His Name Isn’t Barack O’Bortion

I get that people are so passionate about their pro-life stance that they can actually exclude candidates as viable leaders solely for believing in a woman’s right to choose. I get it. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. They see fetuses as fully living, soul-filled beings who are helpless and are, sometimes, dealt a hasty and premature end with the aid of medical intervention.

What I don’t get is how many people in that camp can lose complete touch with reality in the process.

Mrs. Blue hangs out on some parenting boards online. Recently, she came across a doozy of a post in a thread that was celebrating Obama’s historic presidential win. A devout Catholic woman comes in, pretty much out of the blue, and pissed on everyone’s joy with a comment that went something like “I am sooooo glad that now I can kill a baby in my womb whenever I want to.”

In case you missed the sarcasm, she wasn’t really glad. (I wish I had the original text, because what Mrs. Blue read to me was amazingly dumbfounding, but the whole thread got pulled before she could do a copy-paste for me.)

I’m sorry, did abortions stop happening during eight years of Dubya? He’s pro-life. Do abortions go through the roof when a pro-choice leader is in power? I mean, it’s not like Obama is coming in to say, “Hey, one free abortion for every woman now!” It’s not as if he’s going to have a platform saying “abortion is good.” It’s not like he’s going to be requiring women to get them. And, again, what were the Republicans doing to stem the tide? Oh, yeah, promoting abstinence-only sex education in schools so that fewer teens will learn about birth control options and end up pregnant and maybe wanting abortions.

But I digress.

Because you see, the angry Catholic woman didn’t stop there. When a moderator called her out and mentioned how she was fanning the flames of misinformation like FOX News does so well, and noted that this is the kind of lying, inflammatory talk that can get a black president-elect assassinated before he even takes the oath of office, the woman came back with something like this:

“I can’t believe anyone could support a candidate who is in favor of letting women kill their babies at 40 weeks.”

If you’re paying attention and know anything about pregnancy and math, you can pick your jaws up off the floor now. Yes, she actually said that. She was, clearly, referring to Obama’s opposition to a bill in the Illinois legislature that would have required medical care for babies born alive after a form of late-term abortion called “induced labor abortions” or “partial birth abortions.” (for more on the hubbub, and why it really is just a smear against Obama, go here. The man isn’t for infanticide or suffering babies…Illinois law already requires medical care for those babies.)

But back to crazy woman. You cannot abort a child at 40 weeks. Normally, a woman delivers somewhere between 37 weeks and 40 weeks. If you induce labor at 40 weeks, or anything close to it, you are not carrying out an abortion. You are inducing labor. And as long as there are no complications, a completely live and viable baby will be the result.

But hey, why bother with facts when you can do fearmongering instead, and suggest that our next president wants to slay babies as soon as they come of the womb?

(With luck, assuming that no more idiots come to my attention with reckless Obama-hating, I will now stop yammering about political crap related to the presidential election for at least a week or two.)

Update

Of course, it should be noted that the breakdown in the Fight the Smears link above is biased, as the site is actually a Web site of the Obama campaign. It’s still giving some pretty credible arguments, but in all fairness, here are some other sites that have some things to say about Obama’s stand on that legislation, both pro and con:

Fact Check

Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Catholic America – Washington Post

New York Times – Checkpoint

Advertisement

My body…Mine by Miz Pink

I understand why people find the very notion of abortion repugnant. I really really do.

I really especially doubly and quadruply understand because I’m very close to popping out a child I really really want. Third and final. The end of the trilogy. The finale of my baby-making career.

But at the same time, as I consider the wonder that is childbirth and feel the joy of the impending life that I will bring into the world I am reminded of something very very important.

It’s MY damn body!!!!!!!

Sorry if I was a little loud there. There’s a truck I see pretty frequently that is festooned with bumper stickers and signs and placards telling everyone how evil abortion is. Now I’m not saying it’s great and I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s not MY thing. But I’m sick of every person who wants to get into the face of every woman and tell her that she is an evil hellspawned twisted bitch for ever having considered or used an abortion.

I know alot of chick who have done the D&C thang thank you very much. I have yet to find one who used abortion as a “convenience” or as a “lazy form of birth control” (thinking oh if I get pregnant no biggie I’ll just go to the doctor and get my problem fixed) and I’ve never met a single woman who enjoyed doing it. I’ve known more than a few who felt relieved afterward but that doesn’t mean they felt good or didn’t wonder if they made the right choice.

Those who cry that it’s live at the moment of conception, well you might be right and you might not. God ain’t really clear on the status ya know. If it’s just a collection of cells with no brain, no organs to speak of and not a chance in hell of living outside of of a womb, it just might not be a full life yet. You can disagree with me that this is a gray area but I have to tell ya, it’s pretty darn gray.

Too many people are making voting decisions based on this one thing. Oh my god he supports a woman’s right to choose? He must LIKE abortion! He’s a heathen. So I’ll vote for the other guy who doesn’t have any of my best interests at heart and will make life worse for me and my children.

Wether right or wrong and whether God thinks life starts in the first trimester or the second trimester, I need you all to understand someting if you’re in the finger pointing crowd:

IT ISN’T YOUR BODY. IT ISN’T YOUR DECISION. AND GOD DOESN’T GIVE YOU THE RIGHT TO JUDGE!

You want to try to talk women out of abortion, fine. Do it gently and respectfully. And walk away peacefully if you can’t convince her.

And please don’t start on the “well, the other thing is that the man has a say in this too”

No he doesn’t.

I don’t mean to sound mean about it, but he doesn’t. In theory he should and in theory I’d like every father to have a say. But the dude has the easy job in making the baby. He doesn’t have to carry it, he doesn’t have to face the risks to health and life that come with the job and he doesn’t have to squeeze it out in the end. Asking a women to go through 9 months of something she doesn’t feel she can do because the guy says he’ll be there at the end to take the kid himself is asking a lot, particulalry if she couldn’t trust him enough to stay with him or have a kid with him to begin with.

Pro-choice is just that: Standing up for a woman’s right to make her own decision during a time when the life inside her is still at a stage where it’s ability to live on its own is nil. That don’t mean pro-abortion. I’ve yet to meet anyone who is pro-abortion. It’s pro-choice.

And if you call yourself pro-life, I sure hope you’re against killing someone in self defence and agaisnt capital punishment too or you are a damn hypocrite. If you’re pro-life, it’s your job to convince women not to choose abortion. Not your job to bomb clinics or threaten doctors or get Roe vs. Wade overturned. It isn’t your job to take choice away.

Pregnant Pause by Miz Pink

I’m quite pregnant. I have reached that stage where I am simultaneously overjoyed to be hosting a growing life inside me while also wanting the damned human out of me as soon as possible.

I’ve been down this road twice before. I knew it was coming.

As a roughly 7 months pregger chick myself I’m a little wigged out by the story that McCain’s newly announced sidekick Sarah Palin may not be the actualy mommy of her fifth kid..a kid she announced when she was supposedly 7 months pregnant but not showing and not having told anyone before then she was pregnant. Hmmmmm.

This story has been making the rounds quite a bit. One place you can see it retold is here. I won’t get into all the gory details here.

I don’t like conspiracy theories because they get used often enough against the left-leaning politicicans that I enjoy supporting. I’m not interested in spreading rumors by saying I believe this story, because I just don’t know how credible it is.

But just for the sake of argument, let’s say that Sarah Palin removed her pregnant daughter from high school and kept her hidden from folks for a while, announced that she herself was pregnant even though she wasn’t showing and apparently no one knew she was with child, and then went on to pose as this child’s mother instead of her daughter stepping up to the rightful role of mother.

Let’s just say.

Because if it is true, and I’m not saying it is, it will be a huge insult to me and to any other pregnant woman who believes in our power to choose what will be done with our bodies.

Sarah Palin is the kind of person who would see Roe v. Wade overturned. More than that she is the kind of person who would love to see abortion not only cease to have federal protection but probably to be outlawed in all 50 states. From what I’ve read, she rejects abortion even in cases of rape and incest. This is a dangerous woman to other women. Period.

If this is the kind of stance she takes…that women have to always give birth no matter what…and if it turns out she covered up her daughter’s pregnancy and claimed it as her own…then why doesn’t her daughter have to stand up and claim her own pregnancy? Why doesn’t she have to face the possible shame or embrassment or even responsibility of shouldering her own child burden?

And moreover, why does her mother get to lie and look like a frickkin supermom who doesn’t show at 7 months, breaks water in the middle of a speech, gets on a flight, and goes to another state to give birth?

Again, I don’t know that all that’s true. But it sure sounds pretty fishy to me.

A woman who would do all this is a woman who is one of the worst kind of frauds. I hope it’s not true becuase it would be another example of glaring hypocrisy on the part of a right wing Christian nutjob…and that crap makes people like me look bad just because I’m Chrisitian too.

Pro-life, pro-choice…pro sport – by Big Man

I have another good guest post here from my brother-in-blogging Big Man from Raving Black Lunatic, this time on abortion. Whether by the grace of God or simple random fate, this means the second time that he will broach a thorny topic before I do (previously, it was a same sex-relations oriented topic), which will help grease the wheels when I get around to a full post on those topics myself. Yes, as bold as I am on certain topics, I’m coward enough sometimes to drag my feet on others. Thanks for taking a metaphorical bullet—twice—Big Man. I owe you. As for the headline for today’s post, hopefully it will make sense by the end—I’ll have a little after-post commentary following the words of our esteemed guest poster. Now, on with the post:

---

Big Man back for another post on another controversial topic among religious folks.

This time I’m talking the Big A, not adultery, but abortion. Yeah, I’m going there, buckle your seat belts and enjoy the ride.

First of all, let me get my stance on the issue out of the way before I start breaking down why I believe what I believe. I’m pro-choice, but anti-abortion. Basically, I believe women should have the right to have legal abortions, but, I really wish they wouldn’t use that right. I’m actually pretty conflicted about the whole situation.

To some people on both sides of the abortion issue, my stance is a coward’s way out. For those people, abortion is clear cut issue; either you’re standing with women, or you’re standing with God. There is no middle ground, no shades of grey. These people aren’t the majority of Americans, but they’re a vocal enough minority to wreak havoc on the rest of our lives.

And I call bullshit on that.

Seriously, I have no respect for anti-abortion activists who picket in front of clinics with pictures of aborted babies, and I particularly despise the assholes who think it’s ok to bomb or otherwise inflict violence on abortion clinics or doctors. Deciding whether to have an abortion is one of the most difficult choices any woman could make, and I can’t comprehend what type of moral deficiency somebody has to have to shout obscenities at a woman who is trying to go through with such a tough choice.

On the other hand, those pro-choice activists who paint anybody with qualms about abortion as being some sort of religion Nazi are also a problem. Just because I don’t think abortions are a great idea doesn’t mean I hate women or want to keep them in chains under the thumbs of men. You can support somebody’s right to commit an action without actually supporting that action.

The most disturbing part of the abortion debate, at least in my mind, is how important this issue has become to the religious right. The position of the religious right has been unfairly dumped upon all traditional Christians by many abortion supporters.

First of all, the religious basis for disagreeing with abortion does not translate into a justification for passing laws against the practice. It’s very close to the argument I’ve made in my post about gay marriage and holds true for most wedge issues. People have erroneously come to believe that it is acceptable to force every American to live according to Christian ideals, and that is just silly.

In addition, I don’t think any human can be truly certain when we are given souls and truly become human in God’s eyes. Those individuals who argue that this occurs at conception have no true religious basis for that belief.

Those people who argue that it’s wrong for anyone to play God and attempt to control procreation are also living in some sort of fantasy world where they have never heard of condoms, birth control pills or the rhythm method. Unless people staunchly refuse to practice any sort of birth control, their argument against abortion based on it stymieing God’s will seems hypocritical.

Ultimately, I believe that far too many Christians in this country have allowed themselves to be bamboozled into focusing their energies on issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with the true purpose God has for their lives. The abortion argument seems to be one of those issues because I don’t think most people believe that a woman’s right to have an abortion has a direct impact on how they live their lives. If your neighbor has an abortion, I can’t see how it affects your walk with Christ.

So why are you so angry about it?

Post-game commentary

OK, Deacon Blue back again to add some final words. So, why did I slap the headline that I did on Big Man’s topic today? Because I feel like both sides in the pro-life/pro-choice debate (the vocal and in-your-face crowd, that is) have turned this issue into a spectacle. It’s almost like a (bad) spectator sport now, and both the extreme ends of the spectrum insist that people pick a team (i.e. choose unyielding ideological sides on the issues). But the issue of abortion isn’t a sport, and shouldn’t be made into one. It shouldn’t be a way for us to clash on the field and jockey for better field position.

Yes, there are women who think nothing of having abortions and who would rather go without birth control and let the dice roll, and use abortion to solve their problem later if they end up with one. But those women are rare, probably even more rare than the “welfare queens” the right-wing politicians and pundits manufacture to convince us everyone is milking the system. And let’s be fair, the left-wing creates its own bogeymen, including trying to paint fundamental and evangelistic Christians as all wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade.

For most women, this is not an easy choice, and going to a clinic to get an abortion is not a goal-line they wanted to cross. I have personal experience in this. A woman for whom I cared a great deal once faced an unwanted pregnancy and decided—painfully—to terminate the pregnancy. For reasons I don’t need to go into, carrying the child to term and giving it up for adoption just wasn’t a choice she could pick. I was there for her. I took her to the clinic and I stayed with her for emotional support. I even helped her pay for it since she couldn’t do so alone at the time. That day did come up—very briefly and very rarely—in conversations we had in the years to follow, but we had a sort of unspoken pact that we wouldn’t re-open the wounds on this issue for either one of us. We both carried some heavy spiritual and emotional baggage from that pro-choice choice, and I know it still comes up for me at times. And I still have a great deal of conflict over what did I do right that day (if anything) and what did I do wrong (if anything).

Am I pro-choice? Yes. Am I pro-life? Yes. Like Big Man, I wish that no woman ever chose this route. But it’s not a path for any of us—man or woman, Christian or not—to choose for them.