Coat-hangers at dawn
These days, if you set foot in the abortion debate, you are immediately required to identify yourself as being in one of two opposed camps, the "pro-choice" or "pro-life" side. The "pro-life" side are, by obvious implication, "anti choice", representing the totalitarian aspirations of the the Second-Coming movement and their burning-eyed fixation on a mechanistically enforced theocracy in this world rather than the next. Personally I identify with the "anti life" side, as I think they're more likely to succeed in their kabbalistic plans to destroy the entire moral basis of society and reduce us all to a Darwinian social system in which dog eats dog and the rich eat foetus.
I don't for a moment want to imply that I don't sympathise with the anti-choice crowd. Diverse social observations and experiments, many of them in middle-class Kwik-E-Marts in Bracknell, have incontrovertibly proven that the average human female is constitutionally incapable of imposing a decent upbringing on even the most amenable youngster. Women are clearly naturally inclined to get their foetuses hooked on crack, give birth to them with the help of wire coat-hangers, and probably feed them on jam and moonshine even before they're out of the womb. Of all the people you'd want to gestate your child, surely the worst possible choice would be a woman. So, regardless of whether our future is ruled by God or Darwin, I am sure that in our enlightened future, pregnant women will be kept in restraints and fed through a tube, at least until we figure out how to grow babies in bell-jars or specially incubated fonts.
However, the anti-choice crowd misses one essential point: they grossly overestimate the value of life. In the case of a baby at term, that's understandable: even in full knowledge of the trouble and distress babies cause, most humans are innately reluctant to execute them.¹ But the anti-choice people have this bizarre idea that a recently-fertilised ovum is somehow equal in complexity, dignity, worth, holiness and value, to a bouncing nine-month bundle of squalling babymeat. That's like saying that an acorn equals an oak-tree: it's just whacko. For the first week of its "life", a baby is about the size of a Volvox and a damn sight less sophisticated. You can't tell me that killing that is murder-hell, my goddamn immune system kills about a million things a day that are more highly-developed than a blastocyst, and that's why I'm so goddamn proud of my immune system.
But the thing that really gets me about this whole abortion "debate",² is the way both sides try to pretend that both sides don't share the same values. I've already demonstrated the generality of the anti-choice viewpoint, but the anti-life idea appears to be just as ubiquitous and magnetically attractive. It's not just about killing babies: occasionally you get a chance to kill women too, while denying them a choice in the matter, and firebombing the premises of anyone who offers them one. And if you're really, really lucky, you can compel someone to give birth to an honest-to-God monster (go on, ask Google about "anencephalic baby" if you think I'm kidding), tell them it's for their own abstract good, insist on preserving the wretched little mite in a horror-movie travesty of life, and finally watch it die as you knew it would all along.
Wouldn't it have been better just to hoover it out of them in the first place? Well, that's debatable, especially when it leaves the door open for premarital sex, disregard of God's command to procreate, state-marshalled baby-slaughter, and celebrity abortathons. And that's what I specially appreciate about the abortion "debate": everybody loses. Every alternative is bad, and that means that everybody's wrong-and not just wrong, but wrong in the vilest, bitterest and most degrading possible way.
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¹ The gentle reader may form their own opinion on whether this is due to innate Godliness or an evolved aversion to destroying a creature that likely propagates one's own genes.
² Apart from the way that it's not a debate at all, but a bunch of histrionic fuckwits bawling at each other because they wouldn't know a debate if you strangled them with it, let alone if you calmly explained it to them then asked them for their opinion.
I don't for a moment want to imply that I don't sympathise with the anti-choice crowd. Diverse social observations and experiments, many of them in middle-class Kwik-E-Marts in Bracknell, have incontrovertibly proven that the average human female is constitutionally incapable of imposing a decent upbringing on even the most amenable youngster. Women are clearly naturally inclined to get their foetuses hooked on crack, give birth to them with the help of wire coat-hangers, and probably feed them on jam and moonshine even before they're out of the womb. Of all the people you'd want to gestate your child, surely the worst possible choice would be a woman. So, regardless of whether our future is ruled by God or Darwin, I am sure that in our enlightened future, pregnant women will be kept in restraints and fed through a tube, at least until we figure out how to grow babies in bell-jars or specially incubated fonts.
However, the anti-choice crowd misses one essential point: they grossly overestimate the value of life. In the case of a baby at term, that's understandable: even in full knowledge of the trouble and distress babies cause, most humans are innately reluctant to execute them.¹ But the anti-choice people have this bizarre idea that a recently-fertilised ovum is somehow equal in complexity, dignity, worth, holiness and value, to a bouncing nine-month bundle of squalling babymeat. That's like saying that an acorn equals an oak-tree: it's just whacko. For the first week of its "life", a baby is about the size of a Volvox and a damn sight less sophisticated. You can't tell me that killing that is murder-hell, my goddamn immune system kills about a million things a day that are more highly-developed than a blastocyst, and that's why I'm so goddamn proud of my immune system.
But the thing that really gets me about this whole abortion "debate",² is the way both sides try to pretend that both sides don't share the same values. I've already demonstrated the generality of the anti-choice viewpoint, but the anti-life idea appears to be just as ubiquitous and magnetically attractive. It's not just about killing babies: occasionally you get a chance to kill women too, while denying them a choice in the matter, and firebombing the premises of anyone who offers them one. And if you're really, really lucky, you can compel someone to give birth to an honest-to-God monster (go on, ask Google about "anencephalic baby" if you think I'm kidding), tell them it's for their own abstract good, insist on preserving the wretched little mite in a horror-movie travesty of life, and finally watch it die as you knew it would all along.
Wouldn't it have been better just to hoover it out of them in the first place? Well, that's debatable, especially when it leaves the door open for premarital sex, disregard of God's command to procreate, state-marshalled baby-slaughter, and celebrity abortathons. And that's what I specially appreciate about the abortion "debate": everybody loses. Every alternative is bad, and that means that everybody's wrong-and not just wrong, but wrong in the vilest, bitterest and most degrading possible way.
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¹ The gentle reader may form their own opinion on whether this is due to innate Godliness or an evolved aversion to destroying a creature that likely propagates one's own genes.
² Apart from the way that it's not a debate at all, but a bunch of histrionic fuckwits bawling at each other because they wouldn't know a debate if you strangled them with it, let alone if you calmly explained it to them then asked them for their opinion.