be, at the least killing, at the worst, murder.

So lets take the data we do know. At roughly 22 weeks a fetus can live outside the mother’s body. So

lets  put our limit there. No abortions once it is no longer parasitic, which is 22 weeks or roughly 5 months. Wow. Even for me that seems pretty far along and there are now a few states that limit abortions between 22 and 24 weeks. But even Planned Parenthood, a necessary charitable organization believes that abortions should be before the first trimester is over, or before the 12 week mark, and some states give  6 week limit.

So already, abortions are almost completely prohibited long before the fetus becomes viable on its own.

That is taken care of, what else can be done? How about this: the people who voted for the psychopath known as Trump for the sole reason that he is a republican and therefore is pro-life, or the folks who are pro-life for religious purposes, or even those that do not want to be stigmatized by their daughters if they get pregnant (and yes, that still happens) should take their own advice and be responsible for their actions. You forced this woman to have a child? You need to help feed it, clothe it, give it medical care and an education because who the hell are you to tell a woman she must have a child and then walk away because after that its not your problem? It certainly is your problem.

After reading this I assure you I will have lost some friends. I will be chastised for using the word “parasite”. I will be lectured on religion. But, unlike the church going, pro-death penalty, anti-gun control, pro-lifer, I will not be called a power hungry hypocrite. And that is fine with me.