In which I comment on the anti-abortion situation.
Last week, I read an article about a man who wants the State of Texas to pay women $500 to put unwanted babies up for adoption rather than have abortions.
Because it’s soooo constitutional for states to buy human beings.
Today while I was opening the mail at work, I noticed that one of our customers has return address labels that read Pray to stop abortion (in an irritatingly cutesy, child-like pseudo-handwritten font) below an image of a beautiful, chubby Gerber-style baby.
Oh, for FUCK’S SAKE! Normally I’m pretty quiet about the abortion thing because as long as it’s legal I’m content to keep my mouth shut — and folks who can’t see that we’re eventually going to have more people than resources aren’t worth arguing with anyway — because it’s so very personal. I respect the sanctity of life and the difficult feelings abortion causes, blah blah blah, but a being needs first to possess a life before its sanctity can be protected. And a zygote is not a person. [How do I know this? I just do. Just take my word for it.]
- It costs far more than $500 for your average human woman to carry a baby to term and deliver it. Paying someone $500 to give birth to a child they don’t want is so insultingly stupid that I start to sputter indignantly whenever I try to talk about it.
- Sadly, there are women out there who regularly use surgical abortion as contraception. Those bitches, believe you me, will have no problem taking $500 from the state and then delivering a crack baby into the arms of the System to suffer indefinitely.
- Wouldn’t it be better to pray for the babies who are already here and starving instead of hoping for more unwanted, starving babies struggling through addiction-at-birth, DHS, and foster care?
To the genius who wants to convert Texas’ 75,000 annual abortions into up to 75,000 additional live births, I ask this: How much were you planning on budgeting for DHS to process all those state-owned orphans? Babies generally need to be white, pudgy, and healthy to get adopted as infants (unless Angelina’s adoptions have truly popularized adoptions of brown babies). Persons who are not adopted as infants have a likelihood of adoption that drops exponentially every hour they’re alive. In other words, it costs a lot of money to raise children, and they ain’t small and helpless and cute forever so you can safely expect them to end up costing the state money at some point or another.
I think I’d like have a bumper sticker that reads:
Pray to stop abortion! Because God knows…
we need more starving babies!
we need more starving babies!
If we could just get the church to quit saying that life starts at conception and move the moment instead to the second or third trimester, we’d be headed down a road of possible sustainability. As it is, we’re gonna cover the world with concrete in another hundred or two generations, which is totally, like, not nice at all to the children of the children of the children of the babies that Texas wants to purchase!
Don’t even get me started on the world’s apparent disinterest in a real space program. Any creature too stupid to leave an open cage when all the food is gone probably deserves to die anyway.
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Honestly I can never really figure out how I feel about this–usually once I start thinking in terms of ME, like what if I got pregnant now, I think, well, I would probably have an abortion. That’s how I have to think of these big issues–I have to think about me–and that helps me think about thw world and what is right. Everyone wants to throw money at these big issues–such a cartoon bandaid. If I saw a quote like that come across my e-mail I might feel like throwing the computer out the window–or save it for when that customer comes in so she can get the whole monitor in her face.
Maybe what we really need are “pray to stop other people from praying for dumb things” bumper stickers. -m
The government has been allowed to assume all KINDS of responsibilities that it has neither constitutionally nor ethically. Monitoring what we do with our own bodies and the contents therein is clearly one of them. I think your strongest argument above though is that growing up as a ward of the state is NOT better than death in the womb particularly now that we’re finding out that most state child care agencies are little more than child porn/prostitution/sex trade rings for pedophiles, Florida being a recent case in point: 3000 CPS kids turned up “missing”; No one knew where they were at. Then a bunch of them turned up dead, some in other countries with their heads chopped off, etc. Similar busts are being made around the country – here in Texas and just a few days ago in Fargo. So it’s not just that the kids aren’t being properly loved and taken of; They are being systematically abused, beaten, raped, made to participate in sex acts with government employees and having various drugs and even pesticides tested on them. Is that really a life worth having? The government has a conflict of interest by trying to outlaw abortions and force newborns into adoption agencies because they are being used for sex and as lab rats. Bring this satanic bullshit to an end and THEN maybe we can TALK about letting the government get involved in the abortion issue.
The government should be forced to have their own damned babies. 😉 -m
You hit the nail on the head, Mush. Every time I see one of those “every life is sacred” anti-abortion billboards or hear a politician say it, I think “Sure. Right up until they are born.”
Ideas are so much easier to love than actual people. -m
i agree with what you say. i can’t say it any better and would only be redundant. so, ditto.
Your ditto is appreciated. 😉 -m
Dude! I would totally buy one of those bumpstickers! You totally hit the nail on the head.
Deadly accurate with a hammer: that’s me. *heh* -m
Actually, as far as bumper stickers go, I kind of like “Every life is sacred right up until they are born” a little bit better. 10 words instead of 12. Or perhaps “Every life is sacred……until it leaves the womb.”
How about these:
Every life is sacred except people I don’t like.
If every life is sacred then lets revive Ted Bundy.
Every life is sacred. So leave mine alone.
Life is sacred. Except where there’s oil.
Had I known about Republicans I would have aborted MYSELF.
Or two of my favorites that I’ve already seen on cars:
“If you don’t like abortion then don’t have one.”
“I see Republicans.”
LOL. I love a good bumper sticker.
Hah! (I like “Had I known about Republicans I would have aborted MYSELF” the best.) -m
Completely agree with you. The ones that really piss me off are the protestors outside the clinics. They are determined to stop a young girl from having an abortion but offer no money or help in bringing the child up. How Dare They? They fucking irritate me so much I want to smash their signs over their head.
When I was 19 or 20 I had an abortion. My BF sat, as many BFs do, in the waiting room. Eventually he went out for a smoke, and spoke to the lone guy picketing the clinic. During the course of the conversation he learned that the picketer was a virgin. The BF, not the sharpest tool in the shed by any means, asked me later, “What makes a guy who has never been with a girl think he can even have an opinion?!” Moral being, picketers have no clue so don’t waste any time being mad at them. I mean, come on. A virgin?! -m
Michelle Marquis
Professor Vazquez
Sociology 121
Photo Essay Project
While the United States may rank among the wealthiest nations in the world, many Americans are living in poverty. In fact, in the past two decades not only are more Americans living in poverty but the gap between the rich and the poor has actually widened. As it appears to be an ever expanding problem, I have chosen to do my photo essay project on poverty in the United States. Being that poverty is a social problem that effects the economics of a society as a whole I am very intrigued and interested in the idea of alternative policies that can be implemented to mend the inequalities of poverty. Through studying how poverty both affects and is affected by housing, employment, medical care and other resources such as food, I am specifically interested in focusing on who poverty tends to affect and what greater social problems are affected by poverty.
Poverty can be defined in a variety of ways and therefore in order to know who exactly poverty effects the term must be defined. What is poverty? Poverty can be defined in a variety of ways but is technically defined by the Census Bureau’s consumer price index which states the poverty line. However it can be interpreted to mean bare subsistence, or as any standard of living that is below the national average. With that being said, it is important to know that the American society is divided into five main classes: the upper class, the upper-middle class, the middle class, the working class and the poor. With minimum wages set at an all time low in relation to a livable wage, it is not uncommon for those not only poor but also in the working class to live in poverty. Who does poverty affect?
Roughly 25 million people live below the official poverty line. Such people include children, elderly people, single mothers, ill or disabled individuals, as well as students. A large proportion of the poor are children, mainly those from single-parent families. Single-parent families in poverty tend to be headed more frequently by women. Sexism, gender inequality, present in the workforce contributes to why more women live in poverty in comparison to men. Despite women’s increased education and participation in the waged labor market, females employed full-time, full-year, with education attainment similar to that of males, still obtain work in different types of jobs and at lower rates of pay. Female’s higher risk of poverty are caused from gender wage inequality and low-wage occupational sex-segregation. Furthermore, despite stereotypes of people in poverty being lazy, many people in poverty work either full or part time at poverty-level wages. Many of the people in poverty tend to be racial minorities such as African Americans and Native Americans. These people are restricted and confined to ghettos, reservations, or other rural areas. Poor people living in rural areas may commonly include migrant workers and farmers.
While the U.S. has a long history of trying to redistribute the wealth through taxation, it is through such policies that more opportunities are given for the rich to get richer than to actually help those in poverty. Alternative proposals for aiding the problems associated with poverty include modifying the earned income tax credit for those that work in low-wage jobs. This would ideally allow single mothers to work part time while receiving supplemental welfare payments. Furthermore another idea to help alleviate the single mother poverty problems would be to reform the child-support system so that fathers are just as accountable financially for the support of their children. For those that are not from single family homes, new reforms could be created allowing people to pursue higher education, work part time while still receiving various forms of government aid. The structure of society as it stands today makes it very difficult for someone to get out of poverty and make progress in obtaining higher education or a degree. With having to cut back work hours and still not qualify for certain aid, often times there is little incentive to attempt to go back to school or improve ones skills and education level. Education, housing, medical care and food are all resources that are fundamental in allowing someone in poverty to make their way out.
Works Cited
Gardner, Paul. “Middle Class Dreams.” Policy Studies Journal 25.n1 (Spring 1997): 177(6).
Iceland, John. “One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All.(Book Review).” Social Forces 83.1 (Sept 2004): 439(2).
Kornblum, William, and Julian, Jospeh. Social Problems: Twelfth Edition. New Jersey: Pearson, 2007.
Lichtenwalter, Sara. “Gender poverty disparity in US cities: evidence exonerating female-headed families.” Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 32.2 (June 2005): 75(22).
O’Boyle, Edward J. “Toward an improved definition of poverty.(Symposium on the Extent of Poverty in the United States).” Review of Social Economy 57.3 (Sept 1999): 281(2).
This is the weirdest comments-spam I’ve ever received. -m
Due to both my upbringing and the circumstances of my own birth, I’ve always been against abortion. (When your biological father offers to put up the money to kill you, it really makes an impression.) Until I became pregnant myself, though, I really didn’t have a frame of reference, and I didn’t realize it at the time.
When I saw my little bundle of cells wiggle its arms and legs for the first time on the monitor, it was magic. When I came in a week later to see it lying dead on the floor of my womb, on that very same monitor, it was terrifying. Ten weeks… I admit, it wasn’t a human being yet: it wasn’t conscious, and it couldn’t feel pain. For that, I was immensely grateful. But the potential was there.
I’ve thought many times since then that people abort their own bundles of cells at that stage. Unlike some, I’m not one to judge. Or I try not to be. I’ve never been in their position, with their beliefs and whatnot behind me. If I had ever been in their situation, I might have been forced to re-examine my own beliefs.
However… once (or if) science gets to a point where human unborn can be successfully transplanted like that of a horse (yes, I saw it on Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel), there will be changes on so many levels. Whether they’ll be positive or negative changes depends on your viewpoint, I suppose. It all remains to be seen.
Interesting times. -m