Marching For Reproductive Autonomy

THE DAY AFTER Trump was sworn in, millions of women hit the streets, protesting Trump's illgeal, foreign assisted election and his well known misogyny, or both.. It became a healthy habit, and Saturday, October the second, twenty twenty one, a bit older and wizer, they were back at it. This time the issue was reproductive freedom and control, who should have it and who should not. After all these years, we still can't seem to decide. Or rather, we have decided, but its a split decision, split right down the middle of America's political spectrum: those favoring personal reproductive autonomy who want to keep government out of it, versus those favoring government control over it. In a strange reversal of normal roles, it is America's normally anti-government conservatives who advocate for government control over, prohibition of abortion, and the normally big government liberals who want to keep the government out of it. Those big government conservatives, wanting the feds to insinuate themselves directly into the womb of woman. The overarching question of course is and always has been whether abortion is murder, and hsould be criminalized on that basis, and if it is, whether people do and should have the right to kill whatever they might find living inside their own bodies, including fetuses. Maybe abortion is murder, maybe it isn't. Maybe it only becomes murder when the fetus is sufficientlly deveolped to live on its own outside the human body. But as Davy Crockett might have said: "If it aint murder, its a mite too close for comfort." The zeal with which so called "pro life" people defend the supposed rights of the unborn easily evinces self righteous sanctimony, especially considering that most pro lifers seem to have no interest in giving help to the mother in supporting the child once its born. Proponents of personal reproductive choice can and often do come across as callous, callous concerning the cavalier attitude they seem to display towards the actual act of aborting a living fetus. There is in short ample cause to find the most ardent members of both camps contemptible. Then too, this issue seems somehow too profoundly important to be decided by nine post menopausal people, most of whom have never been pregnant, and are only deemed qualified to render a decision by virtue of wearing black robes and having been appointed by self interested politicians rather than elected by the people who will have to live with their judicial renderings. This issue calls for nothing less than a national, if not global referendum of women of child bearing age. They are, after all, the concerned parties. There is of cousre a solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancies staring us right in the face, and it is neither abstinence nor chastity belts. It is, quite obviously, effective, affordable, accessible contraception. Neither science nor technology nor economics prevents contraception from solving the abortion dilemma for good and forever, everywhere. What prevents it is politics and religion, which should be shocking to no one and disgustng to everyone. Only the machinations of the human mind, and the consequent bizarre, counter productive attitudes within it and contagiously spread and multiplied among the many, for political and religious reasons, stand between humanity and the answer to humane reproduction choices. As usual, conservative thinking, political ideology ad religious beliefs block progress towards a final, acceptable solution. But, as we sometimes say: what else is new?