Let’s Get Our Rights Straight

 

It is my fervent belief that all the people who strive to control human sexual behavior in the name of God are demeaning the very God they claim to worship.

It is extremely difficult to follow the logic of the typical conservative’s conclusions about reproductive liberty.  If I am ever going to get my own mind organized well-enough to refute the beliefs of people like Rick Santorum, I must reduce this presentation to the lowest comprehension level I can, and, against all the evidence to the contrary, pray the people who parrot Santorum’s prescriptions for female conduct are at least moderately capable of following along.

Santorum believes/says contraception is against God’s law

So does the Catholic Church, which is one of the reasons I am a baptized, confirmed and purposely non-practicing member.  For the sake of fairness, let’s assume it is true that there is a  God; that contrary to the scientists’ theories, God created everything and everybody, from the beginning of earthly time.

Paleontologists who discovered the headless skeleton of “Lucy” in Ethiopia estimated the age of her bones at around 3.2 million years. As far as I can tell, Ethiopia was and still is a part of Earth.

That means that:

God’s humanoid creation was wandering around for millions of years before the Bible was written by human men.

God’s creation included all the parts necessary to have sex, including the parts that registered pleasure in their brains, however primitive those brains might have been.  The pleasure part was not a mistake made by God, but a major element of the reproductive process.

Since reading and writing were invented by humans eons later in around 3200 B.C., God made no rules that prevented purely recreational sexual intercourse among his first creations.

Therefore, the so-called laws of God cited by Santorum and his ilk are actually laws invented by humans in the name of God.  Further, said laws are just as amendable by mankind as any other laws developed by mankind to try to control the behavior of its ever-increasing community.

Santorum, et. al. believe/preach that abortion is a sin against God and cites the Bible as the source of that knowledge; the same Bible mentioned above…the one written by God’s creation: human males.  To them, every sperm that makes the long, hot swim to penetrate the surface of an ovum has an intrinsic right to proceed through the 9-month gestation and to produce a new human.  That right, they claim, outweighs every right of either donor of the egg and sperm to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; including, in Santorum’s case anyway, the health of the mother and the eventual circumstances into which the fetus is delivered. 

Again for the sake of argument, let’s say Santorum & Company are correct about that.  And let’s pretend (I know, it will be a stretch) that every human in history, including today, honored that so-called right of the sperm and egg.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), 50 million pregnancies have been legally terminated since 1973, the year abortion was legal in every state.  That, of course, does not include any illegal terminations that would likely drive that number up significantly.

That’s a lot of people-- a potential U.S. population more than 15% larger than it is currently.  Not only that.  Since these pregnancies would have otherwise been terminated if termination were an option, many or most of these potential people would have special medical, social and financial needs.  Who would provide those resources?

Santorum, Gingrich, Romney and Paul think it shouldn’t be government.  The burden for such resources must be placed on the parents and those parents should get jobs so they can provide them.  What’s that you say?  There are no jobs? These people who have children irresponsibly should have thought about that before they laid down and got themselves pregnant.

What’s that?  What about rape?  Well, the National Center for Biotechnology Information conducted a study about that.  Here’s what they learned:

RESULTS:

The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator. Only 11.7% of these victims received immediate medical attention after the assault, and 47.1% received no medical attention related to the rape. A total 32.4% of these victims did not discover they were pregnant until they had already entered the second trimester; 32.2% opted to keep the infant whereas 50% underwent abortion and 5.9% placed the infant for adoption; an additional 11.8% had spontaneous abortion.

If any one of the Republican candidates for President defeats Barack Obama, there will likely be an immediate attempt to overturn Roe vs. Wade, making abortion illegal.  That would mean that 17 of the 34 victims of rape who became pregnant would have been forced, by law, to have their babies.

Now imagine what life would be like for those 17 children.

The policies of the Catholic Church and the politicians who share a belief in its teachings against both birth control and abortion are behaving irresponsibly in a 2012 world that is over-populated and straining under the burden to its natural resources.  Their religious arguments to the contrary are simple-minded and based entirely in myth.  Are we really going to allow these people to aid and abet the imminent destruction of our country?