Let's start with a surprising item. "The Purpose Driven Life." It's a wildly popular book in certain religious circles. As in the circles that generally support televangelists and put weird-ass bumper stickers on their cars that say things like "I was dead once. I didn't like it." Let's face it. There's a LOT of these folks around. Funny thing is, nearly every one of them is against allowing women to make the choice of whether or not to end their pregnancies.
Side note here: I saw a bumper sticker here at work, that said "If Mary had been pro-choice, we wouldn't have Christmas." Apparent underlying assumption: everyone who says they're pro-choice would choose to have abortions at all times. This is a rock-stupid assumption. End of digression.
Getting back to the "pro-life," "Purpose-Driven Life" crowd. As a favor to a friend, I made the effort to read every last word of this book. I can save you a little scratch if you like. The book says that God is omnipotent and omniscient (hardly surprising) and that as a consequence, he has planned every event for YOUR life ever since the start of the Universe (also hardly surprising). Interestingly, God appears to have allowed every person the free will to accept or deny this plan he has... which is completely daft. If there is a God and it made arrangements for your natural mommy and natural daddy to (ahem) have sex so that a particular sperm would combine with a particular egg to form YOU (this is pretty much exactly the way the book puts this concept) then YOUR PARENTS HAD NO FREE WILL IN THEIR SEX. OK?
But there's a logical corrolary to this idea. If there's no free will, why does a single fan of this dolt think God doesn't like abortions? If I understand the story so far, God apparently spends a fair whack of his time getting men and women to combine PARTICULAR sperm and PARTICULAR eggs, knowing IN ADVANCE they will be aborted. Looking at the figures, God logically ought to be seen by the "omniscient/ omnipotent" crowd as a big fan of abortion. But they don't seem to recognize that fact, and I find that puzzling.
Maybe these folks have no real use for logic. That would be okay, I guess. Except that they seem to want to put their illogical, contradictory thoughts into law. As any lawyer can tell you, that's a bad idea, because laws are based on logic. If you put together a bunch of laws without using logic, I would think there was a danger of making some truly stupid combinations. I'm not talking about laws like "it's illegal to hunt whales in Utah." More like "you can have freedom of religion, so long as it's some version of the Christian religion." Don't laugh, those of you who like logic. I've had a Christian friend tell me EXACTLY that only a few years ago.
Well, getting back to the main subject, I guess putting it in a nutshell, you can say that religion-based objections to reproductive liberty just don't make any sense to me. So far as I can tell, there's no real reason to restrict this decision making, or to impose a government-mandated decision. In the end, it appears to me to be a matter of busybodies wishing to exert control over the lives of all women and force them to carry to term their pregnancies, regardless of the situation. For whatever reason they have this desire, I think it's wrong-headed. I hope one day, these people will outgrow their desire to control things that they have no business controlling and get real lives for themselves. I should live so bloody long...
