My good buddy Wes sent me a link to this fabulous web site called Until Abortion Ends, a place where smug anti-choice slacktivists can give up something thoroughly unimportant until a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body is no longer her decision. I say slacktivists, because it’s not like they are going on a hunger strike or refusing something that would require action on behalf of the abortion industry. The big grabber picture on the front page of the site is the one to be viewed at the top of this post, a woman vowing with ABSOLUTE FINALITY that she will not drink coffee until there is no more abortion.
I suppose that would be more effective if… I don’t know… maybe Starbucks was offering abortions? I mean, let’s face it… If one person quits drinking coffee, that’s one thing, but what if tens of people quit? I imagine a huge meeting of the abortion doctors of the world, somewhere like Minneapolis or Cannes, and they would all be just like “Oh my God, we had no idea about the seriousness of this issue, but now that we get it we’ll just have to bow to the unrelenting pressure and quit being evil death merchant woman haters! Thanks, smug twenty-somethings!”
If you were to look up impotent in the dictionary, the image above might just be there.
The slogan on the main page is “Too many of us have been lost to abortion. It’s time to share our voices with the voiceless and make a small sacrifice for those who have been sacrificed. Stand with us. Give up something you love.” And now I’m going to pick that apart with a smarmy wit that makes me feel good about myself.
Nobody is lost to abortion. Yes, fetuses are killed. Fetuses aren’t people any more than seeds are trees. One could equally argue that too many of us are lost to masturbation, as literally millions of potential lives sprint madly on my belly looking for an egg to fertilize. It’s a stupid argument. And really, what the hell gives anyone the right to be mourning the loss of fetuses that weren’t even in their bodies to begin with?
A small sacrifice? Giving up coffee or spending hours playing Mario Kart doesn’t join your voice to the voiceless, it shows just how ridiculously stupid people can still be privileged in our society. Have you ever noticed that you’ve never heard someone say, “…and then the British left India, and the Indian people finally drank coffee again and things were better for them.” No, you haven’t. You know why? Because your “sacrifice” means nothing to anyone except yourself and the poor sacks you sit around Starbucks with sipping on a steamed milk because you’re a god damned martyr to the cause.
Let me make certain I am clear on this topic: Nobody has the right to tell me what to do with my body. Nobody has the right to tell me that I am required to procreate. Nobody has the right to prevent me from changing my future by making a decision today. If a pregnant woman isn’t ready to have a child, it’s probably a very bad thing to force her to have it.
But Jim, say the beret-wearing bad poetry writers of America, that’s a life. That’s a little human growing in her body, participating in God’s wonderful miracle. Well, along with handing you this great big bag of dicks to eat, let me just say that you are full of shit. That fertilized egg inside you is not a life. It is living tissue, the same as the mole you had removed and the viral invader your body murdered.
Nobody sits on a rocking chair singing quietly to themselves in the sunset thanking God for the chance encounter of gametes allowing cellular reproduction. That’s not life. Life is going to a ball game. Life is holding the Lovely Lady’s head in my hands and telling her that things are going to be okay. Life is music. Life is skinning your knee. Fetuses can’t do any of those things. Fetuses reproduce cells.
That coffee you swear you aren’t going to drink? Once upon a time, it was alive. It was a coffee bean, the zygote of a coffee plant, a little life with DNA and cellular reproduction. Because of you (or more accurately, because of all the people who don’t give a shit about your ridiculously plea and continue to get their cappuccino with foam), that life was cut short, pulled physically from the next best thing to its womb, dried, ground, shipped, savaged, boiled, and humiliated into your mouth, where it would be swallowed, digested, and excreted. But we don’t care because it’s coffee.
You may think of a fetus as a living, wonderful representative of God’s plan. You’re entitled to do so if you like. Me not sharing your opinion is my business. But when it’s not your body, it’s not your business. Plain and simple.
I just watched one of the videos on the site at random, and a poor eighteen year old woman has just said she will give up eating ice cream. She did it for Lent, only she cheated (GOD HATES YOU) and ate it on Sundays (BLASPHEMOUS TART, DID CHRIST’S SUFFERING MEAN NOTHING TO YOU?) but this time she’s just plain old giving it up, and it is probably going to be the hardest thing she has ever had to do.
You’re allowed to make whatever decisions you want and base them on whatever criteria you like. If you don’t want to eat ice cream anymore because it will remind you to pray for pregnant women to make the right choice, then by all means go for it. Your prayers are as ineffectual as your stance on the issue. The God you are praying to is a stealer of more lives than the abortion people will ever take. Every time you menstruate, your body is shedding a potential life, possibly even a fertilized cell. That doesn’t make you guilty of abortion, but this God you think supports you designed your body to waste the opportunity for life.
I can’t possibly say in words just how pathetic this movement is.
Jim
I will give up giving a shit about these people until abortion is over.