The Wake

Let me get a few things off my chest. I’m not a woman. I love babies. And I’m glad as a Gregorian monk to be setting the conservatives - those right-winged, “religiously-righteous,” Rolls-Royce revving revenue-riders - straight in their horribly misguided quest to assert moral dominance over the whole of America.

Their latest perversion? Making abortion completely illegal. Get this part straight; don’t let them bullshit you with “only partial-birth bans” propaganda. No. To quote Quint, my favorite Spielbergian New England shark-hunter: they’re going for the head, the tail - the whole damn thing.

Which is interesting, considering that in this body of political water, the only carnivorous creatures cut-throat enough to maintain aquatic-control are the Republicans themselves. Virtual fallacy-fishes, these self-supposed “morally right” crusaders and their conservatarianistocratic approach to the abortion debate, thrive on churning the political water, whipping it into a whirlpool of quasi-moral motives and political incentives, where only the strongest lie-spewing, liberal-consuming ichthyoids survive.

All it takes to lure these behemoths from the black depths of the agenda-riddled water is any big hunk of smelly bait that wreaks of the notion that ¡WOW! - A woman should actually have the freedom to dictate the terms of her pregnancy!

So all hands on deck - we’re going to chum up the water, and it’s going to get ravenously dirty.

Here’s what you need to know:
Thirty-one years ago the United States Supreme Court made a decision, in the landmark case Roe v. Wade, which legalized a woman’s right to have a safe abortion. Conservatives have been hell-bent on destroying it ever since.

And now in the year 2004 - a date which belies the times’ retrogressive social-state - with George W. Bush taking his seat on the Throne of America, these pro-life, sharp-toothed Guppies-from-hell are poised for a feeding frenzy.

With the recent decision to ban “partial-birth abortions,” Stateside conservatives have spurred a Tsunami that’s threatening to wipe out all remaining vestiges of reproductive freedom; coincidently spawning a deadly scenario in which women will be forced into having dangerous and often deadly “back-alley abortions.”

But how’d this holy-guided hootenanny all happen? When did George and his legions of bible-belt scallywags get the notion to dance the two-step all over the constitutional rights of women?

Maybe it began when Bush declared the Sunday prior to Roe’s 30th Anniversary, “National Sanctity of Human Life Day.” Oh wait - Maybe it was when he shamelessly linked abortion and Osama Bin Laden in a speech regarding the occasion, saying: “On September 11th, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life . . . Now we are engaged in a fight against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life.” Maybe it was when he enacted legislation to make a fetus - a biological entity completely reliant on its literal mother-ship for life-support - a “human being.” Or maybe it was when he decided to support banning partial-birth abortions. Regardless, the prezident’s alarmingly un-American take on women’s rights is now at the collective doorstep of every female in the nation. Apparently, according to Bush and his administration, abortion and the rights of females have no place in United States society.

And by placing undue focus on the “intact dilation and extraction” method of abortion (this being the actual term; “partial-birth” is a term coined solely by the National Right to Life Committee and is not recognized by any major medical association), Bush has been able to fallaciously appeal to gore-weary Americans everywhere. In portraying the procedure as some kind of heinous attempt by women to wait until the very last minute before aborting the fetus, Bush and his fellow conservatives have - like doped-up Divas - relied on overdramatic-dynamics and fanatical-antics to create their own surrealistic, self-centered-stigma.

The truth is this: in reality, a so-called “partial-birth abortion” (the name, a personification of putrid-Presidential-pedagogy) occurs in only .05% of abortion cases. And in these situations, the procedure is used nearly uniformly for rare cases of rape, incest, or a mother’s endangerment. This may be the reason why the ban has been actively decried by major medical organizations including: the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Nurses Association, and the American Medical Women’s Association.

And regardless of one’s personal opinion regarding what constitutes a human being, the core issue surrounding this ban and abortion as-a-whole remains the same: in this now constitutional-circus of a country, abortion has become merely another politically motivated masquerade of right-winged religious agenda. Completely ignoring and bypassing common sense, conservatives use the abortion issue as a means to raise votes among their Church-going counterparts. YES – banning abortion will force thousands of women to find a dingy side street (or worse, a wire coat-hanger) for abortions; and YES – banning abortion will cause a far more atrocious fatality rate, as mothers will die ten-fold from inadequate and highly hazardous black-market health care; BUT – banning abortion will ALSO satisfy the leagues of Catholics, Baptists, Evangelists, and all the other fundamentalist Christian groups who vote for Bush and who want me burning in hell right now for writing this.

And that’s the terrible thing about it all. Banning abortions will set-off an alarming era in American politics. With religious-motivation driving the pro-lifers (just take a peep at prolife.com), letting a ban on abortion stand will surely jeopardize every principle this country was built on. Banning abortion makes a blasphemy of church and state religious separation; it throws all notions of free-choice, free-thought, and the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her body out the White House’s window.

This ride on the dogmatic religious-express has to end. And despite its current, seemingly unstoppable full-tilt boogie towards the Saintly-Station, I still have faith that it will. For as much as the big, bad Bush and the rest of his razor-toothed, anti-abortionist apex-predators want to make the constitutional water unsafe for us democratically-strong swimmers, remember; the good guys still nabbed Jaws in the end.