Of Abortions and Straw Men

On the Woman’s Right to Choose

Probably the number one argument that I hear when discussing or debating abortion is that “it should be the woman’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion.”  Since this is election year, 2000, I have heard it more often than I had previously, and as I listened to people give me argument after argument about why abortion should be legal, I realized that all the arguments are “Straw Men” arguments.  They are all designed to dodge past the real issue and get people thinking about another issue entirely.  Instead of being seen as whether or not a baby should be protected by law, the media has made it into an issue of a woman’s “freedom.”  The media is effectively indoctrinating Americans to believe that if you are pro-life, that you are trying to take the right away from women to “choose what to do with their own bodies.”

However, this is a dodge.  It is a Straw Man.  It gets the majority of people thinking about women’s rights instead of about whether or not abortion should be legal.  The issue has nothing to do with a woman’s right to choose.  If abortion becomes illegal, then women still have the right to choose to have one, but they will also have the choice to go to jail for their crime.  The real issue is whether or not the baby is a baby.  If the baby is a baby and not just a blob of fetal tissue, then it is a choice that should be illegal to make.  If on the other hand it is just a blob of fetal tissue that has no life of its own, then abortion should be legal.

Furthermore, if it is just a blob of fetal tissue in a woman’s stomach and is not a living being, then the criminal justice department needs to be balanced and un-hypocritical in their judgments.  For instance, as is, if a man shot and killed a baby in the womb, he would be brought up on murder charges, or at the very least manslaughter charges.  However, if this baby is really just a blob of fetal tissue, then the man cannot and should not be charged with murder or manslaughter, for he only damaged part of the woman’s body—and should only be charged with wounding the woman because “it’s only part of her body,” and is not a life of its own under our “modern” definition of a baby in the womb.

The point is:  Either the baby is a baby or the fetal tissue is just a blob of fetal tissue.  If it is a baby, then it should be treated as a human life and protected under government law—and anyone found performing or having an abortion should be tried for pre-meditated murder and given life imprisonment or the death penalty as we would any common criminal.  If, on the other hand, it is just a blob of fetal tissue, then we should treat it as such:

1. Anyone who hits, stabs, or shoots a pregnant woman and damages the fetal tissue beyond repair should only be charged in the court of law for wrongful assault of the woman and not for homicide.
2. Women who miscarry should not mourn or be sad because it’s just a heavy blood flow of fetal tissue.
3. Expecting fathers should not feel their wife’s stomach and talk to the fetal tissue as if it were another person, but should realize that it is only a blob of tissue inside their wife’s stomach and is not an actual life.
4. Women should not get excited when the blob of tissue moves around or “kicks” as if it were an actual life inside of her, but should remind herself that the blob of tissue just moved a little bit and she’ll have to put up with its stirring around until it’s outside of her body, the umbilical cord, and it then miraculously transforms from fetal tissue into a baby.
5. A woman should remember not to call it a boy or girl while it is still in her womb, because until the umbilical cord is cut, it is only a blob of tissue and is not an actual living being.

So, really, we should stop being hypocritical and just decide.  Is it a baby or is it fetal tissue.  If it’s a baby, then lets charge anyone that hurts it with murder in the first degree.  Our laws were made to protect the innocent and I can’t think of anything more innocent than a baby—or was it just a blob of fetal tissue.

On the Woman’s “Right” to a “Safe” Abortion

This is the second most stated argument that I have heard, and it is also a straw man.  Once again, it gets people focused onto the woman—and her “rights.”  However, anyone on the other side of the argument just laughs at such an idiotic argument.  To tell someone who is Pro-life that a woman has the right to a “safe” abortion is equivalent to telling cops that robbers should have a “right” to a “safe” robbery.  Think about it:

Since the beginning of humanity, people have stolen from each other.  It is a game of survival of the fittest.  To a person who is poor and starving, this life may seem like an all out war.  It is the poor against the rich.  The rich are trying to keep the poor—poor so that they always have someone that they can pay for cheap labor.  So, while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.  Well, this is all out war on the rich people.  It is a war to get the money from the rich, to “rob from the rich to give to the poor.”  These are the ideals of Robin Hood, they can’t be wrong.  Robin Hood is seen as a hero.  Since the rich people are hording their wealth and getting tax breaks at every turn, while the government gives no tax breaks to the poor, taxing the money they should have been able to spend on food for their children, it is in the poor people’s best interest to steal from the rich and give to themselves.

So, I appeal the courts of this country to provide “safe” robberies for all poor people who are down on their luck, who are starving and in need of help.  If they walk into a bank to rob it, they should not need to worry about whether or not they might get shot by the police.  They should be able to rob a bank, peacefully, and with “safety” taken into consideration.  After all, we are a modern society.  We don’t want to see poor, starving criminals shot seventeen times in the chest by police officers laying in the gutter because we haven’t provided safe robberies for them.  I mean all that the robber was trying to do was to put food on the table for his children.  He had just been laid off because his company was downsizing—he needed to be able to provide for his family—and the police just shot him as if he were a bad man.

A robber like everyone else needs to have the “right” to “choose” what he wants to do with his own life.  After all, we are all given the “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and for a robber, the only way of achieving the American dream is to be able to rob a bank “safely” and securely without fear of losing his life.  He’s only taking what the government and the rich people took from him—in looking out for their own best interests, they taxed him and took his job away to leave him jobless and broke, and now he’s only trying to take back what was taken from him, his dream for the American Dream.  We have no right to take that “right” away from him by not providing a “safe” robbery.  Who are we to say that taxing and lay-offs are legal and robbery is illegal.  It is merely a matter of perspective.  Are we God?

I hope that you can see how absurd such an argument sounds.  For what this argument is not telling you is how the robber put the lives of all the bank tellers and all the customers lives in jeopardy.  It is not taking into account the innocent people who also suffer from the robbers actions.  In short, it is a straw man argument on theft, much like the argument for abortion is a straw man argument.  What the woman’s right to a “safe” abortion doesn’t tell you is that that baby also has a right to a “safe” delivery into the world.  Unless of course, it’s just fetal tissue, in which case the above argument is still a straw man.

On the Woman’s “Right” to Choose What is “Best” for Her Baby

Now, this here is an emotional straw man, but a straw man nonetheless.  To point out what’s wrong with this argument, I will take you a few years down the road in the life of a child:

A man in his thirties has a child.  He makes a decent living as a blue collar worker, and while not rich, he can provide for his families needs—food, clothing, shelter.  He is not able to provide vacations, expensive toys, or any of life’s luxuries, but he is able to provide his children with love.  Unfortunately, one day he loses his job when there are some massive lay-offs.  He starts looking for a job, but there are none to be found.  (This may be during the Great Depression in the early 20th Century, or it may be during another Depression of similar proportions.)  The unemployment lines stretch outside of the buildings and around the block.  Everyone is looking for work.  He’s never done anything other than work on an assembly line, and he was one of the least skilled even at that.  So, he has little chance of being hired.

He’s starving, his wife is starving, and his children are starving.  He can’t bear to watch his family starve to death, but there is nothing he can do—it is all out of his control.  However, one day he realizes that it would be much better for his children and wife to die quick and painlessly than to die slowly from starving to death.  So, in his wisdom, he takes out his gun, and while his children are asleep, he puts a pillow around the end of the gun to silence it and not wake up the family members that will be shot next, and fires the gun into the heads of each of his family members as they lie sleeping.  Then, because he took the life of his family, he dooms himself to dying by starvation, but he consoles himself with this one statement that he repeats to himself over and over again to make himself feel better:

“I did what was best for them.”

Within a week, relief measures have been taken and people are given rations of bread to eat.  He’s going to live—he’s not going to starve to death.  But he lives on with the memory forever lingering—that he killed his wife and children.  He continues to try to console himself with the statement:

“I didn’t know.  I was sure I was doing what was best for them.”

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that he had no right to act as God—but that is what he did.  He decided that he couldn’t provide for his family, and so he decided, godlike, what was “best” for them.  However, he was obviously not God, and he was wrong about what was best for them.  It was their choice to make, not his.

Our country is playing God.  Our country is telling us that they know when life starts and when does not, and that they have a divine right to make that determination.  They have furthermore bestowed this godlike ability to women, who can now choose what’s “best” for their babies and their own body.  Then, the media has the nerve to call it “freedom” and a woman’s “right,” even though those arguments don’t deal with the real issue.  The real issue is not whether or not it is a woman’s “right,” but whether or not the baby is a baby, and whether or not that baby deserves the protection of law.

In some countries, a man has the right to do with “his own family” much like the woman in our country has the right to do with “her own body.”  Men in some countries could kill their wives and children, and it would be looked on as his “right” to do what’s “best” for his family.  The Nazi’s decided what was “best” for “their country” by exterminating the Jews, and now American’s decide what is “best” for their babies by “terminating” pregnancies—in short, “killing” our own babies.

I do not blame women for this so much as I blame the country that has told women that this is “their right.”  I blame the country that allows thirteen-year-old girls to be taken to an abortion clinic and have their pregnancy “terminated,” without even the knowledge of her parents.  I blame the country that has to kill their own babies so that women can feel empowered.¹ The life of the baby should be protected under law, but it is not.  Under Nazi Germany, Jews were not protected by law.  In many Islam countries, the men’s wives are not protected by law.  Now, in our country, our babies are not protected by law.  And, now, to repeat myself:

Our laws were created to protect the innocent.  So, tell me:  who is the most innocent of all?

If we’re going to debate this issue, then we need to get down to the point.  Either it is a baby, or it is just a blob of fetal tissue.  It’s not a baby when you want to have it, and fetal tissue when you don’t want to have it.  It’s one or the other—every time, and we need to decide.  I’m sick of hearing straw men arguments that are meant to dodge the issue and make people feel bad for “taking away women’s rights,” which is not the issue at all.

FootNotes

1) This statement is not my own, but was inspired by a friend’s wife, a nurse, who while in the middle of a discussion about abortion, listened for a while and then stated, “It’s sad that in order for us [women] to feel empowered, we have to sacrifice our children.”