the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

You say you're against abortion, but:

- You're also against sex education.

- You're against welfare to take care of these kids.

- You're against free education for these kids.

- You're pro-death penalty when these kids don't make it as adults.

And really, how many minority drug babies have you adopted lately?

***

I just saw a poster with these comments on Facebook, and read the attendant discussion. It got me to thinking about population control--which, now that I frame it like that, sounds downright Orwellian.* I wanted to toss a few thoughts out into the Great Uncharted Waters of the Internet, but first, I wish to acknowledge of a couple of good points made in the aforementioned discussion. First, not everyone who is against abortion is against sex education, welfare, etc. Some are, but the poster does paint all conservatives with a very large brush indeed, and I'm not interested in compounding that error. Second, there should be an "or" between "minority" and "drug" in the last sentence; not all drug babies are minorities and to omit the "or" gives the poster an unnecessary and distracting racist slant.

* I can't believe I just used "Orwellian" in a sentence. Who talks like that?

With these caveats, I see the poster as a short and sweet way to list the alternatives to abortion that we can't seem to all get behind. (The death penalty is a rather extreme alternative to abortion, admittedly, but I think it's still relevant. Think of it as a very late-term abortion.)

I am pretty out of the loop on what's happening in US politics, but I am aware that Rick Santorum has said that employers should be able to opt out of providing insurance for birth control if they are morally opposed to it. It's painfully clear to me that I've been out of the religious loop too long, because I can no longer even grasp the concept of being morally opposed to birth control. That's not just batshit crazy--it's ignorant, irresponsible, and dangerous.

Yeah, yeah. The bible commands mankind to "go forth and multiply and replenish the earth," but the earth is full now. We can stop. Largely thanks to this precise doctrine, we have overpopulated the only home we have. You know what happens next? Do you know how beer is made?

Basically, yeast eats the sugars in water and "poops" carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol. There comes a point in every yeast's life where it runs out of sugars to consume and then dies in its own excrement. (Then we drink that shit. Yum!) Humans are presently well on their way to doing the exact same thing to themselves. It's just on a much, much larger scale and moves quite a bit slower.

Something must be done if we want to give our own species a fighting chance. Let's review some of our options:

1. People should be careful who they have sex with and they should use protection.

Yes, of course. I agree. I think everyone agrees, actually.

The problem is, this approach simply is not working, is it? Our planet has a burgeoning population, to say the least. Have you noticed the famine and starvation and warfare over resources that's been going on for decades in places that are not North America or Europe? It's only a matter of time before their fight for food, room to live, and water that isn't contaminated gets to us, and pretending it isn't happening won't change the fact that we're just so many yeast cells in a limited environment, we're running out of sugar, and we're choking on our own waste.

So the question is, what else should we be doing?

2. Provide public funding for birth control and free distribution of it.

What?! Am I actually suggesting that we force people to pay for something they are morally opposed to?

Of course I am. Millions of liberals are morally opposed to the death penalty and to war, for example, but they have little or no say in whether their taxes are used to support such things. Millions of conservatives are morally opposed to welfare, but again, they don't get to choose. (Yesyes...we vote on these things and we call our Congressmen and women, but our slice of the pie is so very small that we can't even determine the flavor.)

Our taxes pay for food and health care for indigent people who have children. Again...yesyesofcourse, they should have to pay for their own care and shouldn't have children if they couldn't provide for them, but they did. That is the fact of the matter. You don't get to back up and say "But you shouldn't have!" at this point. It doesn't solve the problem, and it doesn't take care of the children, does it?

If the choice was yours to make, would you choose to (1) fund these people so the children can be fed and taken care of, at least marginally, or (2) leave them all to fend for themselves? (Option 2 includes the fact that charities will help some, but that there are not enough charities to go around, and I seriously doubt that getting rid of welfare would change that much, if any).

The anti-choice* movement is built upon the assumption that a fetus is a human being, and deserves society's protection as such: the fetus is a life and innocent and should not, basically, get the death penalty for its mother's poor choices. Based on this assumption, anti-choice proponents should choose Option 1 over Option 2. After all, the choice is whether or not to make innocent children suffer for the sins of the parents. In the interest of consistency, Option 1 is the only reasonable choice.

* The correct frame for the position is "anti-choice." "Pro-life" is misleading, at best: We're all pro-life, at least when it comes to our own. We just disagree about what constitutes "life" and what does not, as well as which life gets to, well, live.

Is there another choice? Sure. You can fight with the anti-choice brigade and dedicate your own blood and treasure to personally taking care of all those unwanted children. If you do that, you're still being consistent. I merely argue that most people would not consider this to be a reasonable choice. We admire people who dedicate their lives to helping the helpless, but precious few of us are willing to do it ourselves.

There's a clash of values here that I think makes the conservative position very difficult.* Conservatives generally want to protect innocent human life (and consider fetuses to be part of that category), but also generally want to spend their own money only on things that directly benefit themselves. "Why should I have to pay for someone else's mistake?" is a common complaint, and while it is not limited to conservatives, it is undeniably prevalent in conservative thought and politics. Liberals, on the other hand, are generally defined--by conservatives--as people who want a more socialist "we all should pitch in" approach to social issues.

* I'm trying to avoid the big brush, but some generalization is necessary, as well as appropriate, IMO. Otherwise, why call yourself a "conservative"?

But an internally-consistent conservative must think of the children. If you insist they must not be forced to pay for their parents' mistakes, does that not apply both inside and outside of the womb? If you fight to keep them alive inside the womb, it only makes sense that you fight to keep them alive outside of the womb.

But that takes money. It takes more than we currently collect and spend on it, truthfully, and we already complain about taxes as it is. Birth control is a practical way to drastically reduce both the money necessary to care for all those extra babies, as well as unwanted children, period, which might even drastically reduce the huge incarceration rates in the US (isn't there a link between unwanted children and criminal behaviors?).

Those who refuse to consider the issue beyond their own moral opposition to it are being willfully blind. They are making laws based not on human behavior as it is, but upon human behavior as they wish it was. They are part of the problem.

3. Fund thorough, early, sex education for all.

Abstinence education is not sex education. Abstinence education is wishful thinking and if anything, it backfires horribly. The more the typical young adult knows he will burn in hell forever if he gets jiggy with it before marriage, the more appealing the act becomes. As Ambrose Bierce wrote a century or more ago, "Religion has done sex a great service by making it a sin."

What else is not sex education? Sexually-transmitted disease education. That's just part of sex education, see. If it's the only part taught, it doesn't qualify as sex education. It qualifies only as scare tactics.

Proper sex education involves not only an explanation of how babies are made, but of the various contraceptive approaches available, and the dangers of unprotected sex.

But doesn't this (as well as free condoms, say) send a signal that adults tacitly approve of pre-marital sex? I don't think so, but just for kicks and giggles, let's say it does. Let's say that we have the choice to (1) preach abstinence and deny proper sex education and/or birth control because it sends the wrong signal or (2) provide proper sex education and birth control knowing we're tacitly approving of premarital sex. So far, we've chosen Option 1--against ongoing evidence that this approach does not work.

That's the bottom line, and pretending it isn't true or that the next generation will suddenly take our word for it and stop having pre-marital sex doesn't change it. The only reasonable choice is Option 2, whether or not it "sends a signal."

***

For the record--because you're probably curious--I'm pro-choice. I have what is probably an unusual take on the matter. I am pro-birth control, pro-sex education, and in extreme cases, pro-death penalty. I am largely pacifist when it comes to war (which will probably require a whole 'nother post to address, considering my vocation). At the same time, I realize that we're slowly breeding ourselves into oblivion. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond is a great discussion of this, including numerous examples from history of human beings refusing to collaborate in order to conserve resources and control population and dying out as a result. It's just a matter of time before we do this to our world.

The way I see it, we already tacitly advocate killing entire ecosystems to preserve ourselves, whether we realize it or not. Even most vegans support large-scale farming, which destroys important ecosystems and depletes our precious topsoil which cannot possibly regenerate at the rate we're eroding it. We either control our population or we run the risk of eradicating our own species.

If you are anti-choice but support, say, the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, you are inconsistent because you are supporting the mass murder of innocent people in the interest of...what? Not freedom. That's just political nonsense. It's ultimately in the interest of placing ourselves in a strategic position to control our own access to the fossil fuels which are vital to feed us, and by us I mean the Western world in general.* In other words, we already destroy innocent lives by the hundreds of thousands, even millions, so that we can live, so that we can eat, now and in the immediate** future.

* Or perhaps our ultimate reasons for getting into/maintaining these conflicts aren't even that noble. Maybe they're just to pad the coffers of the already filthy-rich.

** Immediate, here, means "until Armageddon."

I know it makes me sound like a monster, but in my view, the question of whether a fetus is a human being is beside the point. It's political grandstanding for a wedge issue which ignores the bigger problem: we're already overpopulated and we must kill others--innocent others--to survive. In this context, it's difficult to see why aborting an unwanted child is a big deal at all.

Yeah, I'm a monster. But so are you. So are you.

d