Skip to main content

"Abortion On Demand"...

...is a laughable and pathetic platitude that comes from the mouths of right-wing politicians all too often these days. (To paraphrase the late great Bill Hicks, every word that comes out of their mouths is now like a turd falling into my drink.) It's clear in the minds of many Republicans that unless we eliminate funding to Planned Parenthood and the like, we should expect abortion franchises to pop up at every corner, akin to the near-viral proliferation of Rite-Aid and check cashing joints, to satisfy this overwhelming 24/7 demand for abortion that does not and will never exist.

Thankfully, my only experience with abortion has been researching it for my classes, and while it's certainly the least favorite section of my Human Sexuality class, I would never dream of excising such compelling and important material. (And I'm pleased that the most recent text I chose for the class took the abortion discussion out of the contraception chapter -- abortion as contraception is an incorrect conceptualization, showing a fundamental misunderstanding of "contraception" IMHO -- placing it instead in the discussion of pregnancy.)

While a slim majority of the country is now in the "pro-life" side of the debate (or, if you inflame the rhetoric and distort the language, "anti-choice"), one would hope that an overwhelming majority of Americans understands how hard it is to find someone who's "pro-abortion" in the way that the utterance "abortion on demand" connotes. But more and more, I'm not sure that that understanding exists. This article reports on the changing face of abortion providers, and there were two stats from the article that leaped out at me:

  • 87% of U.S. counties have no known abortion provider
  • 2% of ob-gyns perform 50% of all abortions in the U.S.

For the vast majority of recipients of either medical or surgical abortion, the choice for elective abortion isn't much of a choice, with the potential mother neither emotionally nor financially ready for a child at that point in her life. (A child born in 2009 will cost $282,000 from birth until the age of eighteen.) And I defy you, good reader, to find a single woman that has personal pleasure as the primary motivation for abortion.

History shows us that women motivated to terminate pregnancy will do so regardless of whether or not the law is on her side. A few years ago, Hillary Clinton (who has my vote for 2016) laid out her ideas on abortion (analyzed here) that have echoed many of my own thoughts on the subject: that the ultimate number of abortions that should be performed is zero, and that education and opportunity for women is a major tool in getting there. That's what should be on demand, and we should demand it loud and clear for women everywhere.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...

The Natural's Not In It

  For nearly seven years on the button, Courtney and I lived on Perch Lake, just outside of Gaylord. Right next to Perch Lake was The Natural Golf Course, eighteen holes that twisted and turned through the best nature that the 45th Parallel could offer. The picture above is the view of the first green, and if you left the wooden bridge to the right and briefly ambled through the woods and over a rusted metal fence, you'd get right to our old driveway. Every now and again, an errant golf ball would appear at the edge of our property, like a single egg laid by an itinerant duck. Of the three major elitist sports -- golf, tennis, skiing -- I golfed because the barrier to entry was pretty low and the interest in golf on my Dad's side of the family was high, from playing the sport to watching it on television on the weekends. As spare clubs were abundant and my growth spurt had yet to overwhelm statistical norms, my grandmother would take prepubescent me to the Roscommon driving ran...