Wednesday, November 24, 2004

A Populist's View of Abortion

By Alan Gregory Wonderwheel

A mother's choice to terminate her pregnancy is between herself, her conscience, and her God. A mother has the absolute right to end her pregnancy at the early stage for any reason whatever, and she keeps that right into the later stages when she reasonably believes that the risk to her own health and life is too unreasonably large. No busybody religious snob, no dictatorial fundamentalist, no self-serving politician feathering a career, no fancy-pants quacking doctor, no law making judicial activist, no elitist editor, no snake-oil selling talk show host, and not even a tyrannical majority have any right to step between a mother-to-be and her God in making the moral decision to terminate her pregnancy.

Anti-abortionists like to soothe their blistering sanctimonious self-image with false images and idols of themselves as modern day abolitionists, but it is they who are the modern day slave masters wielding the lash of verbal abuse, the whip of pharisaic self-righteousness guilt, and the chains of legislation against the freedom of a mother to make a moral decision with her God. It is the anti-abortionists who chase down and hound a mother who, like the escaped slave, has escaped their bonds and is attempting to seek her freedom in the country of God given rights to make the most intimate and important decision a person could make with her body and her soul.

We must never forget when anti-abortionists today say that they are the friend of the pregnant mother that the slave masters yesterday said "The intelligent, Christian slave-holder at the South is the best friend of the negro." (The Spectator, December 6, 1859, p. 2, c. 1.) When anti-abortionists claim that their cause is sanctioned by God we must remember the likes of Raymond Harris writing in his Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave-Trade, that slavery had "the positive sanction of God in its support."

These false prophets of "pro-life" who abandon the child as soon as it is born, who sanction the death-penalty, who support forced military abortions by the killing of pregnant mothers in war, who only live vicariously through their preacher's charismatic power, they have no true understanding what life is or means. They would enslave the soul of a mother on the pretense of saving her soul. They would chain the mother to the birthing bed while claiming to set her free. In the name of their class warfare and for the benefit of the wealthy and power elites, they would demean the humanity of mothers and force mothers to be breeding stock.

There is no more fundamental freedom today than the right of a mother to end her pregnancy. In every country in the world today the right to make the moral decision with her God to choose abortion is the single best indicator of a free people. Where the right to choose, the right to make the moral decision, is prohibited, there the enslavement of women by caste patriarchy and the plutocratic rule by wealthy elites will be found. If you want to free your society, to free your mind, and to free your soul, there is only one choice you can make: free the mother to make her own moral decisions with herself, her conscience, and her God about whether to terminate her pregnancy.

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