It was a Monday. The South Oval of the University of Oklahoma was adorned with 18-foot pictures of aborted babies. On the ground, students and random passersby stood around the giant triangular exhibit, talking, yelling, and staring in disbelief.
“What do you think of this exhibit?” a teenager helping out with the event asked me.
I knew exactly what I thought about the event. In fact, I knew that the display would be there that day. It would be in same spot on Wednesday and Thursday too. The images are graphic, but people need to understand what abortion is and what it looks like.
“I’m pro-life,” I said, “and I think people need to see this and understand how awful it is.”
“What’s your name?” the boy said, holding out his hand.
“Jelani,” I said as I shook his hand. “I’m actually here to help out.”
“Oh, ok,” he said back. “Nice to meet you.”
The boy walked off to engage someone else in conversation while I stood looking at the pictures. I wasn’t completely shocked by the images of bloody, half-developed babies. I’d seen the pictures before.
The summer before my senior year, I took a speech class. We had to do an oral presentation on anything we wanted. I chose to talk about abortion.
I prepared my speech, and created a visual aid with pictures of abortion I had found on the internet. Some of the pictures I pasted on my poster board, were some of the same pictures that now towered above me.
I was not shocked as someone who was seeing the images for the first time, but I was shocked to see the images so big.
A group of girls now stood on top of a bench with signs. They yelled, “My body, my choice,” and “Keep abortion safe, legal, and rare.”
This display disgusted me more than the pictures ever would. They sounded so selfish.
I wanted to yell at them with my fist in the air, but I had to stay cool; I was there to engage people in calm, thought-provoking dialogue.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - DRF
It seems to me that the majority of abortions happen because of reckless decisions.
Please research this with the same diligence that you gave your other statistics. You will find that many women used birth control but found that it did not work or were mistaken about the risks of getting pregnant. The idea of making abortion safe, legal and rare is to devote time, energy and funds to increasing the reliability of birth control and increasing the availability of sex education.
As for a doctor not having the right to touch your relative, he or she got that right when she gave him or her permission to do so. Check that; it wasn't a right. It was a duty.
2 - Dave Nalle
There are nearly 1.5 million abortions in the US each year. How is that rare?
Well, there are 100 million women of childbearing age in the US, having sex an average of about twice a week, so that's 10 billion times a woman can get pregnant. So 1.5 million abortions means that only about 1 in 6700 chances of conception results in abortion. That's really very rare.
then not wanting to deal with consequences is really the only other explanation.
Abortion IS a way of dealing with the consequences. It may not be one you like, but it's certainly a way of dealing with it.
BTW, when you're out 'spreading the gospel' around the world make sure you don't do it in any of those countries where it is likely to get you thrown in jail. Oddly enough, all countries where abortion is strictly illegal.
Dave
3 - Matthew T. Sussman
If abortion is wrong because it looks so disgusting, I guess we should also outlaw giving birth.
4 - Cindy D
Jelani,
I take it you support bringing back a reasonable welfare program for poor single mothers?
5 - zingzing
meatloaf should also be outlawed. both the food and the singer. never has a name better fit a persona. both the singer and the food. if meatloaf could talk... or sing...
6 - Ruvy
Jelani,
I live in a country where abortion is legal, and frankly the attempts to educate men and women not to have them are abysmally unsuccessful.
I'm against abortion, but Jewish law does not forbid it, as the admonition against it does not deal with the commandment against murder, and the legal theory in Jewish law has nothing to do with the prohibition against murder. Israeli civil law allows abortion upon consent of a doctor that the fetus may harm the mother - consent almost always given.
The culture that pushes abortion also pushes sex without consequences. And to be blunt, fucking makes babies. So, the idea that "fucking without consequences" is where you should start your educational efforts. Pregnancy is the natural consequence of fucking, and abortion is an attempt to ditch the consequence.
That truth has to be stated that bluntly and that baldly. All the arguments about "my body, my life" can be met with that blunt, unkind, bald fact of biology. To tell a woman that she wants to fuck without the consequences - more to the point, to tell her boyfriend that - gets to the issue and cuts through all the arguments they want to make about their rights.
In traditional societies, the idea that the wife is just a free sex service regardless of the consequence is very strong, so being against abortion can put you on the forefront of guaranteeing the rights of women.
In "first world" societies, when you look just a bit further, barely turning the page of a newspaper, or scanning a web-site, you get to the root of the problem. At many of the articles I read here, the banner ad is for a website in Hebrew that hustles an on-line dating service. And the commercial shows a young thing with a tiny bikini on at the beach jumping her boyfriend, smothering him in kisses - over and over again.
In short, you live in a culture that pushes sex without the merest thought of its most elemental consequence - and the cruel method used to ditch that consequence.
You live in a culture of throw-away babies. And, to my shame, so do I.
Mind you, Jelani, I'm not part of the crowd that wants to make abortion illegal. Doing so would violate Jewish law, and would create a market that a mafia here would immediately infiltrate.
But the cultural war can be fought - and maybe even won here and there.
Righteousness exalts a nation.
If there are a generation of young men and women who view sex without consequences as fundamentally morally wrong, you will not see the abuse of abortion when it is truly needed.
7 - Ruvy
Righteousness exalts a nation.
I return to that point. Cindy's suggestion. A reasonable welfare program for young single mothers, coupled with an adoption service that can match unwanted babies with barren parents MUST go along with any legislation that makes it very difficult to get an abortion, if the legislation is to have any meaning at all. That is as true here as anywhere else.
8 - Jet
Actions have consequences, banning abortions means more and frequent clotheshanger proceedures, and a loss of the woman's ability to have children when she wants them.
Consider what this world would be like if the religious right actually succeeded in cleansing everything they supposedly object to.
Men and women most likely would live in separate dormatories, and sex would be only allowed to produce children, anything else like oral or anal sex between HETROsexual couples would be illegal and a jailable offense.
Most people don't realize that all those southern bible-belt sodomy laws pertained to straight married couples too you know!
9 - Baronius
Dave, if you compare the abortion rate to the number of planets in the universe, the number is even lower! About 20% of all US pregnancies (not counting spontaneous abortions or miscarriages) end in abortion. That seems high. But it's not really about the numbers. If "only" 1.2 million guns were confiscated last year, the number wouldn't seem low to you. It's the injustice of each particular act that offends. Each particular unjust act that people like Jelani avert is a win.
Ruvy is right, and so is DRF indirectly. Everyone's had moments when they weren't thinking about the consenquences, but the consequences are there. As a society, we've forgotten that sex makes babies, so you've got to figure that we're just about the stupidest society of all time.
Jet, the article doesn't say anything about making abortion illegal.
10 - Dr Dreadful
if you compare the abortion rate to the number of planets in the universe, the number is even lower!
Sorry, Baronius, but that's a fallacy. You have no information about the abortion rates on other planets, because we do not know if any of them are inhabited or if such lifeforms as might exist there practice abortion. So let's limit ourselves to Earth.
Dave's point is that every act of male-female sexual intercourse potentially results in pregnancy - and I would go so far as to state that pregnancy is not the intended goal in the vast majority of couplings. So the number of them that end in abortion - compared to the number that result in either an unhindered pregnancy or the death of all the gametes involved - really isn't that high.
11 - Jet
Them damned hetrosexuals are always causing trouble ain't they? There aught to be a law!!
12 - Clavos
Doc,
I think Baronius was alluding to how many planets there are in the universe, not what, if anything, their birth rates might be...
13 - Dan(Miller)
The number of U.S. cancer deaths in 2007(?) was 564,000. The number of new cancer cases was 1.2 million. If we are going to compare the number of abortions (almost 1.5 million, according to the article) with something, these seem more useful benchmarks than the number of planets, the fertility rates or death rates of planets.
I don't suggest that a comparison is particularly useful, only that if there is to be one this makes more sense.
I wonder. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Dan(Miller)
14 - Clavos
A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
15 - Dan(Miller)
That may be the answer, but I think forty-two is a better one. However, that is merely a statement of opinion, not fact, in case an ombudsperson is lurking.
Dan(Miller)
16 - Clavos
Aahh, but it is a learned opinon, counselor...
17 - Clavos
opinion, too...
But not in the same sense as Judge Hand's opinions were Learned.
18 - Dave Nalle
If the woodchuck is getting so much wood, he's probably going to get some female woodchuck pregnant and have to get her an abortion.
Dave
19 - Glenn Contrarian
Jelani -
No one likes abortion. Everyone on both sides of the issue know that it is a tragedy. But if you're the one who knows that you're not ready to raise a child, who knows that once that child is born, your own chances for completing your education are greatly diminished, who knows that you have little or no support from your own family, the decision is not so easy.
If we want to take the anti-abortion argument to its logical conclusion, then what are we to think of a political organization that has no problem with, say, pregnant women drinking alcohol or driving without a seat belt? Are you going to pass a law saying that if a pregnant woman drinks or rides in a car without a seat belt, that they are guilty of child endangerment? Are you going to require establishments that serve alcohol to ask each woman whether she's pregnant before they serve her alcohol?
I am the foster dad of a child with fetal-drug syndrome. Another foster child of mine had fetal-alcohol syndrome - and this child has since passed away. Each of these children costs the state about a quarter million dollars in taxpayers' money every year.
Abortion is a tragedy...but who should be the one making the decision whether that is right for a scared young girl who sees her own future going down the tubes? The government?
It's not just a matter of rape, but of what kind of household the girl was raised in, of her own level of ability to provide for that child.
I strongly recommend you read Freakonomics. It's a truly non-partisan book that gives conclusions based only on the numbers - and those numbers show that there is a strong likelihood that the great drop in the crime rate in the 1990's is directly attributable to Roe v. Wade in the 70's. Why? Because children who are unwanted or who grow up in broken household are much more likely to commit crimes, and the otherwise unwanted children who would have been in their late teens and early twenties were no longer there in the 90's to commit crimes.
That's a sad, hard truth to bear...but it is the truth. It is fact. Leave your emotions out of it and see where your reason takes you.
20 - Dan(Miller)
Dave,
I think you may be suffering from species confusion. It's woodchuck, not woodpecker.
Dan(Miller)
21 - Dr Dreadful
This reminds me of the tale of Judge John Knott of Arkansas, who sentenced a man named Lester Yeshudbi to jail for procuring an illegal abortion in 1974.
It turned out that Mr Yeshudbi was himself a judge from the State Supreme Court, sent undercover to investigate why Knott was still sentencing abortion cases even though Roe v. Wade had rendered them legal.
According to the recorded transcript, the sentencing in Knott's subsequent impeachment trial began thus:
"Judge Knott, Lester Yeshudbi judged..."
22 - Baritone
What only Doc has alluded to here is the role of sex, specifically intercourse in modern society. The notion that people have intercourse with the intent of making babies - at least in most of the western world - is rarely the case.
The notion that people should abstain from coupling except when attempting to conceive comes from another place in time. Much more often than not, people screw for pleasure. There remains a significant segment of our society that believes such activity is "dirty" or sinful. In that regard, those people can kiss my ass.
As I believe that we humans are the closest thing any of us know of to actually being gods, it is then our purview to make life and death decisions, which we do everyday.
Most abortions result in the destruction of a mass of cells. Even in the case when a discernible fetus is terminated, it is not a living, breathing, self aware being. The fact is, we don't seem to even blink when killing actual human beings - often by the thousands, yet we get all hand wringy when it comes to abortion.
No, it's not pretty, but then as is noted above, there are a lot of things we do and encounter on a daily basis that's not pretty. The assumption that an unborn fetus suffers any pain or mental anguish is - as Stan might say - bollocks. The same can hardly be said for, say a family rooted out of their home, forced to their knees and then beheaded one by one.
In a perfect world, abortion would not exist. However, in case some of you all haven't noticed, the world we currently are living on does not provide us a "perfect" life. So called "pro-lifers" make assumptions about the motives for women who opt for abortions. There are likely as many reasons for doing so as there are women who decide to have them. This is just another instance of one segment of a society forcing its beliefs on others via legislation. It's the same crap as those who oppose same sex marriage.
B
23 - Dr Dreadful
I think Baronius was alluding to how many planets there are in the universe
Still a fallacy, Clav. Just a false analogy rather than a reductio ad absurdam.
24 - Baronius
Glenn says that abortion is a tragedy. Baritone says that most abortions result in the destruction of a mass of cells. What's so tragic about the destruction of a mass of cells?
25 - Clavos
or absurdum...:>)