By N Oji Mzilikazi
2 February 2016
Two weeks after posting, The Sermon was Anti-Abortion. I support Abortion Rights, a gunman stormed a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Colorado killing three people and wounding nine others.
When the killer appeared in court, he defended the planned attack with, “I’m a warrior for the babies.”
In July 2015, anti-abortion activists posted videos online purporting to show the organization’s employees discussing the sale of aborted fetal tissue, which is illegal in the United States if done for a profit. Shortly thereafter — within 74 days, four Planned Parenthood clinics were firebombed.
A grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of misusing fetal tissue — and instead indicted the makers of undercover video.
Planned Parenthood clinics are more than abortions. They provide healthcare for women and that includes preventative service like cancer screenings. They also providing birth control so females could enjoy the joys of sex without fear of its culmination in pregnancy.
Any attack against Planned Parenthood/healthcare clinics that serve women is an attack against the female gender; mothers, wives and daughters.
So adamant are anti-abortionist extremists about the sacredness of human life, they have bombed clinics that perform the procedure causing death and injury to patients, staff and passers-by. They have also killed doctors, attempted to kill doctors as well as threatened to kill doctors that perform abortions.
As we saw in the killing of Dr. George R. Tiller, security cameras, bulletproof glass, armed guards, an armoured S.U.V. and a bulletproof vest do no protect anyone from any anti-abortionist extremist with pure murderous intent. Dr. Tiller was shot in the head at point-blank range while ushering at church.
In their zeal to save a foetus, whose future as a person is unknown, anti-abortion extremists feel that it’s okay to destroy an already productive life. What logic!
I truly believe that life is sacred. But can anyone explain to me how an unborn foetus can have more rights than the woman who is unwilling to carry it?
In civil society, in most western societies, women are no longer the property — of their husbands or fathers. Yet, the Church/religious ideology and by extension anti-abortionists remain hell bent on maintaining, exerting ownership over a woman’s womb, as well as keeping the female as a slave to her womb.
Since the receptacle that sustains and births life reside in the female, the female is the true and sole owner of her womb. And since the female is the one to experience the physical and physiological changes that pregnancy engenders, the decision to have a baby or abort must reside with her. Not even the man whose sperm caused the pregnancy and who loves her dearly has the right to decide if she should or shouldn’t have an abortion.
Just as the umbilical cord carries nutrients to the developing child, the mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual state of the pregnant female contributes to a child’s wholeness or lack.
If a mother is under tremendous stress, or a child is unloved in the womb, the resultant negative thoughts and feelings are transmitted to the foetus and become part of that child’s personality. The hated/unloved child is psychologically scarred and damaged long before birth.
Must society allow carrying a foetus to full term the penalty for unprotected sex, rape or unintended or unexpected pregnancy?
The US Surgeon General’s January 2001 report, from the Children’s Mental Health Conference, stated that maternal depression affects a child’s development, and 1 in 10 children and adolescents suffer from severe mental illness causing some level of impairment.
The report revealed that 80% of children with emotional, behavioural and developmental needs were not being treated, and in many cases end up in special education classes, the juvenile justice system or on welfare.
Single-parenting, in spite of numerous studies detailing its harm is commonplace. Youths that come before the juvenile or criminal justice system are overwhelmingly raised in a single parent household headed by a female. And more often than not, judges berate the absentee father culture and negligence of the mother for their waywardness and/or criminality. Yet, anti-abortionists are willing to perpetuate a beeline from the womb to incarceration.
When a woman who is not the victim of a rape decides to seek an abortion, it’s more than likely she is not emotionally, physically, mentally, financially, and/or spiritually prepared to have a child.
Children need quality nurturing, a safe, loving and healthy environment for optimum development, to maximize their potential, to healthily navigate the world with all its disappointments and setbacks, and overall, to be “good” citizens. Group homes/State run centers for children can and will never be fertile ground for the said children.
In 2002, the Quebec Association of Youth Centres produced a portrait of the children in, or was part of the foster-care institution.
Findings were they were five times more likely to have a run in with the police and to have alcoholic or drug problems; 1 in 3 tried to commit suicide, compared with 1 in 10 in other teens; 2 out of 3 have difficulty in school compared to 1 in 4 of other youngsters; 1 in 4 was a victim of sexual abuse; and 71% were living on welfare a decade after they turn 18.
Is being a potential/future ward of the State preferable to an abortion?
The decision to have an abortion is often rooted in economics. The financial health of the parent(s) often affect outcomes.
The very nature of the all-powerful parent and dependant and defenceless child set the stage for a child (children) to be ignored, neglected, abused, exploited, and to suffer. Especially, when poverty makes living and earning a living hell.
There are nations wherein parents sell their children to pimps or the rich, parents sell their daughter’s virginity — to eat, and where the child sex/pedophilia industry is a virtual sub-sector of their tourism industry, and where child abuse without fear of consequences brings Arab, western and Asian sex-tourists — and foreign currency.
According to information provided to World Vision in 2011 by the Philippine ambassador to the United States, forty per cent of male tourists who travel to the Philippines go there for sexual purposes.
Universally, many crimes against children including sexual violence and sexual exploitation are overlooked and go unpunished.
Japan is addicted to child porn. As detailed in the Indepenent, Japan “is the only OECD (Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development) nation that has not banned possession of child porn, partly to protect its manga and anime industries.”
The article also revealed, “The FBI and Homeland Security Investigations give Japan’s police hundreds of tips on child pornography makers and distributors every year and none of them are acted upon.”
Lest we think ourselves better or superior, child abuse, the sexual grooming of children, the sexual exploitation of children, child prostitution and child trafficking for the purposes of prostitution are a plague in western nations.
In October 2009, the FBI launched Cross Country IV, a three-day operation in 36 cities that targeted organised crime, gangs and individuals engaged in child prostitution and child trafficking for the purposes of prostitution. It led to nearly 700 arrests. One of the 52 children rescued was a 10-year-old.
FBI raids in more than 70 cities across America in July 2013 rescued 105 teenage victims of sex trafficking and exploitation. 150 pimps were arrested.
Most of the victims were between the ages of 13 and 17. The youngest victim was 9 years old.
Child abuse, the sexual exploitation of children and child trafficking that all rob children of their childhood is a far better cause célèbre than anti-abortion.
Violence solves nothing. Destroying productive lives to save one that could end up being evil personified is counter-productive.
Sex-education as well as access to birth control are the most logical ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies and reduce abortions.
Sex education with the emphasis on sexual responsibility ought to be compulsory in schools. Then and only then are teenagers going to have the inner understand that a child is much more than the terminus of love, attraction, going around with someone or to facilitate the fanciful and abstract appeal of being father or mother.
When people are able to embrace conception as an act of deliberation, the cycle of poverty, child neglect, child abuse, child abandonment, and children becoming a ward of the state is on the way to being broken.
Making adoptions easier, expanding adoption programs, as well as financial support for pregnant women so they could afford to have their babies, not to mention affordable daycare would also contribute to a reduction in abortions.
Given the financial shortfall plaguing municipalities, governments, charitable organizations, and steadily increasing cost of housing, as well as education … It’s purely lip service to children being a precious resource, society’s future, and so on.
As previously stated: “Pro-life/anti-abortionist forces are willing to do battle with those that perform abortion, those that advocate a woman’s right to choose, and those contemplating or seeking an abortion. It would be honourable, if when their intervention prevented an abortion, they will, after the birth of the child offer moral, physical and financial support to those who might be in need of them. But that is not their interest. Theirs is about bringing life into the world even if one lacks the means to provide for him/her.”
Is that what any God of Mercy and Love would want?