Boy, you have to hand it to the usual "pro-life" legislators out in flyover country, doncha? You'd think they'd eventually run out of new and interesting ways to obsess over When Life Begins and What Our Sacred Tax Dollars Should Be Spent On. But they just never stop, because it never fails with their constituencies, who at this point have nothing else to look forward to in life.
There's almost no variance in their strategies anymore. You can't even credit it as "old wine, new bottles" or "same shit, different shovel." Nothing ever changes with them; if any of them had an original thought on the subject, it would die of loneliness.
The one thing in the Kansas proposal that I imagine most people -- including myself -- can agree with is the provision regarding gender-selection abortion, at least in principle. But aside from the efforts of pro-life hoaxsters, there doesn't seem to be a spate of gender-selection abortions going on in the US. This is an answer to a question that no one aside from the obsessives was asking.
The endless efforts to invent a "crisis" or a domestic "holocaust", in order to deprive women of their agency to make independent decisions, belie their true intent as simple control mechanisms. A person who was genuinely invested in reducing the number of abortions -- as one would think just about any decent person is -- could approach the issue from a variety of angles, not just the clumsy overtures to "counseling" and declaring a fertilized egg as a full human being.
For all the tedious jabber about children being the future and families being the cornerstone of civilization, the fact is that this country, and its component states, do precious little in the way of real action to back up those words. I'm not just talking about adequately funding social services, I mean opportunities for decent education and employment, the ability to plan and create a viable future that doesn't require making life decisions out of desperation.
They would much rather coerce and bully women into having children they can't afford, than to find ways to actually support these families once the kids come along. It's a hideous combination of miserliness and cheap moralism. The best way to prevent abortions is to actively create conditions where women have more viable options.
There's almost no variance in their strategies anymore. You can't even credit it as "old wine, new bottles" or "same shit, different shovel." Nothing ever changes with them; if any of them had an original thought on the subject, it would die of loneliness.
The one thing in the Kansas proposal that I imagine most people -- including myself -- can agree with is the provision regarding gender-selection abortion, at least in principle. But aside from the efforts of pro-life hoaxsters, there doesn't seem to be a spate of gender-selection abortions going on in the US. This is an answer to a question that no one aside from the obsessives was asking.
The endless efforts to invent a "crisis" or a domestic "holocaust", in order to deprive women of their agency to make independent decisions, belie their true intent as simple control mechanisms. A person who was genuinely invested in reducing the number of abortions -- as one would think just about any decent person is -- could approach the issue from a variety of angles, not just the clumsy overtures to "counseling" and declaring a fertilized egg as a full human being.
For all the tedious jabber about children being the future and families being the cornerstone of civilization, the fact is that this country, and its component states, do precious little in the way of real action to back up those words. I'm not just talking about adequately funding social services, I mean opportunities for decent education and employment, the ability to plan and create a viable future that doesn't require making life decisions out of desperation.
They would much rather coerce and bully women into having children they can't afford, than to find ways to actually support these families once the kids come along. It's a hideous combination of miserliness and cheap moralism. The best way to prevent abortions is to actively create conditions where women have more viable options.
1 comment:
Hear, hear!
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