The Bleating of Hypocrites

I know I'm a bit of a Johnny-come-lately with this video, but I wanted to throw my belated one-and-a-half-cents into the discussion.

Libertyville Abortion Demonstration

(Note: Embedding has been turned off via request.)

I know some people have strong positions on abortion, but that doesn't make their positions right or even defensible. This video shows that quite clearly. Every single person asked what the penalty for a woman having an illegal abortion should be waffled their answer. Obviously they didn't want to say women should go to prison for having abortions. (If that was the case, there would have to be a heckuva lot more courts, lawyers, judges, corrections officers, and prisons built, to handle the flood of women being convicted. This would only result in abortion being forced underground and more women dying. Is that what this country wants, even if we could afford it?) Only one person out of those questioned did say women should have jail terms, then backpedaled with the caveat "If she knew what she was doing when she killed her child..."

That response was, frankly, stupid, and cast women in a childish, second-class-citizen light. Women who choose to have an abortion most certainly know what they're doing. They don't want a child right now and they don't want to be pregnant--and they rightfully conclude that the rights of the adult, born, thinking person outweigh the rights of the nonborn, nonthinking clump of cells.

It astonishes me that anti-choicers (or forced birthers would be a more accurate term--people wanting to force adults to give birth, thus enslaving them to their reproductive organs) are so focused on the fetus they forget about--or, rather, choose to disregard--the person in whose body the fetus resides. It's as if after a woman gets pregnant, she turns into a walking uterus. No mind, no heart, no wishes or desires or rights, just a swollen organ. Of course, such disassociation is necessary for them to follow their twisted "logic" through to its end. But the inconsistency and senselessness of what they are trying to say comes out when they are asked questions like these.

If abortion is to be made illegal, then women who have one and the doctors (or midwives) who perform them should be punished. There's no other crime on the books that is not punished. If abortion is "killing" as people say, then the punishment should be harsh. I would think an eighteen- to twenty-year sentence would be appropriate for the person who was denied the right to live to adulthood. If people are not willing to punish women who have abortions...then it is not a crime and should be left up to, as one woman in the video says, between "her and God."

See how simple that is? If you have the strength of your convictions, you should be able to follow them through. If not, then you are floundering in inconsistency and hypocrisy, and as Shakespeare commented, are simply "sound and fury signifying nothing."