Manipulators

Time Online had a lengthy article on abortion yesterday.

OneWoman at a Time

“Hillary Clinton has called abortion “a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women” and talks about improving education and access to birth control so that abortion becomes a right most women never have to exercise.”

If she really means it, this sounds good.

“With abortion-rights advocates now in leadership positions, “pro-life legislative advances will inevitably be shut down.””

As written, this may be true, but not in the way that would increase abortion. The goal for all sides is to reduce abortion – for the anti-choice, anti-life people, this means forcing every pregnancy to birth. For the pro-life, pro-choice people, this means making sure each pregnancy is a safe, healthy, wanted one, and if there is a problem, to work through it in the best way possible for all concerned.

This is something the conservatives tend to forget. No one wants an abortion, but sometimes, it is the only possible, viable choice. Conservatives are fixated on the fetus at the expense of everyone else, and they will do everything they can to make sure that fetus becomes a baby. But once the baby is here, it’s suddenly unwanted. There’s no support for the after-birth being or the mother and any prior children she may have. They’ve put up this barrier at the birth. Before birth, all that matters is the fetus. After birth, eh, who cares? Let ’em starve, let ’em suffer, let ’em die. They did their job and made sure that fetus drew breath.

“In the past 10 years, as public funding for family planning has stalled, unplanned pregnancy rates have jumped 29% among poor women; they are now more than four times as likely to have abortions as richer ones.”

Read that again. Because family planning has stalled out, isn’t easily available, and the focus on sex education has shifted from how it happens and how to prevent it to “don’t do it”, unplanned (unwanted) pregnancies have jumped. Preventing pregnancies is a much better option than abortion – and abstinence is not and should not be the only way to prevent pregnancy.

“”We’re willing to offer $200, $300, $400 on the spot, no strings attached,” says Pat Foley, who runs the Wakota Life Care Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. “No life should end because of money.””

But plenty of lives end because of money. They just happen to be older than a fetus, therefore unworthy, apparently, of assistance. Economic pressure doesn’t end with birth. Trust me when I say economic pressure from having a baby can last a quarter of a century or more. It doesn’t ease up, it just changes nature – from nappies and applesauce to college tuition and gasoline.

“…most clients are unmarried, and “the Bible clearly states that sex outside of marriage is against God’s will for our lives.””

This is why religion shouldn’t be mix health matters with religion. If a woman wants to consult her spiritual advisor, outside of a health setting, she should certainly have that option. Pastors and representatives of any religion should not cloak their work in pseudo-scientific terms, using medical equipment to support their religious claims if it is used to coerce people into toeing their religious line.

” But because promoting abstinence before marriage is a part of the CPC mission, centers are eligible for federal abstinence-education grants, which in some cases have instantly doubled or tripled their budgets.”

There should not be “federal abstinence-education grants”, primarily because this elevates one group of religions over all others. People’s personal lives are not a matter for government intervention. Government shouldn’t use tax dollars to fund religious endeavors. I have been utterly and completely opposed to faith-based funding by the government. It doesn’t matter what the religion promotes, tax dollars don’t go to any religion for any purpose, no matter how worthy. If people feel it is worthy enough, they will support it with non-tax dollars. Tax money should be spent on projects and work that will benefit the entire public across all racial, gender, health, faith, cultural, and wealth lines. When it benefits a limited number of the people, it needs to be supported by those people and the ones who choose to support them.

“It accused centers of focusing on women’s needs through the first two trimesters but then abandoning them once obtaining an abortion becomes much more difficult.”

I don’t know the veracity of this accusation, but if it is true, then these religions don’t even take care of the women they force to remain pregnant until birth. I find that disturbingly wrong on so many gentle, caring, loving levels.

“Los Angeles Democrat Henry Waxman, now chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, investigated federally funded CPCs, using callers posing as pregnant 17-year-olds. The investigators reported that 20 of 23 centers they reached provided “false or misleading information about the health effects of abortion,” inflating the risk of breast cancer, infertility, depression and suicide.”

I find that unutterably sad and depressing. Why would a religion, a majority religion in particular, feel the need to lie to the people they profess they want to help? How can anyone provide help if that help is based on lies, misdirection, and fear-mongering?

I knew they were lying to the women, but such blatant and easily confirmed lies? Come on, people, if you’re going to lie, make it at least believable. A good lie has to sound more believable than the truth. These don’t. Neither do these lies: “NARAL reported that in the course of promoting abstinence, a counselor told an investigator that “all condoms are defective and have slots and holes in them.” Another warned that “9 out of 10 couples that go through an abortion split up.””

“…according to the Guttmacher Institute, fewer than 0.3% of patients experience a complication serious enough to require hospitalization.”

Now, here’s a bit of truth you don’t ever hear at those CPCs. The risk of an abortion is so very much less than the risk of pregnancy and childbirth itself. Every 60 seconds, 24 hours a day, a woman dies from childbirth complications. 90% of all pregnant women experience at least one complication during their pregnancy, between 15 and 29.1% experience serious complications. That’s about 1 in 4 pregnant women with serious complications – lifelong or life-threatening complications requiring hospitalization – or a funeral.

Abortion, by comparison, is the safer alternative with only 1 in 333 women experiencing serious complications.

You don’t hear that at a CPC, though.

The only reason the CPCs lie about it is to frighten women into doing what they want the woman to do, and not what is right for the woman.

We need to stop listening to what these humans want pregnant women to do , and focus instead on what the woman needs to have done.

“the only facility in all of western North Carolina that publicly offers abortions is the city’s Femcare clinic. It has a fence around it, cameras, alarms and a security guard because it was bombed in 1999 and had its windows shot out in 2003.”

And this comes from people who presumably believe in the 10 Commandments and the word of Jesus as preached in the New Testament, right? The ones who claim peace is their goal, and to turn the other cheek, and that murder is wrong? Those people? What happened to them that they don’t listen to their own gospel?

“”You never know who’s going to see this and think it’s their moral duty to kill us.””

Again, talking about the people who believe in a loving God; people who have a commandment against killing. When did it become “moral” to kill someone without an arrest, trial, conviction? That sort of morality is best suited for the immoral, unethical, lawless people of the world.

“Hutchinson has wrestled with it himself, as a spiritual matter. “I never would have said that the ends justify the means,” he says. “But I know that was in my heart–if lying helps save a baby’s life, that glorifies God.””

And there you have it – if lying saves a baby’s life, but not a child’s or a woman’s, or even a man’s life, then it glorifies their God. Killing children, women, and men, but not babies!, is perfectly fine, so long as that fetus lives long enough to gasp its first breath. Then it becomes fair game for killing. How backward and cruel that seems to me.

” The hard-core “Culture-War Christians,” he [Hutchinson] says, “have no interest in finding common ground. Their constituencies don’t like it; they won’t send in any more money.””

That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? Not God, but money. The reason these people fight so hard to “save babies” is money. They don’t care about the baby after it’s born. They don’t care about the woman who birthed that baby. They don’t care about the woman’s family that already depends on her. They don’t care about the community as a whole. They only care that they can use the pitiful little face of a fetus or a newborn to extract more money out of gullible, kind people.

Money.