With the highly-edited, out of context Planned Parenthood “sting” videos making the rounds in various conservative news outlets, the topics of abortion, fetal tissue research and the non-profit group’s federal funding have all come roiling up to the surface. Most outlets tend to cover two sides of the debate about abortion — those in favor of women having constitutionally-protected dominion, authority and autonomy over her reproductive organs and decisions, and those who believe in making abortion illegal. We here at The Political Garbage Chute understand that this is a tough, emotional subject for many reasons, but we also have noticed that in all the rhetoric, yelling, and passionate arguments, there has been one group whose opinion on abortion has not been asked — fetuses, zygotes, and blastocysts, otherwise known as the “ones who are aborted.”
While anti-abortion advocates do their level best to portray it otherwise, the reality is that 89% of abortions take place in the first twelve weeks of a pregnancy, or within the first trimester, at least according to things known as “facts” and “statistics” analyzed by the Guttmacher Institute in 2010. This means that the “late-term” abortions — abortions that take place much closer to full-term — that they point to and create shocking imagery of to scare people into feeling the way they do about abortions, only make up roughly 1 in 10. Those who Guttmacher surveyed that also experienced physical abuse — such as rape or incest — were more likely to get an abortion outside of the first trimester.
We decided that the best representative of the Abortion American populace would be a developing fetus in the first trimester. Pro-life proponents often cite that no one “stands up for” the unborn, so we took our questions about abortion right to the unborn, and found ourselves a fetus willing to be interviewed. What follows now is a candid, and frank discussion about abortion with that fetus.
Oh. Wait. That’s right. It couldn’t speak to us about its thoughts on abortion because it can’t think, talk, or even understand it exists because the stages of development of a human being aren’t a magical, mystical adventure through Tummy World where you end up with a baby at the end. It doesn’t register anything on a conscious level because it is literally incapable of it, and it’s not quite 6cm long.
It can’t function outside of its mother, and while it may have its own DNA, so does a carrot and you eat the hell out of those, don’t you? Sure, it has human DNA, but so does the sperm you shot into your gym sock last night. Yes, an abortion is killing a human life form. But it’s a human life form without any remote possibility of life without its mother, and its a life form for which there are roughly 7 billion replacements at the moment.
No one wants to think of an abortion as a wonderful thing, but do you want the alternative? Millions of unwanted children will hit the social safety net, and unless you want dead babies piled in the streets (ironies will never cease) — real ones not undeveloped life forms that could one day be a baby — you’re going to have to pay taxes to take care of them. That’s to say nothing of the spike in emergency care that will be seen all over the Bible belt as Little Susie Perfect Christian has to see Dr. Coat Hanger to take care of the pregnancy she is ill-prepared for
It’s probably a really good thing that these life forms that can’t think, can’t speak and don’t even have any possible way to know they exist be treated better than the host organisms they depend on, huh?
