Letters to the Editor
Laurel962
Published Letters: 475 Editor's Choice: 37
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It's still ... all about sex (and sex is EVIL)
[Read the article: Pregnant and poor in Mississippi]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you actually sit down and read anti-abortion propaganda, it is abundantly clear that it is all about sexual pleasure being bad (unless it's inside marriage and just for childbearing), and that anyone who engages in it needs to be punished. Far from promoting the use of birth control, anti-abortionists are mostly opposed to any kind of contraception. Effective contraception means you CAN have sexual pleasure without pregnancy! So it's bad!
The long term goal of anti-abortionists is a world where women are too terrified to have sex outside of marriage -- and without BC -- because of their fear of pregnancy. The local thought procession of anti-abortionists is not a world of healthy, loved, wanted children but a world where nobody DARES to have sex, because they are terrified of the results. (Until they get married, then it's fine.)
This is such a seemingly logical, powerful paradigm to them that any attempt to talk rationally about forcing a 13 year old rape victim to give birth to her attackers baby, at great risk to her health, and then try to raise the child with no money or health insurance, will fall on deaf ears.
What is sad is to see many articulate, basically decent posters parroting these sad, stupid, heartless, inhumane ideas. OF COURSE, if you suddenly lost a beloved child, you would be heartbroken. But if that child had never existed, you would not be. Face it, a woman has about 400 viable eggs in her lifetime and a man, many billions and billions of sperm. The countless possibilities of children from the many potential combinations of those eggs and sperm are mind boggling....literally, the human mind can't take that kind of information in and process it. And that's ONE male-female pair. So every woman has thousands and thousands of potential children "she will never know". You simply can't think this way, it leads to madness.
As for "if you don't want a baby, use BC", that's a bogus argument. All BC has a potential failure rate, even sterilization. Most women asking for abortions have used SOME kind of birth control, though sometimes it is used inconsistently and even outright wrongly. The poorest women can't afford expensive BC pills (without insurance, these run $50 to $100 a MONTH) and so rely on condoms, which are cheap and available, but which have a high user failure rate (8-15%) and which are very often used incorrectly by the male partner. There are not many safe, affordable alternatives besides this -- the ring and patch are basically just different delivery systems for the same hormones as in the pill and just as expensive. IUDs are VERY expensive and excluded by most insurance policies, and must be inserted by a doctor.
The real way to fight unwanted pregnancy is .... frank, honest, literal instruction in human sexuality. That means sex ed classes started at around age 7, the willingness to advertise BC and condoms on TV, blunt instruction in how to use condoms correctly (bananas and all), and above all else, UNIVERSAL HEALTH INSURANCE so that every woman as access to a doctor, and to whatever prescription BC she wishes to use...and that BC be cheap or free or at least affordable. Today, NONE of that exists and in fact, ultra right wing groups adamantly oppose every single thing I mention above.
Given the situation, it's amazing that any woman manages NOT to have an unwanted pregnancy, or several. What people seem to want, even some basically liberal types, is the right to JUDGE other people on their sex lives and their choices (even while WE get to do whatever we want, cuz we have money and the ability to choose) and then to look down on them...how stupid they are! how shiftless! Surely a stupid and shiftless person DESERVES to be punished by a having a child.
BTW: There is no huge "adoption" market out there for black infants, like there is for healthy white infants. Some can be placed but not all. The children's services in every state are SWAMPED with African American children in foster care, older kids, kids with medical problems and so forth. I don't see -- I have never seen! -- ANY right wing anti-abortionist step up to the plate and adopt some of these black/mixed race/troubled/unhealthy/unplaceable children or infants. They are contempible hypocrites.