Political Frenzy

Fellow 451 Blogger Jeff O’Bryant wrote a recent article concerning the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban. But the ban, I felt, took a back seat to another, absolutely wonderful, point he made:

As an opponent of abortion I’ve all too often condemned the practice in the harshest of terms without offering any alternative. Most pro-lifers do. And, to be sure, it is a practice that justly deserves condemnation. Increasingly, however, I see that our energy and resources should be spent in finding alternatives that work, that help women, rather than on the legality of the issue itself.

I think it should be noted that no one wants to see an increase in the amount of abortions going on in America (psychos, as always, excluded). If I had a gun to my head, and was forced to choose either the pro-life or pro-choice “label”, I would pick the latter. But the fact is I want an America where no women have to get an abortion.

First of all, Partial Birth Abortions (where the fetus is removed from the woman’s body and then terminated) are disgusting. They are only used for women in their second and third trimesters, and for God’s sake, if you can’t get an abortion in the first trimester, what the hell are you doing in the second or third? Couldn’t be bothered to make an appointment? It is revolting that this procedure has somehow become the center of debate for the issue, when the issue shouldn’t even be abortions at all!

Places like Planned Parenthood, the seat of the pro-choice movement, you’ll find often don’t even focus on abortion. Getting women birth control, STI prevention, and lots of advice come first and foremost. In Seattle, Planned Parenthood distributes condoms and pamphlets about the different options a woman has when she gets pregnant (with adoption being first on that list) to adult-oriented local businesses, like the Scream Barbershop where I get my hair cut (fauxhawk please).

What we all need to work on creating is an America where no one gets pregnant when they don’t want to. And that’s by better educating kids. First of all, I would like to address “Abstinence Only Education”. According to a US House of Representatives Investigation in 2004 the abstinence-only programs in the US contained serious factual errors:
* false representation of the effectiveness rates of contraceptives
* using old and discredited research to make wide claims that HIV is transmissible through a condom.
* exaggerating claims that abortions will lead to infertility or cause stillbirths
* treating stereotypes about gender roles as scientific fact (this one is unforgivable!)

Now, I’m probably the only person on the 451 Press Political Channel young enough to have gone through modern sex education in this country. My current girlfriend, hailing from Florida, went to a school that was teaching abstinence-only sex education before it was cool.

I didn’t even pay attention in sex ed (I liked to doodle cartoons about monsters eating buildings) and I still knew far more than she did about the different ways to be safe during sex. Heck, I know things my parents weren’t even aware of! Like a T-bar. It’s a device implanted in the uterus that releases a constant supply of hormones for two months when it needs to be replaced. It’s called a T-bar because it looks like a half-inch long tube until it’s implanted, when two little “arms” pop out of the sides to it can be put in place like a grappling hook. Pretty weird, huh?

And just because they were teaching me how to be safe, doesn’t mean they weren’t emphasizing abstinence. We were shown slides of some terrible, terrible STIs, and it was explained that any part of the genitalia touching any infected cell could result in transmission - not even a condom would save you. The last whole day was spent explaining that abstinence is the best possible route for preventing a pregnancy.

So I left that class armed with the knowledge of how to protect myself and what methods were best (not doing it first and foremost). Meanwhile, a chap I knew over the internet from various political chat rooms once confided in me, telling me he was afraid he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant. I asked “Why didn’t you wrap it up, man!?” he told me “I didn’t think I had to, it was only oral sex. Why didn’t someone tell me you could get pregnant that way!” When I asked, it was revealed he lived in north Texas, and had never had sex education. I was the one who had to break the news to him that either she wasn’t pregnant, or she was cheating on him.

Look, people will be having premarital sex forever. In this day and age, some people don’t even want to get married! And if we don’t educate our kids, we’ll be reverting to the horror stories of Rome. I leave you with these historical tidbits.

In Ancient Rome, when a woman wanted to end a pregnancy, she would starve herself to the brink of death, as she could survive longer without food than the child. If that failed, she would drink small portions of poison; not enough to kill her, but enough to kill an infant. She would get violently sick, and often eject the child in a seizure. On occasion, when the woman was of enough wealth, she would get one of her handmaidens to form a long, thin pole out of lead and use it to reach up inside the woman to stab the child and retrieve the body. Although if the woman was a slave and the master did not want the child, it was believed that having all the men of the household, including male slaves, constantly rape the woman would induce an abortion.

I don’t know how many times I’ve said it, but we do not want America to turn into another Ancient Rome. All of the above terror is the result of a sexualized society without a condom in sight.