The Governor of Texas signed into law this month a bill making abortion illegal a mere six weeks after conception—before a woman would typically realize she was pregnant. If upheld in the courts, this would effectively be a total ban on abortion in the Lone Star State.
Also, demonstrating how radical lawmakers despise women, this bill made no provision for victims of rape nor incest. More than a dozen other states have written similar draconian, anti-freedom laws into their books over the past year or so, and we should expect to see all of these being challenged in federal courts in the upcoming months and years.
As a man, I am fully aware many people will immediately shut me down when talking about this issue and say that I have no right to my thoughts. But, those people can go play in traffic. Further, as I have never been directly involved in deciding to have an abortion or not, others may say I am not qualified to have an opinion or that I don’t understand the emotional pain involved. Which is fair, and I will concede some of that ground. However, I know women who have decided to go down this path, and I have listened. Carefully.
It is important to note that nobody wants to have an abortion. There are no movements of women waving banners demanding the right to have abortions for fun or because they love the idea of going through the stress of it all. Nobody is actually pro-abortion. What they are is Pro-Choice. And, for many women, that choice is the most difficult decision they will ever make.
Historically speaking, the first mention of induced abortion is found in the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus from 1550 BCE. In Ancient Greece, the herb silphium was used as an abortifacient, while around 2300 years ago, Plato wrote of midwives performing abortions during early pregnancy.
It is an undisputed fact that most cultures have induced abortion throughout ancient and modern history, using methods often herbal, sometimes surgical, and occasionally quite strange. For example, I would like to see data for the ancient method of lying on a heated coconut shell.
From the historical record, we know for certain that women have been getting abortions for at least 3571 years, and probably many more. As a result, they have endured pain, they have suffered shaming, they have been imprisoned, and today around 70,000 women die annually from unsafe procedures.
However, with all that against them, what women have never done is stopped having abortions. Therefore, the delusion that abortion will go away for political, legal, or religious reasons is, by any measure, quite insane.
The pushback against abortions is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States.
In New York during the 1830s, and with no medical background, a lady going by the assumed name of Madame Restell started to practice abortion procedures. Within a decade and servicing a clientele of mostly White, married, upper and middle-class women, Restell swiftly grew her practice to include clinics in Boston and Philadelphia. Madame Restell continued to service the ladies of the northeastern United States for decades more, quietly attracting them with newspaper advertising that read;
Is it moral for parents to increase their families, regardless of consequences to themselves, or the well-being of their offspring, when a simple, easy, healthy and certain remedy is within our control?
A good question still.
Abortion was basically ignored until the 1800s and not considered illegal until the woman had (fans of the movie Highlander take note) received the “quickening.” This being when she felt movement in her abdomen. Until then, nobody, not even the Holy Mother Church, believed the fetus was a human or worth saving.
It wasn’t until abortion became a political issue that the Catholic Church condemned the practice in 1869, before further hardening her stance in 1895 by saying abortion was wrong even in the case of saving a woman’s life.
For about 70 years, women then found themselves in legal jeopardy for seeking out a procedure previously available to them, in one way or another, for thousands of years.
However, as they soon had the vote on both sides of the Atlantic, women were empowered to fight for their rights. Hard fought and hard-won, women clawed back their autonomy over several decades. Finally, the Abortion Act of 1967 in the United Kingdom gave women absolute sovereignty over their bodies. Later, in 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, ruling that the Texas law forbidding abortion except when necessary to save a woman’s life was unconstitutional.
And, so began the exhausting half-century-long war in the United States of America over the right of every woman to keep control of her body.
It seems, for many people, abortion is a tricky subject to discuss because it is difficult to say when life begins. However, before we get there, we may need to answer the question: What is life?
In the broadest sense, life is everything around us. Trees are alive, mold is alive, fish are alive, cows are alive, and one could even argue that the Covid-19 virus is alive. So, does merely being alive mean that life is precious or worth keeping? Or, in the context of abortion, are we only considering human beings to be alive or important, and why?
In 1633, Galileo was brought to trial by the Catholic Church for daring to claim that Earth (and, by extension, the human race) was not at the center of the universe. He was imprisoned, his works were withdrawn from view, and he was declared a heretic. It took 300 years for the church to admit being wrong on that one.
Isn’t it possible human beings aren’t that special? That the universe wasn’t created for us? That we have no intrinsic value? Could it be that just like the 99% of species that have made this planet home and gone extinct over the ages, we don’t matter? It’s certainly worth considering.
A modern worldview by the anti-choice crowd is, “life begins at conception.”
Okay. But, does it?
Because, if that is the case, why is it so hard to conceive healthy offspring? And why, in the book of Developmental Biology (6th Edition, Scott F. Gilbert) does the medical science prove that about 66% of embryos fail to implant or survive in the uterus long enough to become a fetus—typically without the woman realizing she had ever conceived?
A study from 2010 at Stanford University School of Medicine led by Professor Reijo Pera found the researchers could predict with more than 90% accuracy which fertilized human eggs will develop and which will fail to launch.
However, what the scientists unexpectedly discovered is that not all embryonic cells during the first few days of development behave identically. And each cell division does not always happen at the same time as other cells. Essentially, individual cells not dividing on schedule become out of synch with their adjacent cells and throw out the entire growth process, meaning there is only about a 33% chance of creating a viable embryo.
Professor Pera explained the issue to the press;
We’ve always thought of embryos as living or dying, but in reality, we find that each cell in the embryo is making decisions autonomously.
Therefore, as individual cells are failing to come together two-thirds of the time after conception to create a viable life, how can anyone seriously claim that at the point of conception those same individual cells have the cohesiveness to be a life?
So, from conception (when life is supposed to begin), there’s about a 65-70% natural failure rate in the first few weeks. Further, when adding known pregnancies that terminate via miscarriage within the first trimester, that percentage is even higher.
This means, if you believe in such things, with billions and billions of so-called lives flushed down the toilet, God is easily the biggest abortion provider in the history of humanity.
That’s some divine design.
Anyway, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I refuse to take any moral guidance from the self-appointed representatives of such an entity on earth.
Therefore, I find it deeply concerning that six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) are of the Catholic persuasion.
Why? Because after the theft of President Obama’s SCOTUS pick by former US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party has effectively gerrymandered the court to take out Roe v. Wade and shore up their Evangelical Christian base.
Catholicism is a minority religion adhered to by 22% of Americans, yet the SCOTUS is 66% Catholic. And, have no doubt, the Catholic majority of the court subscribe to the official teachings of their church, which claims, “human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception.”
This is nothing but cynical power politics to win the votes of those who wish to control women by getting way up into their wombs. Because that is what the seriously religious in society always want—to control women, these men believe they have dominion over the women in their lives. So they put their God at the top of the power structure, place men as head of the household, and keep women in the kitchen as much as possible.
Further, most women who oppose abortion are almost always highly religious and buy into a world of self-imposed male domination. But, that’s a different problem for another day.
Ultimately, the real issue is, legal or not; abortion will never go away.
Women can have a Medical Abortion by taking either one (or a combination of two) safe and effective pills up to 11 weeks after conception, which is the timeframe within which more than 80% of abortions occur. Medical Abortion is growing in use and, according to the CDC, counted for 40% of recorded abortions in 2018.
Well, that toothpaste ain’t going back in the tube. Do anti-choice people think the formula is a secret?
There is already a significant black market for this high-demand and lucrative product. A person would have to be out of their mind to believe it would be any more difficult to score illegal abortifacient pills than it is for America’s 1.7 million cocaine and heroin addicts to get their gear.
As ever, prohibition is not the solution. So, what to do?
The only real, sensible answer is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies as far as possible. It is better to educate, educate, educate women until they use birth control like they wear a seat belt and to do the same with men until they use condoms as if their manhood would fall off if they didn’t.
This requires exercising extreme caution when discussing birth control, sex, and sexuality with those who see such things in puritanical and/or religious terms. At the end of the day, people need solid data and pragmatism, not preaching, to make smart decisions without crippling judgment or shaming.
But, with the danger of sounding preachy myself, it does seem best to encourage both sexes to act extra responsibly to the point of not being in a position to get pregnant until they are in a committed relationship or marriage and feel ready to take on the immense burden and expense of raising children in an ever more competitive world.
That may be a good place to start, I think? Molloy