ABORTION: To Be or Not To Be

I fine it interesting how things become political which have no reason to be political.  Shouldn’t climate change be a scientific issue, and minimum wage the parlance of the economist?  I feel the same way about abortion.

I have no ducks in this tub; what I am putting forth is an intellectual exercise. This is definitely a discussion we must have as a society because we, in the US, perform approximately 1,300,000 abortions each year. Are those 1.3 million murders, or 1.3 million medical procedures?

If you’re a pro abortion Liberal, I’m going to ask you to suspend that belief and put yourself in the place of some one who passionately believes human life begins at conception. Then any abortion is infanticide. I’m sure you would do what ever you could do to prevent the murder of the most vulnerable of children.

If you are a pro life Conservative, I would also ask you to suspend that belief. If human life does not exist until it is viable outside of the womb, then an abortion performed before that time would be merely a medical procedure, no more worth discussing than a buttocks enhancement.

Now the problem: Science really can’t, at least to both side’s satisfaction, answer the complex question, “When does life start?” Is a “potential” life, a life? Does a fetus have to be able to clog dance for it to be life?  I sure don’t know the answer to when the fetus is “alive” and I’m not sure anyone really does, and yet we sure put a lot of effort into defending our positions, as tenuous as they may be.

As with most things in our lives, we tend to politicize everything we can get our mind around. Liberals generally go with the several weeks’ belief and Conservatives generally go with the belief that it’s a baby before the potential mom and dad have had time to take a shower.

Like so many things in politics, there is a dichotomy here. Liberals as a rule believe in pro choice (abortion), but do not believe in capital punishment.  They are OK with terminating a fetus, but not terminating a convicted murderer.

Conservatives normally believe in pro life (no abortion) but do believe in capital punishment. They are not OK with terminating a fetus, but are OK with terminating a convicted murderer.

Since we are not 100% sure when a life is a life, or if a convicted murderer is really guilty, and neither side wants to kill an innocent baby or innocent convict, what do we do? If society terminates a fetus or a convicted murderer, we stand a chance of being wrong, which puts both the left and right in a box. Maybe no one, no fetus nor convicted murderer, should die “unnaturally” That would put us in a pro-life, anti-capital punishment society. Pardon the pun, but could we all live with that?

If we easily terminated fetuses and easily hung murderers from the nearest oak, we would then be a society of pro-choice, pro-capital punishment folks. Would that be something you would just die for? (Again that pun thing.)

Since I’m out on a limb already, let me scoot out a bit further. What I’m about to say is extremely general. I’m doing it to make a point, so please stick with me. (The “delete” key will always be there.) Here I go. I believe there are two kinds of abortions: those of necessity and those of convenience.  Necessity would be loosely defined as the potential death of the mother, rape, incest, etc.  Abortions of convenience would be a one night hook up followed by “I love my body too much to be pregnant.” Left and right always tend to focus on one or the other. Left sees abortions as primarily those of necessity, the right, those of convenience.

So, when the two sides “discuss” abortion, the left sees the poor woman who faces death or a life of severe emotional pain, and the right sees someone who, wrapped up in her own pleasure, snuffs out a potential life because she doesn’t want stretch marks and refuses to take responsibility for her own actions. (“I certainly supported a woman's right to choose, but to my mind the time to choose was before, not after the fact.” 
― Ann B. Ross, Miss Julia Throws a Wedding) Do both the necessity and convenience  conditions exist? Of course. Is the federal government up close and personal enough to tell the difference? Of course not.

If I were King, the government, federal or state, would have no part in abortion. Abortion, from the government standpoint, would be treated as any other medical procedure. From a religious point of view the acceptance of abortion would be between the couple, their doctor and their religion. A person could choose, or not, to buy an insurance policy that paid for abortions and if she chose to have an abortion, she could (woman’s right to choose). What is happening now is that people who believe abortion is child killing are made by the federal government to pay for it.  Obamacare’s one size fits all just makes that whole complicated mess worse.

Any time a Republican expresses uneasiness with abortion, either because he or she is very uncertain about what’s being killed, or can’t reconcile our constitution with the government’s involvement in procreation, the “war against women” signs pop up.  I believe we ought to be waging wars, but the wars we ought to be waging are wars against ignorance, (a quest for scientific knowledge regarding the beginning of life), a war to establish and market alternatives to abortions, if desired, like the establishment of adoption centers. Above all we should all, men and women, pick up metaphorical pitch forks and torches against the government insatiable quest for control and power over every aspect of our lives. 

WHO IS GOING TO TAKE CARE OF ME?

 In one of the first couple of debates between President Obama and John McCain the question was asked if health care was a right or a responsibility. The answer to that question was all I needed to see the difference between Liberal and Conservative, Obama said, “right,” McCain, “responsibility.”

President Obama stated prior to his election in 2008, true to his belief, that he wanted single payer health care for the country, because he believes that is the only way to insure the human “right” of health care.  A right, commensurate with Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, and he would get it for the peeps in his first term. 

This Liberal belief that health care is a right, obligates the government to insure that health care happens for all of its citizens --enter Obamacare.    Liberals come to the “health care as a right” belief from the original Bill Of Rights entry, Pursuit of Happiness. Their conclusion, as stated by a prominent Liberal talk show host, is how can people be happy if they are in bad health? So, in order for the government to fulfill the Pursuit of Happiness right they must provide health care.  Of course, how can the sheeples be happy and healthy if they are hungry? “Government “free” food? It’s hard to be healthy and happy without an adequate home –“free” housing?  How can a person be happy without an education (they will need the required knowledge to fill out the paperwork for all the other free stuff that will make them happy)—“free” education? Those rights, of course, could be obtained by the folks themselves if they had jobs, but requiring work for the “happiness” stuff is, I realize, a last ditch option.

One political view is for the government to get out of the way and let the folks PURSUE happiness. The other view is for the government to step in and PROVIDE happiness. I will let you determine which political philosophy is which.

As a Conservative I guess I can feel good that I’m not going to be around for this Liberal philosophy’s logical conclusion which is redistribution to the point where half the population is paying for the free stuff of the other half. Wait, I just heard that today more people are receiving government assistance than are working. Guess I am around for it.

This fight over Obamacare is very important for both political sides because it addresses what philosophy will define the United States for the next few generations. Not to be overly dramatic, but it’s a fight for the soul, the essence of who we are as a country.   How much government is too much? At what point are the citizens of the US officially declared incompetent to care for themselves? That competence/incompetence line is the line between left and right. It is a Liberal/Conservative tug-o-war.

 The current discussion over Obamacare is important because it is representative of the core difference between Liberals and Conservatives.  After three years of  being told individuals would not lose their plans (while the Federal Register from 2010 show this not to be true), this administration  finally admitted that many people are going to lose their current healthcare plans because, in the minds of the government, the insurance plans of a great many of the unwashed masses were not good enough. I heard a panelist on MSNBC completely befuddled at why people would be upset at having the government replace their “substandard” plan with one that covered more issues (like pregnancy for 70 year old men and Viagra for 70 year old women). She didn’t get it. Since she is of the political ilk that holds the belief that the government, as a whole, knows better than any individual, she never will get it. These people who are being forced out of their plan were satisfied with what they had! They bought their policy using their own brains, they were willing to live and die by their decision and it satisfied them, but apparently these personal choices didn’t satisfy the government.

I thought the stated objective of Obamacare was to provide insurance for those folks who did not currently have insurance, whether they wanted insurance or not. I didn’t think the objective was to take away insurance people had and replace it with plans the dull population didn’t know they needed. I was naive. I forgot the single payer end game.

I’m sure Obamacare will overcome all of its many start-up problems and because its concept is to take from the few and give to the many, the many will be happy with it, so within maybe five years it will rank up there with other Liberal successful yet unsustainable programs like Medicare and Social Security and the ‘fundamental transformation” of the country will be almost complete.