!!! WARNING NOTE !!!
This essay about abortions and miscarriages is going to be ugly and be rife with triggers for a lot of people especially those that have been affected by either. I have written about abortions before.
If you already have a strong position one way or the other that women are murderers this essay is not for you and will only be upsetting to you.
Yes you are. No I’m not.
I am pro-life, pro-choice and not “for” abortions. Pro-life people may take issue with that position but they don’t get to make up the rules.Trump was pro-choice before he decided to run for President as a Republican and needed the support of Evangelicals led by Pool Boy Falwell Jr. (He was the first of the Evangelicals to throw in with Trump.) Trump needed his moral authority.
Murderers!
It’s easy for Evangelicals to call women that have abortions murderers. Evangelicals are making this kind of language and such thoughts commonplace among their sort. Their trolls fill up election comments sections about Murderers!
Then they act on them.
Punishment!
Abortions will happen whether they’re legal or illegal. Making them illegal didn’t work in the past and it won’t work in the future.
I do not see that punishing women is a desirable or solution. Throwing a few million women in jail as murderers seems counterproductive to me. BUT I’m not an Evangelical. They are into punishment. They want people punished. They will disagree. BUT they either believe that its murder or they don’t. The Law and Order crowd of Trump believes in punishment and incarceration. Get tough! Beat ‘em up! Shoot people!
They’re set to victimize.
Women have rights.
A woman that chooses to terminate her pregnancy is not “murdering” her baby nor should she be punished.
Based upon the recent uptick in anti-abortion memes in social media the conservative evangelicals are cranking up to support President Trump in 2020 by making abortion a cause célèbre for President Trump once again. They have to rally the troops! So get ready to hear more about killer women murdering their babies in the next couple of months.
Praying for miscarriages!
Paula White, the woman mentioned in the next paragraph, is a spiritual advisor to the “Chosen One” a.k.a. President Trump. She’s crazy. You can watch a lot of her on YouTube. Evangelicals eat this stuff up. It has nothing and I mean absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ our savior.
In plain simple straight forward not politically correct language Paula White is asking for God to abort fetuses. PLURAL. White is also acknowledging that if God is in charge of miscarriages then miscarriages are abortions from God.
I lifted the below comments from a Washington Post article:
Crazy
“In video of the Jan. 5 sermon, posted by the liberal advocacy group Right Wing Watch, televangelist pastor Paula White breathlessly calls on Jesus Christ to “command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now.”
“So Paula White wants everyone at @WhiteHouse to know she is praying for abortion,” tweeted Jennifer Gunter, an obstetrician and gynecologist who writes a column on women’s reproductive health for the New York Times.
Not crazy
“No pregnancies are satanic. Every child is a gift from God,” tweeted James Martin, a prominent Jesuit priest. “No one should ever pray for any woman to miscarry. No one should ever pray for evil or harm to befall another person. Jesus asked us to pray for our persecutors, not to curse them. To love our neighbors as ourselves.”
END OF COMMENTS
Here’s a link to the video of White making her comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvc7TDJhksA
White’s comments are representative of the Amerika that the Evangelical Party is trying to create as they break down the barriers between the Christian Church and the state.
Spin the wheel!
I watched President Trump when he was running for office express several different positions on abortion within the span of two days. He’s had several over the years. He has said that he has evolved and is no longer pro-choice. That’s because he needed the conservative vote of the Evangelical Party.
In 2015 Trump did not call it murder. He said that abortion and same sex marriage should be a state’s rights issue. He also provided several caveats as to when abortion (murder) should be allowed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzGrSYWAkxg (Published July 24, 2015.)
Then in a blinding light of honesty he provided a totally logical answer to the “should women be punished” question. You have to watch until the 2m21s mark before he finally gets pinned down for answer. You can see him thinking about the answer and reaching a conclusion. If it’s called murder then the woman should be punished. Of course then the pro-life movement was all over him for stating the truth about their position. The truth is dangerous to them.
They understand bad optics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGSttcyn2RI (Published Mar 30, 2016.)
So then Trump evolved some more and went back to just calling it murder but that women shouldn’t be punished. He also said that this is the way things are until the law is changed.
Guess what?
The pro-life movement is trying to do that very thing. He also said again that this issue should be a matter of state’s rights.
In the beginning he wanted to dodge this bullet. Now as President he wants to load it in the gun. He needs it for his base. It can be a rally chant.
“Jail murdering women! Lock ‘em up! Jail murdering women! Lock ‘em up!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-33wt9KKGxs (Published April 1, 2016.)
How many jailed?
What are these female baby-killing machines up to anyhow? How many women murderers do we have anyway?
According to the numbers available CDC website 623,471 women received abortions in 2016 the most recent figure available. That’s a year. That means hundreds of thousands of women could be charged, convicted and incarcerated. Hundreds of thousands.
That’s a LOT of murderers on the streets. Given the hordes of illegal brown immigrants marauding on the streets it’s a wonder there’s room for regular folks to walk or drive around. The problem is that they look like regular people. That’s a real problem. One in four women may have an abortion but you can’t tell just by looking at them. That innocent looking woman behind the checkout counter could be a bloodthirsty murderer of children. Poor people after all are much more likely to be murderers.
It either is or it isn’t.
What’s to be done with all of these murdering women anyway? Should they be punished? After all, if the woman doesn’t go and have her pregnancy terminated there can be no murder. If a pro-life person tells you that the woman shouldn’t be punished then they don’t really believe that it’s murder. It’s either murder or it isn’t. There really isn’t any wriggle room on this.
Except there is.
Those Tricksters.
Currently the pro-life movement says that the woman should not be held legally liable; the woman should not be punished. But while maintaining that position the pro-life movement is also pursuing having a fetus defined as a person. When this happens women that have abortions will be legally committing premeditated murder. Those pro-life tricksters! They say that they oppose punishing women while pursing legislation that will result in women being punished.
Fetus police.
There’s plenty of room for collateral damage. We haven’t even got to the women that miscarry. They are all potential murderers. If a woman is known to be pregnant one day and isn’t the next shouldn’t there be an investigation? How would people know whether it’s a miscarriage or murder? Wouldn’t there be an obligation to call in the fetus police?
More walls!
This could prove to be a real boon to the construction industry because a lot of prisons and/or internment camps are going to have to be built to house all these offenders. More walls! They do love walls. And that’s just for the murdering hordes of women. That won’t count the women that will be accused of and found guilty of endangering their fetus. Fertile grounds for the fetus police. Woman smoking while pregnant! Incarcerate her! Woman drinking a glass of wine while pregnant! Incarcerate her! Woman riding a motorcycle while pregnant! Incarcerate her! Woman participating in sports! Incarcerate her! Seriously the potential for incarcerating women is virtually unlimited!
Incredible amount of sadness.
Of the child-bearing women that I know the majority have had miscarriages. Our mother miscarried. My first wife miscarried. It is estimated that twenty percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. (Does that sound like Intelligent Design? A 20% failure rate.) That is a huge number and a conservative estimate. Women can miscarry and not even know that they were pregnant. Would that just be manslaughter?
That means that upwards of a million women annually will miscarry, depending upon the number of live births. This is an important number to keep in mind for later. Just avoid getting caught up in the numbers because different groups just make up their own numbers to suit their position as near as I can tell.
According to Focus On the Family (FOF) one quarter of American women will have had an abortion by the age of 45.
Ninety percent of abortions take place in the first trimester. All of the extreme cases of abortion that will get so much social media time constitute one percent or less of abortions. The majority of miscarriages also take place in the first trimester.
Trending.
In 1973 Supreme Court of the United States decided that abortion was legal. This is the law that pro-life is constantly trying to overturn by various means. Since 1995 the overall trend of abortions has been downward.
Easy targets.
Now why do I draw conservative Christians along with right wing evangelical leaders into this morass? Well they have put themselves right smack in the middle of it. They’re up to their eyeballs in it and have been for decades. It’s their baby so to speak.
Unwed mothers are easy targets, especially when they’re poor. They’re vulnerable physically and emotionally. You won’t see them lining up to defend themselves or their decision. What they have been through is trauma enough. Too many have had to run the gauntlet of religious zealots screaming “murderer” and “baby killer” at them.
Target rich environment.
And we’ve got lots of working class people to charge. Lots of poor people too. Forty million people in this country live in poverty. They don’t have access to the resources available to the elite. They can’t afford to send their daughters to other countries or special doctors in this country. Most of the time these women don’t have anywhere else to go.
They don’t have the same access to health care because they simply can’t afford it any more than they can afford contraception. Now, I know that there are people that say that condoms are cheap enough for anyone to be able to afford them. These people do not understand poverty.
They also do not understand humanity.
BTDT
Making abortions illegal doesn’t stop them. Never has. Never will. We need to learn from that. Evangelicals are yet again trying to get the government to do what they have not been able to accomplish for hundreds of years and impose their beliefs upon all of society. They want women getting back alley abortions again and if they die then that’s their God’s punishment.
Evangelicals also oppose contraception along with sex education. Perfect. They’ve covered all the bases. Basically they oppose anything that works.
Abortion is just an issue that Evangelicals hype to whip up their Conservative base to vote for people that will give them political power and advance their theocratic agenda. Sanctity of Life is just a catchphrase they use for getting votes for their patrons. (Otherwise they would be wearing masks, not pushing to send kids to the front lines and not want children caged and separated from their families.)
They are evil assholes.
What does work?
There really isn’t any one easy answer. Working to make a positive difference in people’s lives will make a difference and drive statistics down and not underground. Eliminating the need for abortions is going to take a lot of work.
Ω Contraception works. (Evangelicals claim abstinence works. It doesn’t.)
Ω Sex education works. When I was in the Army a Sergeant friend of mine confided that he needed contraception advice. He and his wife were Catholic. His wife was using birth control pills—as a suppository. Sex education is critical!
Ω Access to free contraceptives for men and women is critical. Especially for women. It’s difficult to get men to use condoms.
Ω Health insurance.
Ω Medical science works. Advances have reduced the number of miscarriages and will continue to lower the mortality rate for giving birth. The field will continue developing better methods of contraception.
Get a job!
By and large Conservatives treat the poor like it’s their fault they’re poor. Trump likes the poor. They work cheap at his hotels and golf courses. They are his servants. The rich like cheap help. They don’t believe in paying living wages. They don’t believe in universal healthcare.
Essentially they believe that social programs take money out of their pockets and give it to undeserving people.
Poverty is a killer. Literally and figuratively. Capitalism isn’t working. Our Republic isn’t working properly. If it was we wouldn’t have 40 million people living in poverty. Eliminating or simply reducing poverty by tens of millions would be beneficial across a broad spectrum of social ills.
It’s about control!
If it wasn’t about control Evangelicals would be OK with sex education and contraception. They don’t believe in government involvement in their practicing religion but they push for government involvement in controlling women and how they conduct themselves. They used to be in the bedroom with laws until they were kicked out.
They want back in.
Unless they’re the ones doing it.