hi,
i just got back from washington d.c and the naral pro choice march.
there were 1.5 million people taking part in the march, which makes it the largest march in the history of the united states, or so i was told.
thanks to the organizers and the participants for putting together a very important and very peaceful march.
i’m very tired, but i’ll try to write down some of my thoughts about pro-choice before i go to bed.
for starters, i respect a woman’s right to do with her body as she sees fit, and i resent the idea that old white men might try to legislate an anachronistic notion of morality through anti-choice legislation and the rolling back of constitutionally guaranteed rights.
abortion is a very hard and divisive issue, and i agree with john kerry when he says that abortions should be legal and rare. i personally find it absurd that the right wing in the u.s are pro-death penalty but anti-choice. and i find it absurd that the right wing in the u.s are rolling back environmental legislation, the effect of which will be to cause hundreds of thousands of birth defects through mercury poisoning.
do the republicans in the u.s care more for unborn fetuses than for living children?
if the republicans and the right wing in the u.s would be more consistent and would promote universal health care and would make birth-control and sex education universally available and would develop programs to look after the health and well-being of low-income mothers and children then i might be more inclined to at least hear them out on their ideologically extreme anti choice position.
it would seem that if the right wing and the republicans wanted to really make an effort to reduce the number of abortions in the u.s that they would institute the measures that i just mentioned.
teach sex-education and make birth control widely available and make family planning clinics ubiquitous and well-funded and you’d see a huge drop in the number of abortions.
but the right wing in america are not pro-life, they are just trying to legislate a narrow and anachronistic moral position.
as i said, if they were truly ‘pro-life’ they wouldn’t support the death penalty and they wouldn’t get excited every time there’s the opportunity to go and kill people in other countries. and if the right wing and the republicans were truly ‘pro-life’ then they would make health care available to any and all who required it.
no, the right wing and the republicans in america are just trying to foist an anachronistic and misogynistic agenda on the people of the united states.
i do hope that at some point the discussion around choice and abortion can become less polarized and more moderate. but as long as the republicans and the right wing maintain such a bizarre and inconsistent position they kind of rule out the chance for meaningful debate on this issue.
and that’s why i was in d.c this weekend lending my support to naral and planned parenthood and the march for choice.
moby
