Abortion Truth and Old Lies

http://patrickmadrid.blogspot.com/2008/12/undercover-at-abortuary.html

I think one of the dumbest things pro-abortion advocates can say is a variation on this: You anti-abortion people only care about kids when they are fetuses and then you just walk away from them.

First of all, I think it is indicative of the person's age when they use this argument. I first heard it expressed during a George Carlin routine on Saturday Night Live and that was a LOOOOONNNGGGG time ago.

The gist of the argument is this: us Catholics and other Christians, Orthodox Jews and Muslims really don't love human beings and so are against abortion. Really what we are doing is showing our hatred for WOMEN. See, we don't REALLY care about the babies being slaughtered in the abortuaries (great new word I just learned) across the world because we NEVER take any of them into our homes. We do not feed them or clothe them or help them with their homework.

When we share with the person arguing this ridiculous point the number of children we have fostered, the promise we make to any woman contemplating an abortion that we will adopt their baby if they let them live, that we have resources available to help the woman heal from such a horrendously stressful time in her life - obviously, stressful to the point that she is considering killing her own child - they either ignore us or they compliment our 'individual' efforts but still insist that all the pro-Life people walk away from children once they leave their mother's wombs.

Stupid.

Who do they think will be manning the promised programs under the new administration? You know the ones a I mean. The programs our President-Elect insists need to be promoted in order for abortion to cease to be a 'necessity' in this country. The foster programs. The adoption programs. The education programs. How many members of the Liberal Left are going to get in line at age 50 or 55 and offer to adopt babies born to addicted mothers, tutor children who have been poorly fed or physically and/or sexually abused, pay for the medical care for the children who have been dumped on society by men and women who think their needs outweigh their responsibilities?

I guess I need to calm down.

What amazes me, I think, is that the same kind of stupid stuff is still being said 30 years after women were convinced that they could not be free in America unless they had the right to abandon their children without consequence. Only we went one step further, didn't we? We gave women the right to kill their children in the name of freedom. We told them that, because they could get pregnant and were therefore 'victims of their biology', men would always have all the power.

Well let's see now....we have killed at least one and a half generations of children (if you use the old calculation of 20 years for a generation, which doesn't really hold true any more). The last study done shows that women are still being paid less on the dollar than men for the same work.

And the reason for that is.....why?

You know, maybe we need to give women the right to kill their babies AFTER they are born - especially if those babies are really standing in the way of them having the ability to run their own Fortune 500 Companies, fly a spaceship to the Moon, head up an army advancing through the hill country of Afghanistan or being President of the United States.

Ok, so I am being silly.

Being a feminist used to mean being committed to loving oneself enough to demand to be treated with dignity and respect. It meant saying out loud that my essence, my being is just as valuable as yours and it has nothing to do with my gender. If I wanted to devote myself to the study of Nambian Water Frogs that I would not be told I could not do so simply because of my genitalia. If I was willing to crawl through the water of Nambia and study the little devilish frogs then I was to be given the opportunities to do so; the proper education, the proper funding, the proper equipment and it was to be based on my ability to deliver the goods: proper research information on the Nambian Water Frog. It was not to be based on how many research scientists I slept with or whether or not I had PMS or large breasts. Besides, have you seen some of those scientists? Good God, some of them have larger breasts than Carol Doda (and if you recognize that name, you are up too late...go to bed).

Being a feminist used to mean that when Dr Hildebrand at UC Berkeley made the mistake of saying, "Women do not belong in the Math Department" he would get his comeuppance by being shown that the highest scores in that department in 1975 were by the women in the department....and the results were gathered from a double-blind study of testing done without gender being referenced at all. And he had to be the one to announce it to the press, and no one cared that he was being made to eat his words when he was 100 years old and had a building named after him. The dude was wrong and he had to own up to it.

Today, it appears that all our efforts during those years of trying to prove that we were just as smart and just as capable of having different gifts to offer the world as men have translated into a 'right' to behave like the worst of mankind, get into fist fights with other girls in high school over the 'right' to participate in oral sex contests with the football team and an inability to spell properly because we are glued to our text messaging machines.

It used to be almost taken for granted that women were a civilizing force in any society. First the brutish men would arrive, tame the land, build the saloon (I mean, come on...priorities) and the whore house and then the 'nice' women would arrive....and the men would put down planks of wood over the mud holes, build the school and the church and stock the general store with more than bad whiskey and bullets.

AND we got to have our share of really COOL women who knew their way around a trail or two, could knock the eye out of a squirrel at 100 yards and dance the tango when necessary.

I know I am rambling here but the point I am trying to make is that we were talked into giving up something wonderful about ourselves, our very natures, in the name of freedom. We have always been able to work hard and we have also been the victims of horrible aggression and anger from the menfolk...but that is what we needed to stop. And somehow, the idea that being able to say, "Nope, I want this child killed before it takes a breath" was a ticket to stopping abuse.

I think of the strong women I grew up with - the ones who worked the fields by day and cared for children and men at night. I think of the women I knew who looked at the back of the men who walked away from them and their children and so were forced to be the sole support, the backbone, the foundation of their children's lives. I think of the women who, when it was not fashionable, told their little girls that they had to be able to do more than cook and clean because they may need to support themselves alone.

How my generation (and the present one) has let them down. They must be ashamed at how we took their struggle for dignity and equality and turned it into a immoral slug fest.

Well, this weekend I get to take a meeting to an old timer in a nursing home.

It's the least I can do.