Abortion

Over the 40 years I have been writing this column I have learned some very important lessons. When you have free press, which very few do, you learn that so called “tough questions” themselves are usually not tough. Right and wrong is usually very clear. Disagreement is usually caused by religion and/or distorted values. Tragically these are the prevailing emotions among those that call themselves pro-life. To be clear up front we are all pro-life. This movement has nothing to do with life. A better more truthful fit would be a pro-biofluid movement.

I am saying they co-opted the pro-life name to make it appear as though another view is not pro-life. We are all pro-life. It is my view that this movement does not properly apply variables. My thinking embraces the truth in understanding that men, religion and politics are all three, incapable of morality in this arena. It is my view that in this arena, they want to control life that has not progressed scientifically to a state that justifies their intense desire for all encompassing protection.

I am not disrespecting the so-called pro-life adherents. But the laws and extremism surrounding bio-fluids have become comparable to the archaism of age-old religious barbarity.     

This is about protecting the right of every woman to protect her health, her life and her future. It disgusts me that when your daughter, wife or mother is pregnant, no matter how vile, cruel or filthy the insemination, there are those that demand to control what you do. Be it a violent beating rape of your child or any other circumstance, it is male strangers, or sometimes males you despise that make the decision on how to proceed. Usually, they decide recklessly with religious or political self-serving bias and inhuman regard for the health and futures of women.

If reason could prevail, an intelligent discussion and agreements could be had in this area. However, irreconcilable differences exist preventing this. Leaving one answer. The health and welfare of females must take precedent over extremism. The only answer that protects women is for them to be able to decide. 

Pro-biofluid protectors are capable only of false conviction, not reason. This group is so repugnantly extreme that they actually embrace these secretions as life. In Alabama, they gave frozen sperm and egg human rights. If gestation is interrupted at any stage from inception to birth, it is now a felony in many states. Patients or their parents and doctors go to jail and are branded for life as criminals. The health of females (women and children) is not just endangered, they often die.  

There is nothing in the Bible about abortion. These beliefs are the interpretations of these self-appointed guardians of cruel stupidity.

Examples abound but none is more heart wrenching than what I am writing about today. Religion and Politics have corrupted just and moral views and this has resulted in unparalleled human suffering.

In my life, the abuse of women on so many levels has never ceased to amaze me. The belittlement, the inequality, the demeaning of human value on so many levels, and the false male sense of superiority that exists in full force in Republican circles today are a human disgrace. Only in the last century were women’s voices even heard. It was 1848 when the suffrage movement took hold. After 72 years of struggle, women finally achieved the right to vote in 1920.

Like with the emancipation of slaves, the Jim Crow like stigmatization of women’s equality remains a part of the female struggle. How disturbing that women still are in pursuit of recognition as equal among our species. 

The Republican Party’s dispassionate lack of regard for the pain and danger involved in bearing children is breathtaking. To make regulation without these considerations is cruel beyond description. Republican convictions on life, which include in-vitro fertilization, take religious dogma to new levels of idiotic disparity with normalcy. IVF is the joining of sperm with an egg. They tried to make it murder to dispose of this ejaculate and egg. They lost, yet an individual donor or provider will be prosecuted if this frozen matter is not kept usable.

To create this frozen extract an embryologist mixes harvested eggs with sperm. Following the logic of these hideous dictators of life’s origins you now have a child. You don’t. You have mixed bodily fluids. Yet in Alabama the doctor or patient can go to jail for violating the rights of this spermatic mix.

This movement, that denies women the right to control their own bodies and protect their very lives and often the lives of their daughters, is not on the highway to heaven. The example I will furnish shows that the road they are on is rather the road they fear the most. Imagine having an unplanned pregnancy that would permanently disrupt your life and affect the number of children you may have when you are ready in the future. A pregnancy you are 100% unprepared for that would severely endanger your life and your future. The following story was made into a short film (Red White and Blue) and nominated for an Oscar. It is one of countless similar stories that take place every day:

One day she recognized the signs of pregnancy. She went to the drug store and purchased a pregnancy test. At home, she was horrified by the result. Positive. She was completely unprepared. She cried and cried and cried. She quickly realized she could not bring up this child. There were enormous health issues that would endanger her life and there was no money for another child. She knew the law in her state. So, she asked for more hours at work and slaved for a month. She was running out of time so she begged and borrowed the last few hundred she would need.  

She finally had enough money. She packed up her 9-year-old daughter and some cookies and candy, a few toys and her favorite doll. Off they went. By nightfall they had entered the city in an adjoining state where abortion was legal. The clinic was busy. Exhausted, she went inside, taking her daughter and her doll with her. She told her daughter to sit in the waiting room.

She approached the desk and explained she was there for an abortion. They told her the calendar was full and it would take two days for an appointment. She explained it was an extreme emergency and she could not wait. They asked for her date of birth. She looked back at her daughter as she gave the year. The nurse looked confused and then realized suddenly what was going on. It is for my 9-year-old daughter. She was raped and left for dead.

The nurse scheduled her immediately. They went home the next day, Mother and Daughter, traumatized for life, and the healing that could be, began.

What gives these cruel religious zealots and these bought male self-serving politicians the right to force such horror upon women and little girls. No God would sanction such terror.

Bill McClellan