Archive for March 15th, 2012

The abortion debate never goes away

I enjoy The Titleless Blog, written by an American expat who now lives in Chile. She was recently inspired by a recent dinner conversation to write a post about abortion entitled “In Defence of Women’s Choices” that I found interesting.

I’m not going to bore you with a summary because frankly you should read it yourself. Whenever I’m informed about something that is happening in the United States, especially in an election year, I can’t help but shake my head. It’s absurd to me that a country that proudly claims that all its citizens are equal, actively works to restrict civil rights to women and gays. Each Republican debate is like listening to the greatest minds of the 19th Century. The greatest hypocrisy of the Republican party is that they advocate less government for everything but your personal life. Now before anyone starts accusing me of being anti-American let me say that Canada doesn’t have a rosey human rights record either (the internment of Japanese-Canadians during WWII comes to mind), but I believe it’s the fairest in the Americas.

I know I’ve written about this before but I feel compelled to write about it again. The abortion argument always revolves around morality: right and wrong, life vs. death, the right’s of the fetus, and rarely pays attention to women, who — in case you didn’t know — give birth.

This is not a post about women’s rights per se but about access. The real issue when it comes to abortions is that they will never be eradicated, not as long as we live in a global society, where a vast majority of people are struggling to feed their families. A rich person telling a poor person what’s right or wrong, is simplifying the argument. No government, no matter how strict their laws, how brutal their penalties, will stop abortions from happening. So the question before you is, “Why not make them safe?”

I believe the answer to that question is that we hate women and want to control what they can and cannot do to their own bodies. Gloria Steinam once said, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” But even that is a simplification of a much more complex issue that is ultimately a personal choice based on individual life experiences. Religion, no matter how much they try to convince us otherwise, is irrelevant in the conversation. Maybe we’ll take members of the Vatican more seriously when they’re willing to set the ultimate example, and live as Jesus preached and sell all their assets to feed the hungry. While they’re at it, perhaps they could also fix their most grievous human error and proclaim that condoms in Africa aren’t so bad.

Anti-abortionists can wave their fingers and judge all they want: It will never stop abortions. As long as we live in a capitalist, unequal society where 1 per cent of the population controls all the wealth, we’re going to be keep arguing about this topic. What we really need, as corny as it sounds, is empathy for other people.

Like how I tied all these issues together? The reality is that they’re all connected on a variety of issues. See how smart I am?

Anyway, that’s my point. And I do have one!