Abortion!

Today a man decided it would be a good idea to shoot a bunch of people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, three are dead including one police officer, and seven or eight more people are injured as of the most recent report I have seen.

There's a lot to talk about here, the usual stuff about how this guy got taken alive, yet Laquan McDonald gets shot 16 times for killing nobody, or we could talk about how the major news outlets are all going out of their way to avoid using the word terrorist, or terrorism and stressing we should wait to make conclusions, you know, since this guy is white and therefore clearly not a terrorist. There is also the talk about how it is unclear if he even wanted to be at the clinic at all when he started shooting, like he accidentally walked in through the security doors and then couldn't get out or something so he just decided to murder people there instead of the restaurant across the street.

The thing is, there is nothing wrong with the above assumptions, yeah the cops should try to take people alive, yes we shouldn't jump to terrorism or assume motivation before we actually know something, the problem is we only show this consideration when a white guy is committing the crime, it's the hypocrisy and the complete and utter lack of self awareness that is pissing people off here.

But I want to talk about Planned Parenthood and abortion, while a good case can be made that going after abortion services is just an excuse to kill publicly funded women's health care as part of the ongoing attempt to punish women for having or wanting to have sex, which is what I believe to be the case, I have already written about that and probably will again.

Nothing seems to set the conservatives in the modern world off more than abortion, and Planned Parenthood, as the most visible provider of those services, regardless of how many they actually perform (whatever number you guess, it is still probably higher than the reality) gets to be the target of all their ignorant vitriol, and makes those who work at and who use their clinics among the most common victims of terrorist attacks in the US, but why is it that abortion sets people off so much?

Historically it hasn't been an issue until sometime in the Victorian era, at least in the western world, and records of ancient civilizations such as Babylon, Assyria, Greece, and Egypt all seem to at least have made  an effort to record contraceptive and abortion methods, and did so in such a way as to indicate they weren't particularly taboo. So what happened?

Christianity happened, at least that is my assumption, but it really took until the 15 or 1600s for laws to become widely enacted condemning the practice, previous to that even many religious figures were relatively permissive of it, St. Augustine was against it, but not because he thought it was killing fetuses, but because it broke the link between sex and procreation, which was pretty much the common idea at the time he lived, numerous Islamic scholars and doctors wrote treatises on how to safely practice abortion, and St. Thomas Aquinas put a thirty day limit on the practice during which it was not a sin, this lasted until 1869 before the Catholic Church officially condemned all forms of abortion.

It's no surprise that as a patriarchal religion and its offshoots increased in power, so to did limitation on the actions of women in regards to their own health, but the idea that abortion is murder, and that all involved should be subject to death is a rather more recent development, and thankfully, not the law of the land in most of the western world.

Today, people like Marco Rubio and, well, basically every Republican, want to severely limit or remove the right to have an abortion altogether, having embraced the idea that a fetus is a living being and should not be killed, however most of them are not ideologically consistent, allowing exceptions in the case of rape or incest, the thing is, if abortion really is murder, than the fetus shouldn't be terminated no matter what its origin is, it isn't to blame for how it was formed after all, the fact that these exceptions are included seems to be an attempt at compassion, but in reality is just another way of punishing women for choosing to have sex, rather than having it forced upon them "Oh you were raped? Fine you can have an abortion" vs "Oh you had sex and don't want a baby? Suck it up."

The whole idea is ridiculous to me, arguing about when or whether a fetus is alive or not. I get the choice of what happens to my body, if I was infested by a parasite that needed to live in my body for nine months no one would think twice about me getting rid of it, especially if it brought on the physical and hormonal changes that pregnancy does. But all of a sudden, when a dude's penis is involved, a few multiplying cells have absolute priority over a woman's life and health? Screw that, as far as I am concerned there's no contest, and don't give me that "what if Einstein/Jesus/you were aborted?" crap, if I got to make a choice, and I knew my my unwanted presence would give my mother nine months of misery and possibly trap her in a cycle of poverty, abuse, a loveless marriage, or the sacrifice of her other dreams, the only moral choice would be to choose not to be born. As should anyone who cares about inflicting pain on another.

If we accept that women have agency, then we must accept that they can deal with the consequences of their own actions, that means they get to choose if they carry a fetus to term, and they get to choose if they don't, this is not a scenario that needs the input of a man here.

Back to the backlash though, murders, hate speech, and whatnot, I believe that feminism is on the rise and the patriarchy is slowly eroding, opinion polls on things like abortion would seem to agree with me on this. This ties in to the increasing extremism of the conservatives in the political field too, those on the other side are seeing it, and they are getting desperate to cling to relevancy as they slowly are ground into a minority.  The religious speakers increasingly diverge from the message of love their books supposedly provide, focusing instead on appeals to emotion and driving their base up to fight against, rather than for something. They do not honestly hold their beliefs, but they do honestly want to keep their power, and any attacks on it, be it the election of a black President, the assumption that poor people deserve good lives, or that women can control what happens to their bodies are direct threats to their position of power, they are old, white, affluent men who have never been told anything other than that they deserve to be on top in all things, and it terrifies them that the cracks are beginning to show.

My heart bleeds.