Flashpoint! A Woman's Right To Choose

I’m not a person filled with hate. I don’t brew strong stomach acids when I hear/see things I think horrendously idiotic or unjust in the news or on the street. Initially, my reaction is to laugh. The irony is simply too much, and I crack up. Generally, it’s either laugh…or cry. And who wants to spend the day in tears? For I would, were I to give in to that option of dealing with the utter, naked insanity in our midst on a daily basis. I’m not just talking about something that ‘isn’t quite right’ or… ‘is just a tad out of whack’…I’m talking about the United States of America in this year of 2009 being completely off its moorings and slipping into the abyss.

“What the hell is Graham on about now?? What momentous, screeching rant is he conjuring up now; can somebody put him on a stupid TV show so he’d shut up already??” – Your name here.

No. I’m going to say it. I’m going to say what millions know in the front of their brains, and many, many more millions know in the depths of their hearts…but won’t allow themselves to think it, much less feel it. And believe me, I know I’ll be hated for saying it, I’ll be hated by people who don’t know me, have never worked with me, have never golfed with me, had a drink with me, shot the shit with me. They’ve never met me, don’t want to meet me…but they will hate me. I’m going to say it anyway: Abortion is murder.

Screams, bomb blasts, machine-gun rounds rip through plaster, I duck, but the copper-tip spears tear into meat, I run, the fire sears flesh, more screams, are they coming from me, or are they my head being torn from…my…

In the sixties and seventies I was a proud part of the peace generation. Long-haired hippies, rocker-lovers, lover-rockers, music festivals, drug explorations, peace not war, and there’s this cute piece right next to me, I’ve got a sleeping bag, would you like to get warm, and there’s a little hash left, you’re so pretty… Hey don’t laugh, we thought we were changing the world. Free love, baby, do it if it feels good, don’t look back, power to the peeps, and do your own thing. Wow, really? You mean you can be cool, have a lot of sex…and save the world all at the same time? Damn this is so f*cking bitchen! Ooh, my hair’s getting really good in the back… (Brown shoes… don’t make it! — F.Zappa)

But wait – I’m in college. I’m on a fast track to jump into the business world. I’m going to be some stick-up-the-butt loser in some establishment straight-ass job, when I really just want to party. Oops, I mean… I want to help save the world! Through drugs, sex and rock and roll. All right, we don’t really have a solid business plan made up yet…but we’re working on it. Of course I’m a Democrat! Duh!

End of flashback.

I have been on all sides of this issue for most of my life, and I can simply not escape the logic. That fetus a pregnant woman is carrying inside of her, regardless of the gestation stage, is a living, breathing human being. Yes, breathing – the amniotic sac forms 12 days after conception, and in the second trimester the baby is actually breathing the amniotic fluid. It’s not an ‘unviable tissue mass.’ Not a wart, a mole, a skin outcropping, a boil, or a bundle of uncoordinated cells. It’s not just a ‘fetus’.

It’s a baby. Not fully developed, true. Like an infant is not a fully developed and mature adult. But it’s a baby.

And the first time I got a girl pregnant, I would have wrestled you to the ground for saying that. How f*cking dare you? You don’t know what you’re talking about! You piece of crap, you don’t know!

Well I do know. And I stand condemned. I’ve paid for three of them and was responsible for probably several more, I’m not really sure. But it breaks my heart. Because I’ve been convicted in my soul. It took years after the fact, but I was shown the Truth. And not to get mumbo-jumbo, oogly-boogly on you, but it was a spiritual awakening that did it. It happened unexpectedly, and it threw me to my knees in sudden tearful epiphany of what it meant for a man to be with a woman, what sex was really designed for by our Creator and… what abortion is.

And up until that point, I was completely ‘Pro-Choice’. I had bought the whole ‘women’s rights’ thing, completely agreed with ‘the constitutional right of a woman’s freedom to choose’…and I was just fine with that. Sure took the pressure off of me, a guy, interested in sex who had been raised in the era of, “Hey, you get a girl pregnant, you marry her!” But times had changed. Now abortions could be had legally if a doctor determined the life of the mother was in danger. Girls in college told me what a joke that was. They’d go in to see a doctor, tell him they’re pregnant, and the conversation went like this:

Doctor: “You’re feeling suicidal?” (hint hint, wink nudge.)

Girl: “Oh. Yeah… suicidal. I’m feeling suicidal.”

Doctor: “All right, then.”

Abortion as a method of birth control became the norm. I knew a few girls who had had as many as five of them by the time they were twenty-five. And they seemed fine on it…mostly because everyone around them was telling them that they should feel fine about it.

So this abortion thing was pretty damn convenient for a guy. And for a time, I was quite the Lothario. I kept a roster of seven girlfriends. Why seven? I don’t know…maybe Lucky Number 7 (yeah maybe)…or seven days in a week (more likely). But I would meet someone new, and I would simply go through my list…and kick one girl off. I would simply stop calling her. And to my great shame…this was my chosen method to ‘decathect.’ In retrospect, I wish I’d had the balls of utter honesty in my early relationships; but I was a drug-addled, post college idiot and that was the best I could muster. This was my m.o. and I knew I wasn’t alone…not by a long shot. We were proud products of the Love Generation.

Jump forward thirty years and Nancy Pelosi tells us yesterday that ‘family planning’ is now a fiscal responsibility to ‘reduce costs.’ Her defenders will say that NO, she’s talking about condoms and sex education. But anyone with a mind who’s been around for a while knows that ‘family planning’ is code for abortion. She is asking for 200 million dollars for Family Planning Services to ‘expand the economy.’ These are taxpayer dollars, dontcha know. Your money. She says states are in terrible fiscal crisis and it’s ‘part of what we do for childrens’ health and education’…” I’m trying to figure out how ripping an unborn child from it’s womb is aiding in it’s health or education, but maybe I’m missing something here.

I’ve heard it argued that a fetus is not a baby because it could not survive outside the womb on its own. But what about three-day old baby? Or even a two week old baby? If you set it down on the floor and leave it alone…will it survive on its own? Or will it die? So what’s the cut-off for determining whether it’s a baby or not?

It really comes down to this: when does life begin? When is it a baby? At the point of conception? First trimester? Third? At the point of actual delivery? When the umbilical cord is cut? Two weeks afterward? When?

I’m telling you, once you draw that line and say this is the moment it’s a human being…you’ve lost the argument. Because it’s arbitrary. On this date it’s a baby, but yesterday it was just a bunch of cells…this blob of a nothing and you can do anything you want with it, it’s okay. Babies have been born premature in the second trimester and lived. Happens all the time. So please, somebody tell me how is taking a baby and delivering all but the head, then plunging a tube into its skull and sucking the brains out…how is that not murder? This is what happens in partial-birth abortions, and unfortunately, this happens all the time, too.

And we as a nation…as a people…are all right with this?

I understand the hate that is leveled at someone like me who reminds people of this. To contemplate the reality is daunting. The act is horrendous and made more tragic when you consider the numbers of babies that are being disposed of every day.

Our willingness to tolerate such a holocaust says volumes of how our entire culture has been coarsened. How life itself has been cheapened. We are told to have sex any time we feel the urge. Condoms are handed out in grade schools. Promiscuity is not only condoned, it’s tacitly encouraged. Illegitimacy has enslaved an entire underclass of our citizens, relegating them to government assistance for a lifetime, bankrupting cities, and holding an entire subculture down in dependent despair. But if you should get pregnant and it’s just not a ‘convenient’ time for you, don’t worry, there are Family Planning Services, funded, thanks to the likes of Nancy Pelosi, by your tax dollars. That inconvenient fetus can be surgically ripped from its uterine moorings, ground up and tossed into the trash like so much garbage. Problem solved, and the mother can resume her egocentric lifestyle. But the scars on that woman’s soul will never quite heal. I’m a man, but I’ve got them on mine.

I’ve heard from liberals the following quote: “We want abortion to be legal…but rare.” And I ask, Why rare? What’s wrong with abortion, that you think it should be a rare occurrence? I’ve had moles removed from my skin. Doctors don’t tell us that a mole removal should be rare. So what’s with this ‘rare’ business? Or is it a tacit agreement that abortion…is plain wrong?

And in the double-standard department… Will somebody tell me how it is that Scott Peterson gets convicted of a double homicide – his wife, and his unborn son – and yet it’s not murder if a doctor does basically the same thing in a clinic? Explain it to me; why is it murder in the one case, and totally acceptable in the other? You tell me, “HEY! It’s my body, I’ve got the right to do whatever I want with my body!!” Well, no you don’t. You don’t have the legal right to prostitute yourself (Nevada excepted). You don’t have a right to pick up an axe and lop off your boyfriend’s head if he gives you lip. You don’t have the right to murder. And your anger will bring you back to the its-not-a-baby, it’s-my-body mobius.

Illogic without end.

Try this exercise: Every time you hear someone use the phrase “…a woman’s right to choose…” mentally complete the phrase with the following words – “…to kill her baby.” That’s what the argument’s about. A woman’s right to kill her baby.

In the extreme cases of incest…rape…severe birth defects. Hey, I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers. That’s a tough one. But there has got to be a better way than abortion. Adoption comes to mind. With all the thousands of couples out there unable to make a baby…doesn’t it seem the right thing to do…to give birth and give the unwanted baby up for adoption into a loving family?

Just a thought.

I saw my daughter’s ultrasound when she was at four weeks. All I saw was this little pulsating cylinder about the size of my little fingernail. Each little vibration was a heartbeat. Yes, a heart barely formed; cells still differentiating into form and function…but her little heart was just wailing away. I burst into tears. And I realized… I was beholding an utter miracle. The miracle of life. And I also realized that from the very first merger of cell into cell, and the first divisions…that the whole miracle of life was from that point on struggling against all odds to become a fully-realised human being.

I don’t mean to preach. I’m just telling you what I have come to know, and that I know that I know. The unborn fetus is a baby in development…and to end that life prematurely is to murder that life.

I truly wish that I had had this conviction way back when…when I was only concerned about my selfish convenience of the day. But I didn’t want to know, I didn’t want to think about it. It was inconvenient to think about it.

How ironic that the ‘Love’ Generation should spawn such a culturally accepted abomination as abortion.

May God have mercy on us all.