Wendy Davis has become a house hold name for her epic filibuster.
On Friday, Senators convened to debate the Texas Abortion Bill. But one thing missing? The objections this time were simply ignored.
The Texas Abortion bill is a religious bill. I don’t think anyone is a fan of abortion. It is a medical procedure. Most sensible humans aren’t having one for “lolz”. Yes there are some people who abuse it but frankly there are people who abuse chocolate and we don’t legislate that and chocolate is infinitely deadlier than abortions (People die from diabetes and cardio-vascular issues more regularly than abortions after all).
Abortion is a fundamental part of women’s health. To deny it to people is to deny them a vital tool for the control of their own health. The only thing that has occurred when abortions are banned is the proliferation of unsafe abortion. In fact the British Abortion acts were put in place mainly to save women’s lives. Abortions are going to happen. You may as well make them safe.
Senator Davis is no stranger to this. Her first filibuster was to protect schools from reckless cuts. After that she was removed from the Education Committee. Because children are important. Unless they are poor.
The irony of the declaration that rights of foetuses are important then not caring about them after their born is not lost on me. The Christian Right who care so much about abortion that they would deny women access to it are also unwilling too fund proper sex education, contraception, pre-natal check ups and made such a big fuss about Universal Healthcare that you would have assumed that Obama was planning to sell their children’s organs to zoos for meat. These are the same people who deny poor people a living wage and who are so impressed by the sanctity of children’s lives that they wish for children to never grow up and so deny them the education that they desperately need.
I know of mothers who threw themselves down stairs and out of windows to abort their “baby”. Abortions are not done lightly and the ultimate irony is that many pro-lifers have found themselves on the opposite side of the doors of an abortion clinic when it’s them or their kids who need the procedure.
If you really cared about children you would allow abortions. Children are great. I don’t personally get along well with them but they get along well with me. But here is the thing. I don’t want half a dozen of them. I got enough things to worry about without that many of them.
Middle Child Syndrome is a real thing. See the first child gets care because he is the oldest. The cutting edge. The youngest child needs care because he is young. The one in the middle? Generally has lower healthcare outcomes. Money is spent on the oldest, time on the youngest. He lies in the zone where neither time nor money is available and so suffers.
At the edge of existence and for the poor, this is especially felt. We encourage mothers to have fewer children and space those they have out so that each child has the optimum time and resources to grow.
To take a step back from this level of service and return back to the natural restrictions on birth is madness.
It’s simple. If you are pro-life then don’t get an abortion. No one is forcing you to get one. Senator Davis is not going to chase you about with a speculum. Do what you wish with it. Raise it yourself, give it away for adoption… whatever.
But don’t tell other people to make the same choices as you do. It’s not yours to make.
An abortion is not a happy medical procedure. It is a stressful one and ensuring it goes as smoothly as possible is vital for the prolonged health of the mother to be. To throw up unnecessary obstacles solely to satisfy your god is just pointless. The Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t accept blood. They don’t force you to not get a transfusion.
Ultimately those who are harmed the most are the women. But you tell the women who support pro-life arguments that they cannot be real women unless they love babies and do this. So they think that those women who want the choice and access to abortions just hate babies. It is easy to portray your opponents as one dimensional baby/woman haters but the reality of the situation is that there is a driving force.
In this case it is blatantly religion. We know it’s religious, we have seen pro-life arguments. None of it is based on scientific evidence and the least religious of it boils down to the extremely childish “How can you kill a Baby” argument because in their minds there is no difference from the bunch of cells and a fully formed adult.
Whether it goes through a second time or not is still up in the air. But if it does, it’s only a victory for the coathanger lobby. Everyone else loses.