My thoughts on the abortion issue ...
I have two observations about the abortion issue, observations that I have never heard from anybody else.
One of them involves recollections of Sunday School classes from when I was 10, 11, 12, 13 years old. That would have been 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963. These are distinct, vivid memories of lively discussions involving the Sunday School teacher and the kids in his class, including me, in the Southern Baptist church I went to then. The issue we were discussing was the question of when and how the soul enters the body. The teaching and the consensus were that the soul enters the body at or minutes before the moment of birth, not the moment of conception. When the delivery room doctor slaps the infant’s behind and God breathes the breath of life into the seconds-old newborn, and the baby begins crying as its respiration starts.
That was the teaching then, 55 or 60 years ago, but it’s not the teaching now. Now the churches are teaching that “life begins at conception” and that is why abortion “kills babies.”
I strongly suspect, and I believe, that the churches very subtly changed their teachings about this issue in the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision. I say “very subtly” because it simply happened and nobody to this day has ever seemed to notice it, or announce it, or acknowledge it.
Of course, this strong suspicion of mine is based on the decades-old memories of just one person, and the teachings of just one church, and that makes my suspicion suspect, and that is why I am posting it here on Democratic Underground dot com for others to read. What memories do y’all have of churches of various denominations and what they were teaching on this issue before the Roe v. Wade decision came down?
My second observation involves birthdays and the way we all keep track of our chronological ages. Whenever one of us celebrates a birthday, we say, “I am 40 years old today.” That is the date that comes exactly 40 years to the day after that person’s birth, not his or her conception. We all mark our ages that way, including the “pro-life” people who claim that their individual origin was the moment of their conception, not of their birth. What I am saying is that every time an anti-choice, or pro-life, or anti-abortion, or whatever you want to call them, whenever one of those individuals says “It’s my birthday and I’m 40 years old today”, they are acknowledging that their life began at the moment of their birth, when the delivery room doctor slapped their behind to get their respiration started. And God breathed the breath of life into them.
If “life begins at conception”, then we all should start celebrating conception days, not birthdays. We all should start marking our ages from our conception days, on our passports and our driver’s licenses and our Social Security cards. And birth notices in newspapers should instead be conception notices. And every one of us is nine months older than we’ve always thought we were.
If the anti-abortion people were going to be consistent in their beliefs, that’s the way they would start keeping track of their ages, but I believe the way we’ve always done it is the right way. They like to talk about things like fetal heartbeats and fetal brainwave activity and little wiggles of fetal fingers and toes, but I’ve always thought that the fetus is a house under construction, a house that nobody has moved into yet. Sure, that house has the lights and plumbing working, but it’s still unoccupied and under construction, and it’s only when it’s finished that somebody actually moves into it. As we were discussing in those Southern Baptist Sunday School classes of my youth, that body is unoccupied until the moment of birth, when the doctor slaps its behind and God breathes the breath of life into it. That’s when somebody who might be called a “soul” moves in and that individual’s life begins, and that’s why we’ve always marked our ages in that manner. And still do.
What if I’m wrong? What if a person’s life really does begin at conception and therefore abortion really does murder babies? Well, in that case, is abortion the only thing that is inimical to life? Of course not, but the anti-abortion people seem to think it is. There’s the coronavirus pandemic, for example, which many of the anti-abortion people think is a hoax. How anybody could perpetrate a hoax of that magnitude is a mystery to me, and how anybody could believe a catastrophe of that magnitude doesn’t even exist is equally mysterious. At this writing the pandemic has killed about 600,000 Americans, not to mention the suffering and lingering health problems many of the survivors have endured. How many of those 600,000 born, not unborn, Americans would still be alive if Hilary had been president for the past four years? She would have listened to the science and the experts, she would have taken the measures necessary to control the virus before it started getting out of control. And hundreds of thousands of BORN Americans would still be alive.
Early in the 20-aughts, during the George W. Bush administration, I remember hearing that the number of abortions that were actually occurring in the U.S. was steadily rising. That number had been on a steady decline for the previous 15 or 20 years, as I recall, and I’m not going to bother to research any actual numbers, but I do remember that after George W. Bush took over, more women started having abortions. The reason was that the Bush administration, typically for a Republican administration, was cutting social services, components of the social safety net, resulting in a lot of poor and lower-middle-class women no longer being able to afford to have children, so they were having more abortions. If right-wingers think Democrats are inimical to life because they support reproductive freedom, Republicans are more inimical to life because they oppose policies that will reduce the number of abortions that are actually carried out.
What about contraceptives and family planning methods? I’m talking about things that will stop abortions by reducing the demand. You would think that the anti-abortion people would support those measures, but in fact, they will fight tooth-and-nail against any effort to promote those kinds of public policies. This has always puzzled me. In their opposition to those kinds of common-sense policies, they will often resort to rationalizations and excuses. I have heard them irrationally claim, for example, that if people have more condoms and IUDs, they will have more sex, and that will result in more abortions.
This is why I have long suspected that the anti-abortion people are not really about “saving babies” but about keeping people from having sex. Their stated goal is “saving babies” but their unstated goal is keeping people from having sex. And I believe that is actually their primary goal. I base this claim on the fact that whenever there is an actual or perceived conflict between their stated goal and their unstated goal, they will come down on the side of the unstated goal every time.
One more observation and then I’ll shut up: One thing I always notice on those rare occasions when pro-life and pro-choice individuals actually discuss this issue is that they don’t REALLY discuss the issue, but just talk past each other. The pro-life people will talk about “killing babies” and the pro-choice people will just ignore that and talk about reproductive freedom. Then the pro-life people will ignore that and talk, again, about “killing babies”. They’ll go back and forth like that, each side ignoring the other’s concerns and talking only about their own. I always think that there is some overlap between their concerns and that if they would focus on that overlap, they could ease the contentiousness of this issue somewhat, if not resolve it altogether. But of course, a large part of that overlap is contraceptives and family planning, and the pro-life people will fight tooth and nail against that, which leads me to suspect that they are not REALLY about “saving babies” but just about keeping people from having sex.
I could go on and on about this issue, but I’m tired of pounding away on this keyboard, so I’ll shut up now.
— Ron
= new reply since forum marked as read
You make some good points. Definitely food for thought. Thank you for sharing with us. 
We’ve been getting uppity since the sexual revolution. Things like having the nerve to tell abusers and weirdos to fuck off, working good paying jobs and attending the best colleges, making our own decisions. Apparently, that is emasculating.
ETA: if cis men could get pregnant, they would be throwing free packs of birth control pills and boxes of condoms off of every rooftop, like confetti.
In short: They want to control us, period!
And I am a former Catholic
I too am a recovering Catholic and I have felt this for a long time too.
