Reading time ~ 8 minutes
An excerpt from a previous post
Use the Tiny ULR below to read the original, full-length article on how abortion was turned into a political football in 1971 by Nixon’s White House adviser Pat Buchanan in order to sway Roman Catholics & conservative Christians to vote for Nixon’s re-election.
Nixon publicly renounced his previous pro-choice stance, claiming to have seen the error of his ways and become a born-again “pro-lifer”. It worked and he won by a landslide.
The Republican party immediately swapped out its historical “pro-business” stance for an anti-abortion, pro-Christianity platform and implemented its “Southern Strategy” — focusing on traditional Christianity and “pro-life” sentiments to convince Southern Democrats to vote straight Republican. https://tinyurl.com/yyuobu45
However, I encourage you to read this true story first, and then return to its politics.
The Ultimate Nightmare
~ a real-life story you’ll never be able
to get out of your mind!
Easy-to-share link to this post ~ https://tinyurl.com/y56x8xsp
Politically blocking access to safe and legal abortions directly and primarily kills or permanently damages women, but the effects of unsafe illegal abortions is NOT just a problem for women.
The tragedies of this negative “gift that keeps on giving” often involves other family members. This includes the mother’s other, often very small children, and not only personally ruins their lives, but can affect these families for generations, as these tragic and preventable deaths are secretly whispered from one generation to the next. This kind of story can even affect persons in high office, such as presidents and members of Congress.
One example of this is a first-person account of a man in his late 50s telling the story of an event that occurred when he was a child.
It began when he was 7 years old and living with his mother and his baby sister. One evening after the two children had been put to bed, his mother went into the bathroom and locked the door.
Early the next morning his baby sister woke up hungry and crying hysterically to be picked up and fed. But oddly, his mother did not come out of the bathroom to take care of her, in spite of him calling his mother again and again. So he got up and banged on the door and kept calling her, but she wouldn’t come out and didn’t say anything to him.
He didn’t know what was wrong or what to do next, except to give his crying baby sister a bottle. This settled her for a while, but her night diaper was soaked. He did his best to change her diaper, but he’d never done this before and couldn’t get the diaper to stay put.
Many a grown man has failed to figure out how to get a diaper to properly cover the business-end of a wiggling infant and keep it in place while trying to stick sharp pins into the diaper without harming the baby or jabbing one’s own fingers. I can’t imagine trying to do this as a 7 year old child.
But that first bottle and diaper change was only the beginning of the many problems these children faced. By the end of the day, the milk carton was empty so he could no longer give a bottle to his baby sister. He tried to stop her cries by stuffing tiny morsels of different foods in her mouth, while staving off his own hunger with dry cereal and cold leftovers.
The warm sunny day gradually faded into a cold dark night. There was no heat in the house and he didn’t know how to turn the overhead lights on. The little boy did his best to take care of his baby sister, but still, he was only 7.
He was lonely, frightened, and just couldn’t understand why his mom wouldn’t come out of the bathroom in spite of his pleading and knocking on the door. After it got pitch dark, he took his little sister to bed with him, but his inability to diaper her properly meant that both of them got wet and cold and smelled bad. It was the longest and most miserable night of his young life.
This living nightmare melded into a long and increasingly intolerable second day. By then all the accessible food had been eaten and the children had no more dry clothes. There was no one for him to talk to, no one to comfort them, no way to know how much longer this would go on, and worst of all, no explanation for why his mother wouldn’t come out of the bathroom and take care of them like she usually did.
Had he done something to make her mad at him? Was he being punished? Even so, why wouldn’t she come out to take care of his baby sister? Surely she hadn’t done anything to deserve being neglected like this. No answers came.
Finally, a neighbor happened by late in the afternoon of the second day and found the two children all alone. The reason was soon apparent. After breaking the lock on the bathroom door, they found his mother lying dead on the floor in a dark pool of her own blood, the fatal consequences of her attempt to abort an advancing pregnancy.
The brief but shocking glimpse of her partially-naked body smeared with blood and folded into a crumpled heap on the bathroom floor can never be erased from his adult mind.
This badly traumatized little boy grew up to be a man whose life was forever haunted by this tragic experience. Nonetheless, he was willing to share the story of these horrific events with a national radio audience, hoping it would keep this awful thing from befalling the children of other mothers who had untenable pregnancies.
The take-home message is simple — society is obligated to be both ethical and compassionate by providing access to effective contraception and safe, legal abortion services.
The cost of the alternative is just too high — gruesome, painful and unnecessary maternal deaths and orphaned older children forced to bear the unbearable.
Endless, illogical and inept Gender Wars by men
trying to control female reproductive biology
Simply put, the way to “control” female reproductive biology is for the male of the species to keep his sperm zipped up in his pants, that is, do NOT ejaculate in the birth canal of an adult woman.
Every pregnancy begins with the man’s sperm. No sperm, no pregnancy, no abortion-related issues, period, end of story, we can all go home now and live a happy life.
Unplanned pregnancies, and non-medical abortions begin with the male of the species.
If a man doesn’t believe in terminating a pre-viable pregnancy, or doesn’t want to be responsible for raising a baby, the answer is simple — don’t ejaculate in the birth canal of your female partner.
Men are “first cause” in the biology of human procreation. Their actions, or failure to act — i.e. use contraceptives — are directly responsible for a woman becoming pregnant. No woman ever got pregnant without a man first putting his sperm in her birth canal.
The US Supreme Court failed Biology 101
While pregnancy AND abortion are the direct and specific responsibility of the male gender, there are some supposedly-adult members of the US Supreme Court that apparently skipped biology the day their class studied “where babies come from“. I’ll give you a hint — male, sexually active, and doesn’t take precautions to prevent unplanned pregnancies in his female sexual partners!
Unfortunately, Justice Alito and his buddies are sadly mistaken when it comes to gender issues: Abortion is NOT, and never has been, a “woman’s” issue. These Justices apparently missed the class on the biological facts of life — it takes a man to make a sperm and it takes sperm to make a baby
A human embryo in the very earliest stages of development. It’s biological structures are not yet differentiated from other vertebral (having a spinal column) animals.
However, this disconnect from reproductive biology does not stop with the Gang of Five – Alito, Barrett, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Thomas (ABKGT).
Many Americans are virtually deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to the biology of human reproductions and are convinced that an unplanned pregnancy is always the woman‘s fault!
Indeed, men do not directly bear any of the biological the burdens associated with pregnancy — not the physical experience of morning sickness, not stretch marks, awkwardness, anxiety over finances or the loss of income at a time of increased expense.
Men Without a Conscience
Instead, many men choose a one-night fling or have an affair, and then go away and leave the impregnated woman to struggle by herself every hour of every day for nine long months, endure many hours of painful labor and the hard work of pushing an eight-pound baby out and then breastfeeding him or her round the clock. This is inevitably followed by shouldering near-total responsibility to raise the child for 18-plus years.
And yet it is men with power and influence — priests, ministers, rabbis, legislators, lawyers, judges, governors, presidents, and big donors to partisan politics — who insist that the female gender does not have the legal authority to determine their own reproductive biology, nor does she deserve to choose whether or not she is able to take on the life-long responsibilities that go along with raising a child.
This attack on contraception and abortion is in direct contradiction to the 1972 the US Supreme Court, in which Justice Brennan wrote:
“… it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to beget or bear a child.” (ref #13, These Truths: History of the United States; J. Lepore, 2018)
It always wonders me when I see a room full of men in expensive suits, wearing thousand dollars watches and pontificating about the woman’s absolute responsibility to avoid getting pregnant as if men played no part in the act of conception.
But my eldest daughter got the man’s part in sex and reproduction exactly right when she said:
If you don’t want a baby, don’t ejaculate in the birth canal!
A goodly number of these same wealthy and influential men have at some time in their life ejaculated in the birth canal of women they didn’t want to raise a baby with. If that woman got pregnant, they either claimed they don’t know her, or arranged to fly her to Canada for a nice quiet (also very safe and legal) abortion.
Obviously, the way to end unnecessary abortions and irrational shaming of women must begin and end by immediately putting the responsibility squarely where pregnancy has always begun (with male ejaculation) and where it always belongs — with the men who chose have unprotected sex.
If any individual or group wants a focus for their outrage, it’s proper place is on the man who fathered this so-called “unwanted” child.
When a man chooses to ejaculate in the birth canal, he is logically responsible if his female partner becomes pregnant and it is he who logically must bear the cost for caring, feeding and raising the child.
By putting the blame, and shame of unplanned pregnancy, as well as the social and economic expense squarely, where it truly belongs — on the man who had unprotected sex — this debate, which is anti-woman, unethical, and sometimes fatal for both the woman and her unborn fetus, will no be able to be used and abused as a political football to gain a partisan political advantage for individual politicians running for election.
The way to stop abortions is to stop unplanned pregnancies.
Once we focus on the REAL ISSUE – men who have unprotected sex with women they don’t care about enough to simply take responsible for what they have done — impregnated them. When men take responsibility for their actions OR when society makes them be responsible for the consequences of their actions (failure to control their sperm), the religious and partisan issues of abortions will vanish like wisps of fog in the early morning sun.
A Certain Class of Men ~ Traitors to their Species
Until then, we will continue to have a certain class of men — mostly wealthy and in positions of political power, insulated by our social institutions against the effects of their actions who have abandoned their humanity and continue to insist it is solely the woman‘s responsibility to prevent unplanned pregnancies.
And should the woman for any reason fail in her attempt to prevent an unplanned pregnancy (he refused or forgot to use a condom or it broke) and her male partner decides he does not want to “play house”, she is illogically bound to welcome the pregnancy gracefully and without complaint, she becomes solely responsible for supporting and raising the child.
These same men, and many others like them, boldly insist that it is “right and proper” to pass laws that make safe abortions either illegal or inaccessible. Likewise, they insist they are doing God’s bidding (Note: God’s Will is NOT dependent on the actions of partisan politicians!) by sponsoring laws that permit the criminal prosecution of women they suspect of directly or indirectly causing a miscarriage or doing something these men believe might pose a risk to the developing fetus.
This kind of propriety, “Father/Doctor Knows Best”, thinking extends to term pregnancies when the obstetrician’s personal preference, or hospital protocol, is to perform an elective Cesarean for any one of a long list of supposed problems they define as an absolute “indication” for surgical delivery — small baby, large baby, post-dates, normal twin pregnancy, breech, or a mother who had a previous Cesarean delivery, etc.
And if the mother-to-be refuses this advice, the doctor or the hospital’s attorney, simply call a juvenile court judge and generally get a court order to perform Cesarean surgery without the mother’s consent.
All this unhealthy focus on controlling other the pregnancies of people they don’t even know is promoted by well-meaning but mis-informed people, politicians seeking votes, elected official seeking power, and many others who don’t know the real facts or they just don’t care.
Many people who think of themselves as patriotic citizens devote years of their life collecting and disbursing millions of dollars in order to convince state and federal legislatures to close clinics and criminalize abortion services.
This kind of “play to pay” wealth is also used to finance election campaigns that promise to bring about more favorable abortion-related rulings by the US Supreme Court (i.e. more restrictive and punitive, including criminal charges).
Apparently, they want to be sure that other 7-year olds somewhere in America become orphaned and permanently traumatized when their mothers, desperate and in dire financial straits, attempt to end an untenable pregnancy, only to die on the bathroom in a pool of their own blood, leaving behind their orphaned children and a bottomless pit of sorrow.
God help America!
Instead of being the “home of the brave and land of the free”, it is the land of dispassionate, clever, mean and heartless hoards of arrogant, uber-rich and politically influential men who have convinced themselves that they alone know what is best for girls and women.
They believe they have the final say over all female reproductive functions, thus reducing the status of adult women to property, like breeder cattle, with “ownership” rights in the hands of male relatives, doctors, lawyers, and judges.
But these ‘alternative facts’ are flat wrong. Furthermore, no self-respecting man would stand for this if the gender roles were reversed.
The Critical Missing Ingredient – Civic Virtue
Our is gender war against women is illogical and wrong for many reasons, but the biggest of all is that it leaves out civic virtue — ethical principles that apply to a fair and functional government, common sense, and the simple verbs of human compassion and tenderly caring for the weak and vulnerable with empathy and compassion.
Civic virtue is rooted in the Golden Rule:
Do onto others, as ye would have them do on to you.
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