[clue-talk] abolish abortion in america

[David L. Willson]

On Thu, 29 May 2008 23:19:03 -0600, David Rudder wrote
> Hi David,
> I find your categorizations of people interesting.  Which group do you
> put yourself in?

All of them, at different times.  I do my best to stay in the solution-oriented
gem-finding groups.  It is my pleasure to solve problems, to express my enthusiasm over
many things, and to work toward solutions of difficult problems, like the "sense of
entitlement" that is seeping into the American way of thinking about everything.

> I have an example for you.  Your big issue, politically, is abortion.
> In the past, I've posted a link that contains statistics, gathered by
> the CDC, that shows abortions increased under Reagan, Bush Sr, and
> decreased only very slightly under GWBush.  But, those same statistics
> show that abortion dropped dramatically under Bill Clinton.  Many
> experts say it was because of his wife's emphasis on sex ed.
> 
> So, it is safe to assume that Hillary Clinton will usher in a new age of
> dropping abortion rates.

I think that would not be a safe assumption.

> So, why aren't you campaigning for Hillary?

Because Hillary said this:

http://clinton.senate.gov/~clinton/speeches/2005125A05.html

If you can't see the misdirection in that speech, if you can't see through the gross
mis-representation by association of "pro-life" people with totalitarian nut-jobs, your
bullshit and manipulation detector is badly borked.

And Barack for good measure:

http://www.ontheissues.org/Social/Barack_Obama_Abortion.htm

That's pretty polar positioning, isn't it?

I'm not out to reduce the number of abortions; I want to abolish abortion.  I want
people to see it for what it is. Once upon a time, we didn't see slavery for the
atrocity it was.  We dehumanized our slaves.  Scientists made claims that people with
non-white skin were less evolved than people with white skin.  And that soothed the
consciences of slave-owners, and those that stood idly by while their friends owned slaves.

We are doing the same thing now.

If the law protected none of us, I would keep silent, and I would be thankful that I had
the right to kill stupid people, and that if I got too stupid, I could count on one of
you to kill me before I really annoyed somebody.  But that's not the way it is.  We are
the post-birth; they are the pre-birth.  We can speak and defend ourselves and earn and
vote.  They can do nothing.  They are less than we are, even though they will become
everything we are, so we can dehumanize them, if we do it quickly enough.  It's baffling
to me that you don't get this.  Just because a bunch of people want a thing to be true,
doesn't make it true.  Human babies are human babies.  Humanity doesn't happen at birth,
or at some moment shortly before birth, it happens when the new chromosomal pattern is
knitted together.  Any other moment, "ensoulment" or viability, is a nebulous fiction,
with an easily discovered and selfish motive.  What makes wanted babies, babies, at the
moment of their knitting, and unwanted babies, a bit of unwanted tissue in mother's
body?  It's convenient fiction, like the differences in human quality that are revealed
in skin color.

-- David
Abolish abortion in America